Constantine 1.08 “The Saint of Last Resorts”

Okay peeps, this is gonna be a short one. This episode is huge. It’s digging into the premise’s ribcage and ripping apart its breastbone to glance at the moist red parts inside. This gives us more of the show’s harsh morality. It gives us a new look at the rising darkness. It gives us a glimpse at Zed’s dark past. It lets us see Chas’s warm heart.

Big loveable bastard.

And, most importantly, it gives us an enormous cliffhanger. John’s journey to meet an old “friend” in Mexico City and combat a clawed, baby-snatching creature takes a few dark twists and turns, getting darker and darker as it goes until the end finally comes and… well… yeah. I’d say something corny like “LACK OF END IS MORE LIKE IT” but I don’t think I could live with myself if I did, so I’ll just say that this episode will leave you on the edge of your seat, screaming at the screen that it can’t possibly end like this.

Oh, but it does. It does end like that. And you have to wait a whole ‘nother MONTH to see how it continues.

While I’m at it, and putting off giving this episode a proper review in favor of waiting for the next, there is something I’ve noticed in the series itself that I’d like to mention: Each episode escalates. Like, impressively. I start off each week going “Huh, not much is going on so far, probably not gonna have much to say about it this time around.” Then, inevitably, by the time the halfway mark comes around I’m wide-eyed and staring at the screen, ferociously chewing my nails as I wait for what’s going to come next. And, by the end, I’m flabbergasted and wondering how I can make sense of what I’ve just witnessed. Now, obviously, not every episode is this heavy… but a lot of ’em are. “Feast of Friends“ is an excellent example of exactly this, as was “Blessed are the Damned,” not to mention this episode right here.

Well, she’s certainly getting a lot of attention, isn’t she?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Constantine has a talent for tightening its narrative grip into an unbreakable chokehold, with enough finesse to clamp down from the zero-mark within its forty-minute runtime. With this episode ending the way it did, I can only imagine what heights they’ll manage to ramp the next up to.