The devil is in the details, and the music.
What They Say:
The Devil’s Vinyl – Zed and John must save a woman and her family from sinister forces by engaging in a dangerous confrontation.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The second episode of Constantine was doing its best to pivot after the changes of the pilot by eliminating Liv and introduced Zed instead. A lot of the episode certainly felt like a standard story piece that wasn’t quite good for a second episode to get it to hold onto audiences, but it introduced Zed and her abilities well enough and had some decent sequences to be sure with what it did. How everything fits into the bigger picture is still up in the air, but unlike a lot of other people I still came away enjoying the episode. Ryan is still capturing a solid interpretation of Constantine and I’m curious to see what Zed will bring to things overall, especially as we get into more of the mythology of the series.
The cold open for this episode is one that’s a bit unusual as it gets going as we get a woman that has gotten a hold of a vinyl record that’s something that she believes didn’t really exist. With it supposedly being a good bit of evil, she does her best to get a friend to analyze it while getting him to promise to not to listen to it. Of course, he can’t help but to listen while she steps out of the room to talk to her daughter on the phone and we see just how badly the whole experience goes for him as it sears his ears and drives a wedge into his mind, causing him to basically gut himself. The power of vinyl indeed. With a lot of people growing up believing that you could hear the devil if you played records backwards, having a record that actually is a tool of the devil is amusing.
While Constantine has opted to keep Zed out of his life, she’s intent on being a part of it and with her ability to draw things she’s trying to find, well, she’s able to find the millhouse easily enough which is thankfully being used as his base of operations. Chas isn’t thrilled to see her there of course and he kind of does his best to spook her a bit with some of what’s involved there. And there are plenty of things to deal with, such as when he learns that a friend of his from his music days has died, which ties us into the story of Bernie and the music. Zed’s not exactly his first choice to bring with him to investigate his death, but she’s got some useful abilities and she does provide a bit of our window into the world, albeit one with a bit more of a connection to it herself. But still, it’s pretty freaky when he tries to raise Bernie a bit to talk with him and find out what happened when he died and he nearly wakes every dead body in the morgue. Sometimes things aren’t quite what they seem.
The pair do get a few clues out of Bernie with what had happened, but not enough to answer all the questions right away – and not without a bit of cost as well to Constantine with the magic he has to use to get it. Working through some of the connections that Bernie has, which has them visiting a man named Marcus that used to run Moonrise Records and knows of the record that is now starting to cause trouble. This gives us a look at the past, going back to the thirties to see a Bluesman named Willie Cole that was popular but ended up disappearing suddenly. With whispers that he had sold his soul to the devil for his ability, we see his recording session going in a bad way, because you can’t trust the Deceiver. With the death of Cole, it’s brutal to be sure, but we also see how the record ended up being created and how indestructible it turned out to be over the years.
The layout of clues and places to go is fairly linear with what it does, but we also get some decent explanations along the way as well. With the idea of the devil claiming souls, Zed at least asks why he does it and that has a decent explanation about it that helps to set up more of the reason for the war between the two sides and how humans are caught up in it. One of the clues leads Constantine to visit Ian Fell, one of those that had a potential interest in the record itself. While Ian is oblivious to what’s going on, it’s actually his wife Jasmine that made the deals and did the deed, which brings us back to the beginning of course. But there’s also the twist in that she brought the record home herself after things went south with Bernie, and it doesn’t take long for her daughter to find it for her own reasons as she’s drawn to it.
As we see Jasmine’s daughter Julilah fall to the record, at least temporarily at first, we also see Constantine going off on his own to see how the deal to bring the record in would play out and who all is involved there. The low level type he comes across can’t actually do much, so he knows he’s just a pawn, but the pawn of who is what’s exciting to see as we get Papa Midnite revealing himself in the series, someone that Constantine obviously knows. Midnite makes out well with Constantine’s arrival since he ends up revealing where the record is and falls into Midnite’s hands easily enough so he can eliminate Constantine. With it being clear the two definitely have a past, Midnite sets a pretty nasty kind of slow death for Constantine as he bleeds out over a few hours with no way to slow it down.
While Midnite gets to have his revenge, slow as it is, we also see that he’s closer to getting the record as well as a couple of his thugs go to retrieve it. Being thugs that they are, they naturally end up touching the record which in turn leads to fighting over the records because of all the voices in their heads. The results of it is pretty nasty as they took the record to a club to spin it and the fallout is a whole lot of dead bodies out of the club that Constantine finds the next day. The only real clue that they get, thanks to Zed, is the breakdown of what happened from a busboy that survived the attack due to his being deaf. It’s certainly amusing, and scary, that after seeing what the record can do in a club, to learn that the thugs are taking it to a local radio station next to expand their reach and desire for destruction. The final act gives us the big moments, and a challenge for Constantine as he gets sucked into the lyrics as well, but it’s amusing that the man that really saves the day in the end is Papa Midnite himself. Though he doesn’t quite get what he wants either, as the record is dealt with in a pretty big way.
In Summary:
Adding a complicated villain like Papa Midnite this early in the season is definitely appreciated. While he only gets to play in the second half, he certainly chews the scenery a bit and makes for a foil for Constantine to deal with. The show is definitely still trying to find its footing and that’s pretty normal for a show like this that’s working through its first half dozen episodes in a production sense. Constantine is still pretty much dominating the show as one would expect as he goes about things as self assured as he can and enough disdain for others to carry a couple of shows. While a lot of shows ease you into their worlds, Constantine continues to feel like we’re stepping into this large world and doing our best to catch up, which works well enough for me. Most of the first order of episodes are what I expect them to be in that while we get threads of a larger story, they’re still mostly standalone. Papa Midnite is a welcome addition to things and I’m liking the dynamic that Zed is bringing to it all as well.
Grade: B
