Constantine, Episode 6: Rage of Caliban
Again, I'm not a big fan of horror. But topping the list of scary shit for me personally has to be creepy kids. I think it's why I stopped watching this episode a couple of times after starting it because, well, fuck creepy kids. I'm just not very good at this horror thing.
Ahem.
After the initial scary scenes (the scene where the ghost showed up in the kid's room, and later when the father's just fumbling around in the darkened house) the episode gets going with a far less jump-scare-y episode. And what a weird episode! Zed is conspicuously absent, written off with a quick "Zed's in art class" around one of the first scenes that featured Constantine and Chas. The episode had a pretty weird series of introdump dialogue, taking a fair bit longer for Manny to show up and talk about the rising darkness -- something that didn't deserve a rant this far into the series -- and telling Constantine about the rules of how angels cannot interfere in mortal business, something that really should've been established earlier on before we start wondering why Manny isn't doing jack shit.
Apparently this episode was intended to air as episode two before they introduced Zed, and it kinda shows. It's very much your standard filler episode with Constantine and Chas going around to fight a monster-of-the-week, and there's not much to really lift this episode from being a bogged-down filler. Oh, sure, Chas gets more screentime than he did in the past five episodes combined, it's scary thanks to the classic demonic child, and there's the nice twist that the thing possessing Henry isn't a restless spirit but the soul of the first (now catatonic) victim that has left his body. There are some nice clever hints thrown in here and there with the ax and such a focus on the first victim and Constantine going to see him and finding that he's catatonic... Marcello's role is definitely a role, we just don't know what it is until, well, it's the soulless body of the killer.
The one-off characters that Constantine helps this time around is a family with a single kid, with an asshole father that's like a sane and non-psychotic version of Kingpin's father, a mother that's far more sane and, well, the possessed kid. The episode spends an inordinate time on them, more than I think Jim Corrigan got in his guest star episode, and it honestly is a cheap way to get some scares. Like the aforementioned scene of the father stumbling around in the dark. I actually liked the bit with the haunted house with super-convincing props. That doesn't rely on jumpscares or tense familiar 'this could be your house' scene, and we have Constantine instead of poor helpless daddy facing the possessed kid. It's just scary in an atmospheric way, not scary in a 'be on your seats while the jumpscare builds up' way.
As for the characters... Constantine is still in tiptop snarky form. Manny makes some cryptic remarks and tells us a bit of backstory regarding Constantine's shitty-ass childhood, and gets some nice dialogue trades with Constantine for that. Chas apparently broke up with his girlfriend or wife, whichever she is. Poor Chas. He gets so little screentime. We get a bunch of random one-off characters like Nora, the lady that Constantine fucks, and the random paralegal that gave Constantine some stuff. Wow, there really isn't a lot in this episode, yeah?
Overall, though, it's a filler episode that's mostly devoid of character development and content beyond the odd quip or two from Constantine and the obligatory creepy lines from Manny, and way too much screentime spent on one-off filler characters. Easily the definition of a filler episode.
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