Constantine - 'A Whole World Out There'

John goes visiting another old friend.

With his usual backing group on hiatus to recover from their clashes with Felix Faust, John is enjoying the chance to wallow in self-pity; at least until Manny provokes him into seeking out another old friend. Ritchie Simpson, not seen since the pilot, is making a quiet living as a teacher, until an ill-chosen class project leads four of his students into another dimension, and not one occupied by fauns and friendly dryads.

The antagonist of the week is Jacob Shaw, a mystic and architect who fled from persecution into a world of his own creation. Accessible through Egyptian spirit projection incantations in his journal, this world takes the form of a house which he controls through his mind, and through which he stalks the spirits of those who come to him... potentially forever. As John and Ritchie strive to save the last surviving student, for once is it not John who has the knowledge to take on the enemy, but Ritchie; if he can overcome his own Newcastle-induced self-loathing.

'A Whole World Out There' manages a pretty decent balancing act, showing us Constantine's guilt over Gary's death in 'A Feast of Friends' without ever letting the audience be certain he isn't setting Ritchie up for a similar fall. In the end, however, it is John who convinces Ritchie to come back to the world - albeit in a typically jerkass fashion - yet also John who remains trapped by the past, having helped Ritchie to find a new purpose in his philosophy lecturing.

It is also an effective creepfest, with wounds appearing on bodies in trance-states and Shaw stalking his victims through reflective surfaces. As in The Librarians and the Heart of Darkness, it has a lot of haunted house material to draw on, explained by Shaw's obsession with games and murder and games of murder.

Ritchie's condemnation of Shaw as a man who could have created like a god but chose to destroy as a monster actually covers a lot of Constantine's villains. Not the demons, obviously, but the mortals who use their magic for dominance and destruction.