The Black Diamond appears.
What They Say:
Angels and Ministers of Grace – John asks Manny to help him investigate a mysterious attack at a hospital; a health issue prompts Zed to question her visions.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Constantine’s closing in on its season finale and it’s built things up well over the course of the season after its first couple of rough episodes. The last few have been pretty fun to watch with what it’s done, particularly the two part story, but it’s also done some solid character pieces as well with Chas getting his time to be explored and a pretty neat little story involving a killer that escaped into another dimension and is killing again. The more surreal it gets, the more interesting it’s getting for people as it manages to establish its own identity. Granted, I liked a bunch of the more procedural type episodes early on once Zed came on and it found its groove, but a healthy mix of both is definitely appealing.
With the cold open here, we get a woman named Taylor that goes into the seedier side of town to get some drugs she needs to cope with things, as her brother’s funeral is the next day. It’s a pretty grim thing overall with the place and what she’s coping with, as is the need she has to get taken care of. What makes it worse for her though is that just as she’s shooting up, all the lights in the area start exploding and some really twisted thing in humanoid form and all black appears out of nowhere, tosses her around, and kills her while also jabbing both of the needles hard into her chest. While she comes across as dead at first, there’s more than meets the eye here as she’s been infected with something, that makes her a carrier for the hospital she’s about to be taken into.
Constantine gets drawn into it all eventually as he’s dealing a bit with Zed back at the manor as she’s withdrawn a bit since recent events. Her heavy connection to the other side has definitely thrown her for the loop and that has her finding a bit of a sensory deprivation of sort situation going on. Constantine doesn’t have much patience for that though and even less so when Manny arrives and sets Constantine on the path to St. Catherine’s Hospital where Taylor was taken in. Manny, of course, doesn’t provide any real clues about what’s going on, but there’s enough of a hint when they come across her in the ER and see the black veins across her face, which is a sure as hell telltale sign. What makes it an intense moment is when Zed touches her and she sees something dark, hot and scary on the other side just as Taylor codes. And that, in turn, sends Zed into her own dark spiral after touching that thing from the other side.
As scary as the supernatural can be, hospitals can be even scarier and that vibe comes off of Constantine rather strongly since he’s worried about Zed. While he knows they won’t really find anything wrong with her, there’s his concern in general with what she saw on the other side. While Constantine figures out a basic idea of what’s going on with Taylor by examining her body and realizing that it’s pretty much massively contaminated with dark matter, Zed finds herself in a very different track herself. The ER doctor reveals she has a small mass in her brain that she believes must be causing the visions she has, which in a way makes it feel like she’s searching for a way out of all of this. There’s a decent bit about the world of magic and science and how one can explain away the other, but part of it is just feeling like Zed is angling for a way out of this world to some degree.
Now that Constantine is fearing the worst with Zed and also realizing that he can’t do anything to help her, and that Manny won’t do anything, he’s focusing on doing what he can. And that takes a creative approach here as he uses a vial of air from Hades to trap Manny in the body of the doctor he had taken over so he has some form of assistance here in trying to figure out what this dark matter is up to as it moves throughout the hospital. With a few telltale signs, they manage to figure out where the next victim is and gain a few more clues as Constantine digs deep into the corpse. What’s really intriguing is that within the body it’s pretty much a black and purple tone, making him realize that it’s all connected to the Black Diamond, which we know from the comics is related to the character of Eclipso. With a little history lesson for the diamond and its shards, the pieces of the puzzle are all there. But it’s comical in how it plays out now as Manny is struggling with all the senses of being trapped in a human body and how Constantine uses it to his own advantage, both to get information and just a little bit of torment for past issues. Not that Manny doesn’t have some… wonderful experiences because of it.
While the show moves towards figuring out who it is that’s the real problem within the hospital that’s the source of things, we get some really good material with Zed and Manny. With Zed struggling over the tumor and her visions, as well as her religious upbringing and how she has to view it at times, having some one on one time with Manny definitely works well for both. Manny’s understanding of humanity a bit more here is helping him to be more empathetic, and Zed sort of gets the answers she wants, but as he says, she answers them herself. Manny is really made to be a lot more interesting here, though you know this particular approach of his character and his “humanity” won’t really last long, but it really works well here in making him more accessible. His interactions with both Constantine and Zed is spot on since he sees so many different sides of things and does what he can to ease things.
When the trick of it is revealed with who really has the shard of the Black Diamond, it does move into the expected action component of the episode, but it works really well in giving us something that has a good kind of threat and has Manny involved in the physical sense as well as they go after the doctor behind it all, that didn’t even realize it with the way the shard had embedded itself in him. While it’s not a lot of action, Constantine isn’t a show that really requires or needs it. What we do get is a really good kind of closure here with the way Manny gets directly involved and helps to ease the pain and suffering, while we also see the Black Diamond grow a little bigger with the shard reconnecting with other pieces. Playing the angelic card isn’t always easy, but after seeing Manny throughout the episode as we did, bringing him back to this really works well to give us more of a side of him we haven’t seen much of.
In Summary:
Constantine has a pretty strong episode overall here with what it does as it brings in a big piece of the DC Comics with the Black Diamond, it humanizes Manny in a really great way with some good humor and empathy and it also changes the dynamic between him, Constantine and Zed at the end. There’s a lot of little character bits throughout this that definitely makes it a fun episode as well as one that expands on the overall mythology while still playing it dark and cruel as it needs to be. The show has definitely hit all the right sweet spots for me with what’s been doing the last few episodes and one like this is one that I’d love to see more of overall, especially if the cast does eventually grow if we get a second season.
Grade: B+
