Arrow - 'Beyond Redemption', 'Haunted', 'Lost Souls' and 'Brotherhood'

New digs.

As Arrow marathons go, this week's really sucked, but we're almost there now, with only the second part of the big Legends of Tomorrow crossover event to go to get up to speed (well, plus this week's episode by the time we sit down to watch again.)

In 'Beyond Redemption', Lance and Laurel struggle with the fact that Sara is back, but basically as a blood-crazed feral beast, regardless of Laurel's insistence that she'll be fine in time. Sara refuses to tell Oliver on the grounds that he'd put Sara down like a dog.

This place gets more 'STAR Labs' every day...

Meanwhile, the SCPD anti-vigilante task force have gone rogue to put together a retirement fund for the imminent collapse of the city that pays their salary, forcing Lance to work with Team Arrow to stop them. Oliver suffers a bout of suck and gets taken hostage, but Lance talks the leader of the team down by appealing to her sense of duty and to the idea that nobody is beyond redemption, speaking not only of Sara but of his own deal with Darhk, which Oliver now knows about. He offers to hand himself in, but Oliver asks him to be their inside guy in Hive.

Full disclosure, I don't actually know if this is a pixie bob.

In 'Haunted', Sara escapes from the basement where Laurel was keeping her chained to a wall until she remembered she wasn't an animal and starts hunting down skinny brunettes with pixie bobs, instinctively seeking to curb her bloodlust by killing her killer. Fortunately, she gets distracted in each attack by maiming her would-be victim's other assailants, so Team Arrow are able to retrieve her before she does more damage than kicking the snot out of Thea one time. There is a worrying moment where it looks like Laurel might actually be trying to let Sara kill Thea in the hopes of restoring her, but I think that was just us taking the least charitable view of Laurel's actions because we don't like her much.

Oliver is pretty mad that Laurel lied to him, especially since he might be the one person who can help. Back in his flashbacks, he'd been recruited to work security on a drug farm on Lian Yu, where he also meets another interloper: A mouthy, British interloper.

It's that guy!

Yes, it turns out that Oliver Queen knows John Constantine, and as Constantine owes him a favour the surly betrenchcoated one comes to Star City to perform a ritual which allows Oliver and Laurel to retrieve Sara's soul and reunite it with her body. He also notes that he has heard of Darhk and recommends that they run.

Ensouled or not, 'Lost Souls' shows that Sara still has that bloodlust swinging, even as Thea's begins to put in a return appearance. The fact that Laurel didn't try to set Thea up is confirmed when she doesn't bring up that whole 'kill your killer' solution when it becomes clear that Sara wants to beat some fools to death. It's also somewhere around this point that Thea starts dating Oliver's political consultant, Alex, whom I presume to be either evil or doomed; possibly both.

This is not good. I have seen good, and this is not what it looks
like.

Having decoded a message from Ray, Felicty finds not his last words, but a call for help, his experiment having miniaturised him and having since been captured and kept in a lab. With help from Palmer Tech employee Curtis Holt - polymath genius, bronze medal Olympic decathlete, base jumper, possible future Mr Terrific and the Arrowverse's second 'just deal with it' married gay guy - she tracks him down, the mission given extra urgency when they learn he is being held by Damien Darhk. Ray is retrieved and resized, but Darhk is able to retroengineer a dwarf star alloy power source for a techno-artefact macguffin.

The unacceptable face of civic leadership.

'Brotherhood' sees Diggle discover that not only was his brother assassinated by Hive because he was a rival drug smuggler, but in order to recruit him into their ranks (although I am baffled that anyone would choose to fake someone's death by hiring a lethal sniper who uses curare-tipped bullets for extra fuck you to take a kill shot.) Recruitment turns out to include a yellow pill that renders one susceptible to suggestion and destroys DNA (which must have long term health risks.) Diggle decides that his brother's neglect of his duty to his family (in particular his wife and son) render him unworthy of aid, but the team insist on getting Andy out and finding out what really happened to him.

Thea goes apeshit on a creeper during a date with Alex (seriously, in what appears to be a pretty swish bar this guy hits on her after Alex has been up from the table for ten seconds,) which he takes surprisingly well, adding weight to the 'evil' column. Later however, she gets in a fight with Darhk, but escapes when he turns out to be unable to suck out her soul, instead draining her bloodlust and having a painful turn himself.

Meanwhile, Darhk offers help with Oliver's campaign for Mayor in return for not trying to clean up the harbour. Oliver considers getting into bed with Darhk so he can be the inside man and not have to risk Lance, but Diggle convinces him instead to fight in the light of day.

In flashback land, Oliver saves one worker from death, but kills another when a suspicious fellow guard manipulates the man into attacking Oliver. This turns out to be the first worker's brother, just so that Oliver has another secret to keep while he tries to work out what drug producer and magic collector Baron Reiter actually wants on Lian Yu.

Constantine - 'Waiting for the Man'

John Constantine, now with 100% more firearms.

Satanists, voodoo kings and zombies; we're going back to New Orleans for Constantine's mid-season season possibly-series finale, 'Waiting for the Man'. A teenage sort-of-runaway is lured by three tripped out waifs into coming with them to 'marry the Man', and receive a 'wedding ring' in the form of a neck brand. When a detective investigating is desiccated and branded with 'the Devil's Mark', Jim Corrigan (he of the 'second-husband of the action hero's ex-wife' beard and glowing future in undead vengeance) calls in John and Zed to help investigate while Chas... isn't here. Meanwhile, the Brujeria have put out a hit on John - a fact he is warned of by dead friend Gary (making what amounts to a stunt appearance, animating a corpse, quite possibly tacked on when they knew they weren't getting the second half-series) - and Papa Midnight is inclined to collect.

'Waiting for the Man' is a decent enough monster of the week story, intended to show the impact of the Rising Dark on ordinary human evil. The Man is a garden variety serial killer suddenly able to suspend the souls of his victims in some sort of thrall and use them to trap the unwary and incredibly stupid (seriously, the show does not provide an adequate reason for the victim to follow the creepy brides home, and although it does imply she was in some sort of trance it isn't really shown enough.) This part of the episode plays like an occult themed episode of Criminal Minds or a crossover with True Detective, and is pretty damned creepy, as ordered.

Where it falls down is as the conclusion of the series, or even the season. The producers were clearly confident of a pick-up when they made this one, because it hits the beats for a mid-season break, not a closer, and even that it doesn't do as well as 'The Saint of Last Resorts'. It's a shame, because the show had been getting very strong, and this is only okay.

Constantine - 'Angels and Ministers of Grace'

Some days are tougher than others.

It might be hard to admit it, but John is missing his backing group. Chas is back in play, but Zed is hiding out in an extraspatial meditation chamber since her powers overwhelmed her in confronting Felix Faust. Constantine encourages her to get back on the horse, but she suffers a seizure as they try to track a source of 'dark matter'. Zed is taken into care at a hospital full of murders, and John - needing another helper - binds Manny into a human form to force him to actually get involved for once.

'Angels and Ministers of Grace' is a significant episode for Manny, but also for John, who is forced to confront the fact that he still needs people, and that Zed is more than just a handy psychic receiver, when she is diagnosed with a brain tumour that may or may not be the source of her visions. It is also a watershed for Zed, who wants to know where her gift comes from, but seeing John visibly racked with guilt for pushing Zed to use something that may be killing her was a real turning point for the friend-sacrificing, nun-snuggling hard man of urban sorcery.

It's tough to be human.

After his total absence last week, Chas had a bit of a side role here, but less through lack of inspiration than to give John the impetus to force Manny to be his sidekick, I suspect. Much of Manny's role in the episode was as comic relief, but he also gained a new appreciation for the problems of the humans he usually only observes. He also signaled a sea change in the series by destroying Liv's scrying map, calling it a prop.

Of course, we're almost out of episodes now, the series having not picked up a second half order and with renewal looking dicey. Here's hoping it at least goes out on a high note.

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.

Constantine - 'Quid Pro Quo'

What is it they say about a good man going to war?

A city plagued with mysterious comas and a little girl in peril. It's all in a day's work for John, except that this one is personal. The little girl is Chas's daughter, and the rising darkness might be about to learn how good it is for anyone bad that Chas is such a decent guy.

So, as you can probably tell from the synopsis, we're leaving Zed's father and all that jazz for another time and it's Chas's episode this week. Returning home for his weekend with his daughter, he finds her in a mystery coma and calls in John to help. Discovering that her soul has been stolen, John is wary of such a power, but Chas has no patience in this case.

'Quid Pro Quo' delves into Chas's backstory, the secret of his 'survival skills' and the motivation that drives him to risk life after life helping John. The title refers both to Chas's belief that he must pay the debt of the 47 lost lives that keep him from dying, and to DCU guest star Felix Faust's attempts to bargain for Geraldine's soul. The latter is right up Constantine's alley, of course - certainly more so than going toe-to-toe with the suddenly badass Faust - but when Chas offers to bargain nicely with the man who stole his daughter's soul... Well, you don't have to be a dad to know how that will end*.

* It doesn't end well.

This is another strong episode, pitting the eternal sidekick Chas against long-time occult runner-up Faust in a main event. It also brings out a rare flash of conscience in John, who continues to use Chas in his fight but clearly understands both how much he owes his friend and how much Chas has given up.

Constantine - 'The Saint of Last Resorts: Part 2'

So... that went well.

Oh deary me; things look bad for our - for want of a better word - hero: Riled by his blase attitude, his ex-lover (now 'with' Jesus) Anne-Marie left him gut-shot in a sewer while she rescued a pair of babies. He soon gets out of that quandary... by inviting the Demon King Pazuzu into his body to heal him and scare off the unkillable Invulche, figuring that he'll evict it later. Said eviction - or exorcism, this show being more trad than Dominion - takes up the bulk of Part 2, along with John occasionally Pazuzing out and killing a few people.

Pazuzu you ungrateful gargoyle, I put you through college and 

this is how you repay me?!

Back from the mid-season break, Constantine shows us that John is pretty much willing to sacrifice anyone to get the job done, but that if it's him being sacrificed, he'll work to the bitter end to find another way. Arguably he'll do the same for others, but as that is rarely the focus of an episode it's hard to say. In this instance, his rescue costs at least nine lives, although admittedly all bad people (eight hardcore gangsters and a corrupt diplomat.) Was it worth it? I'm sure John thinks so, although as Manny points out, it's telling that he'll welcome a demon into his own flesh rather than ask Heaven for help.

Zed gets some early focus as she escapes from her kidnappers, but really it's Chas and Anne-Marie who get the lion's share this week, Anne-Marie finding her strength to exorcise Pazuzu and Chas generally providing the loyal core of decency and niceness that prevents us just giving up on John as a bad job. After all, if someone as gosh-darn stand up as Chas rates him, he must have something going.

Constantine - The Saint of Last Resorts

Redefining the answer to the question: "Whats' the weirdest thing you ever
did?"

Down south of the border, dark things are moving; a mother is slaughtered, her baby abducted, and the nun caring for her calls reluctantly on an old friend for help. Enter John Constantine, sinner and egoist, to confront the Rising Darkness.

Episode 8 of Constantine just screams 'mid-season finale' - revealing the identity, if not of the rising darkness then of its primary middle men, introducing people and creatures which John believes to no longer exist and which he is genuinely terrified to learn are still kicking around, and ending on a cliffhanger for both of its main characters - and sure enough, it is.

It also introduces us to another of the Newcastle crowd; Anne-Marie, once it seems the Nancy to John's Sid, and now a genuinely devout nun in a Mexican convent. After 'Feast of Friends', 'The Saint of Last Resorts' teases that Anne-Marie will be another victim of John's 'mission', before flipping that on its head. In this case, Anne-Marie is using John; once more for a good cause, the protection of two innocent babies. The babies thing was a bit of a wobbler for me (I am not good at child peril, as I may have mentioned) and I was glad to see their immediate fate at least not made the subject of a cliffhanger.

Anyway, now I have to wait until January to find out how Constantine escapes the Invunche (unless the remaining five episodes are all in flashback, I'm presuming that he does) and what happens to Anne-Marie, Chas, the babies... Oh, and Zed, who has been kidnapped by her own father, but that subplot has been so poorly integrated into the main arc that I am currently struggling to see it as the same story.

Constantine - 'Blessed are the Damned'

"Aunt May; is that an angel?"

Angels we have heard on high, and down low as it turns out. This week, John and Zed - Chas is out of town on family business - are drawn to a country church where a snake-handling reverend has returned from the dead with the power to heal. They soon trace this power to the feather of an angel, now trapped in the earthly plane, but the preacher is reluctant to return what has been 'given' to him.

Themes for this week include intentions and effects, and the price of magic, as well as the danger of preconceptions. Zed is automatically doubtful of a healing preacher, but awed by the sight of an angel, and Manny's inclination is to help one of his kind without question. Even John is taking a lot on trust this week.

'Blessed are the Damned' expands on the limits placed on angels, and Manny's willingness to bend the rules. It also touches on Zed's life outside Team Petty Dabbling and on her backstory. It's not a bad episode, and again has a twist which is not entirely predictable, but is definitely solvable.

Constantine: Rage of Caliban

In retrospect, the decor should have been a giveaway...

Things get a little personal for John Constantine this week, with a malevolent spirit possessing children and bringing back memories of the ill-fated Newcastle exorcism. This spirit has been hopping from child to child down the years, killing their parents before moving on, and unless John can name it, another family will literally be torn apart.

Constantine delivers another solid episode with 'Rage of Caliban', playing off the obvious horror of a possessed and murderous child and John's genuine desire not to be responsible for another child's death. There's a twist which is not predictable but is flagged for the observant and good performances from the threatened family, eschewing the obvious options of an abusive father or cloying mother in favour of conflicting styles of genuine care.

With Constantine currently on the ropes a little (a second half-season was not ordered, although the show has not been cancelled yet) the following weeks are going to be telling. So far, we've had four good offerings, the slightly rushed 'Danse Vaudou' and the superb 'Feast of Friends'. I can only hope that the ratings support renewal.

Constantine - Danse Vaudou

In a shocking twist, Chas actually does something in this episode.

Using a Victorian zoetrope to kickstart Zed's abilities leads Team Constantine (as seems to be the accepted parlance for DC series ensembles these days) to New Orleans. We can tell it's New Orleans because there's a bar where they're playing 'When the Saints Go Marching In', and because Chas tells us the currently active bloodspot on the map is in 'New Orleans, Louisiana'. Still, props for treating New Orleans the same as, say, London.

Shockingly, the Big Easy appears to have a zombie problem. Local cop Jim Corrigan isn't keen on getting outside help on this, and neither is local magic supremo Papa Midnite (who also bears a grudge for episode 3.) Before long, however, Constantine is in an uneasy truce with Midnite to lay the dead to rest, while Zed and Corrigan try to prevent further deaths. For once, Chas is called on to actually do some stuff this week, and to demonstrate his 'survival skills', making for a truly ensemble episode.

* It doesn't work out so well, yeah.

There's another little Easter egg for the fans, with the presence of Jim Corrigan to tease those who know how his story works out.*

Issues of scope and timing mean that this week's resolution is a little pat, especially compared to the solid gut punch of 'A Feast of Friends'. Sadly, this means that we follow a great episode with a merely decent one, but at least on a par with 'The Devil's Vinyl'. Also, at least John doesn't claim there's nothing blacker than voodoo; that would just be awkward.

Constantine - A Feast of Friends

A wise man knows that there are places it isn't safe to stand.

A man coming through customs shows signs of withdrawal. The resulting search releases a hunger demon from a bottle and looses it in Atlanta. The man is Gary Lester, an old friend of John Constantine and a fellow veteran of Newcastle. He trapped the demon and was on his way to John to dispose of it. A lifelong screw up, he longs to make right. John may have a way for him to do it, but it won't be pretty.

'A Feast of Friends' is a direct adaptation of one of the Hellblazer comics, and it brings a harder edge to the series. Apparently it's still a nicer ending than the comics, but if there was any worry that the original Constantine would be sanitised out of existence, this should set most of that to rest; he may be softened, but he's not soft. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is the best episode so far. Gaz may only be a guest star, but the character feels real and substantial, which is vital for the final punch. Jonjo O'Neill and regular Angelica Celaya also do a good job of looking properly sickly as Zed psychometrically shares Gaz's withdrawal symptoms.

The absence of Chas to get the cab fixed does support my suspicion that the series either doesn't know how to write for more than three people at once or can't afford to have that many actors on set.

I've been rooting for Constantine from the get go, in part from my antique love of the rapidly cancelled Strange, but on the strength of 'A Feast of Friends' I would be genuinely sorry to see it go.

Constantine - The Devil's Vinyl

John Constantine respects the classics.

Everyone knows that the great bluesmen sold their souls to the Devil at the crossroads and paid the price in the end, but there is only one recording of the Devil coming to claim his due. That recording is now a source of colossal power and absolute corruption, and it seems that someone wants it to get out.

The third episode of Constantine rocks the classics, from John's use of the hand of glory to a central Macguffin borrowed from the legend of Robert Johnson (as featured in the movie Crossroads), from genuine satanic contracts to Papa Midnite's voodoo posse. All in all, it's a good collection. The record that kills you if you listen to it is a pretty creepy conceit (how do you hide from sound?) and Midnite's blend of voodoo, mob muscle and pharmaceutical know-how makes for a much more intriguing antagonist than just a mumbling bokor (so a few points back from the Gypsy crack last week).

The series seems to be working Zed in pretty well, not least by giving her stuff to do that doesn't directly involve her visions, letting her be a character and not a schtick. It still seems a little shaky on managing to use Zed and Chas at the same time, but it's finding its way better than some and at least it isn't cluttered with characters in idle mode (Gotham, I'm looking at you here.)

Constantine - The Darkness Beneath

Still not as creepy as the church graffiti in True Detective.

The first 'proper' episode of Constantine (if you consider 'Non Est Asylum' as a slightly disconnected pilot,) takes our eponymous and surly antihero to a Welsh-descended mining town in Pennsylvania, and makes me begin to wonder if he isn't going to find himself in a lot of communities with strong Britannic roots as the series progresses, the better to utilise the source material without alienating the main audience with all those limey accents.

Or maybe I'm too cynical.

John Constantine knows how to show a girl a good time.

Hard-to-kill Chas is sidelined this episode (due to an outstanding warrant for derailing a train which is oddly limited to Pennsylvania; that feels like something that could go federal,) in order to introduce the replacement for Liv, Zed Martin (Angélica Celaya), an artist who experiences visions, including recurring dreams about Constantine. Martin pushes to be involved in Constantine's investigation of a series of murders surrounding a dangerous mine, while he pushes her away to test her commitment.

An interesting twist in the tale is that the supernatural killers are actually protective spirits distorted by human malice. The series kind of squanders this with a bit of pointless anti-Romani prejudice (there is, apparently, 'nothing darker than Gypsy magic'), but that aside it's a decent episode, with Constantine very much in his element being out of his element, as well as getting to reference his background in an apposite fashion. Martin manages not to be too annoying (many series mistakenly feel that a hot female character can be as much of a whining load as they like) and actually shows promise as a lead; she's tougher than Liv and her abilities have more potential to be a rolling part of the plot, rather than acting as the set up.

'The Darkness Beneath' is a solid second episode, with a pass for any pacing problems from the need to introduce a new second lead. They have the ball now, so let's see how they run with it.

Constantine

Maybe I'm spoiled on crossovers by the MCU, but I kind of want to see him
show up in Arrow's Starling City, or maybe Gotham; just to fuck with people.

About a decade ago, I went to see the film Constantine with my dad. It was... okay, but with Keanu Reeves in the lead, it wasn't very John Constantine. Now, I know only a little about the character, but it's obvious from the start that the new TV version, played by Matt Ryan, is a better adaptation. For starters, he's actually British, and kind of aggressively so. Maybe it's in the mind, but it strikes me that there's a particular kind of swagger that goes with all the Anglo Saxon swearing and Reeves didn't have it.

That being said, this Constantine is probably a little too clean, a little too heroic. He's a TV Constantine for a TV series, which actually makes him a decent match for the version I've encountered drifting in and out of Neil Gaiman's work in the Vertigo* imprint, but not quite as edgy as he is in his own title. He's rough around the edges, blunt as a hammer to the knees, but pretty clearly good, when the chips are down. He also doesn't smoke, but that's kind of unavoidable; a matter of regulations.

Within this limitation, however, Ryan is impressive. The supporting cast lacks a certain oomph, and outside of namedrops for fans of the comics none are truly memorable. Lucy Griffiths as the stock occult newbie is pretty, but bland, and I'm not surprised that she was dropped from the rest of the series, as the character brought nothing substantial to the table (her supernatural abilities notwithstanding; anyone could have those as the plot demands.)

The show plays out as something between a supernatural police procedural and The Surliest Hobo, but that's the pilot; it will be interesting to see how they go from here.

* Not Dark Horse at all; I am the world's worst comic nerd. I'm like an aspiring comic nerd; it's a sad state of affairs really.