Review: Constantine: City of Demons

 

Constantine is back thanks to a force worse than devils…Network Execs.

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

John Constantine (Matt Ryan) wakes from a drunken stupor to someone whispering “Queen of Angels”…only to find tiny demonic versions of him trying to eat him. I won’t have what he’s having. Seems they’re his “inner demons” given form, so the only solution is to put them back in. What this also means is someone has opened a door between his conscious and unconscious thought, and who knows what else. A bang on the door answers that as his friend Chas comes by to tell him what his character’s been up to since the last show ended. He’s gotten married, had a kid who’s eight now, and now has been separated for awhile now, and not for the reasons one thinks. Chas, like Constantine, is still living through the events of their past, specifically when they accidentally sent a little girl, Astra, to hell for their hubris. What’s worse is that his own kid, Trish, is in a coma. A coma that might be supernatural.

John’s solution for this is summoning the Nightmare Nurse (voiced by Laura Bailey), who diagnoses that something has stolen Trish’s soul from her body. That someone is a giant red astral projection monstrosity, who invites John to come meet him at his address in Los Angeles. Only less fitting home for a demon would be Washington (bdmm tshhhhh). Chas insists on coming along for his daughter and to give John moral support, while the Nurse and Renee (Chas’ wife) look over Trish’s body.

The Nurse takes this opportunity to use Renee’s memories (or her memories of Chas telling her HIS memories???) to finally shed light on what happened at Newcastle, something that had been hinted but never fully explored in the TV show. Long story short, John and Chas grew up together, but John was headstrong and Chas kind of a scaredy cat, made a band that ended up in a club whose owner sacrificed children to demons, and among them was his own daughter, Astra. When John, a wannabe magician himself at that point, found out, he tried summoning his own demon to kill the owner. Shockingly, this backfired, as almost everyone in the cult and the club was killed, and Astra was taken as a sacrifice for the summoning. This incident haunts John to this very day, as he and Chas arrive at the home of Beroul. The demon reveals that Trish’s soul is now trapped in his heart, so killing him means killing her as well. They’ll have to come up with some other way to separate them, including having John take on the demon’s competition.

…to be continued???

OUR TAKE

Oh GOOD, ANOTHER CLIFFHANGER. Just what I always wanted!

It’s not like I was expecting this to wrap up every plot thread the show left dangling, but I AT LEAST was hoping they’d finish the story they started here. I’m really not super fond of this format CW has gone with this and The Ray (that show’s continuity issues aside). And like with that, I don’t imagine they’ll just leave us hanging here, this is just an odd place to stop.

They marketed this as a much more mature story than the previous series, fitting more in line with the tone of the Hellblazer comics, and in that goal, they have very much succeeded. The added gore and swearing isn’t anything new, but it does go over better than what NBC tried to cover up. The addition of elements like the Nightmare Nurse (great voice work and all) and showing the underlying corruption of humanity with the alarming voices from the beginning of the first and third episodes are two of many nice touches that add to the darkness I assume the source material meant to portray.

We’re still waiting for the second part of The Ray, let alone this, so who knows when we’ll be getting further adventures with Mr. John Constantine in animated form. Here’s hoping we don’t have to draw a pentagram to get them because this first batch just might be worth summoning a demon.