Constantine Ep. 2 Review: Introducing the For-Realies Female Lead

Constantine, Episode 2: The Darkness Beneath

A bit of a stepdown as the series goes into a more 'monster-of-the-week' format. We kind of leave behind the supporting characters we met last episode -- Liv is outright written out, Ritchie and Manny don't appear, and Chas can't come along because of dome noodle incident involving a succubus and a derailed train. So this episode focuses almost solely on Constantine and our new female lead, Zed. Who, uh, has a fair amount of similarities to Liv last episode. They both have mystical scrying powers, Zed's just involve less blood. They both have no experience with the spiritual. Constantine doesn't want either of them along since he works along and all that.

The two of them investigate a mining town, while Zed tries to convince Constantine that she can help out for... uh... reasons? I dunno. This episode brings them against *looks up spelling* the Coblynau, spirits of dead miners who are normally docile and actually help out real miners, but have for some reason gone around and trying to kill people. We've got a dude that got killed by burning into flames, and another dude drowned by having muddy water fill up a car. They don't really feel as threatening as Frucifer last episode, though, and it's just as well since this episode mostly functions to introduce Zed. We get a pretty long red herring involving an ex-priest, and the pacing feels a bit jumbled as Constantine and Zed just jump from one clue to another, and finally face off against the one who summoned the Coblynau, a gypsy who's married to the miner killed at the start of the episode, in typical Scooby Doo fashion -- it's the character introduced in the first act and disappears for the rest of the episode.

I think it's also borderline racist for Constantine to just go 'oh then I remembered, you're Romani', though. Zed's... an okay character. She's your average nonoffensive sidekick character, but on the other hand she doesn't have anything going on for her or her personality beyond having vision powers. She's not whiny and I'll take that, at least.

It's basically a pretty decent monster of the week episode, introducing us to Zed -- who has like 11 episodes to grow to a character I like, because right now she just fells pretty generic. So's the monsters in this episode, and other than some throwaway lines about some rising darkness and ominous greater force, this episode ultimately only serves to introduce us to the main female lead. It succeeds in that regard, at least. There honestly isn't much to talk about this one, a wholly middling episode.