Constantine Episode 7 Review: "Blessed are the Damned"

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Constantine (Episode 7) “Blessed are the Damned”
Review by Brandon Wolfe

“Blessed are the Damned” is not the strongest episode Constantine has put up thus far, but it is a solid enough outing and further evidence that the show is doing more right than many of its comic-book-derived TV contemporaries. The show is congealing into a fine supernatural potboiler. Pity no one is watching and its days are numbered.

Deep within rural Kentucky, a preacher at one of those snake-handling churches that seem to exist primarily in occult-based fiction is having a crisis of confidence. He lives in his late father’s shadow, but lacks the old man’s convictions, which has led to much available pew space during Sunday sermons. Defying the advice of his incongruously Hollywood-pretty sister, the man decides to handle actual poisonous snakes to prove his worth. Surprising almost certainly no one, he is bitten and lays on the floor dying until magically springing back to life, clutching a glowing feather. Now the man is gifted with the ability to heal anyone’s maladies with a simple touch, his first trick being to restore the leg of an amputee. God must be behind this, right?

Probably not, since Zed has a snake-centered vision while in that art class she was at for apparently an entire week in the previous episode, which dovetails with Constantine’s map pinging with snake-related mishaps. The two head down to Kentucky to find the preacher, Zachary, operating under a newly bustling congregation, with people coming from miles around to get themselves healed. Zed becomes convinced that Zachary is the genuine article, but Constantine isn’t so sure. And since he’s the hero, it turns out he’s correct when the former amputee shows off his new gam to his astonished doctor before flying into a demonic rage and murdering the hapless practitioner.

Constantine attempts to consult with Manny the Angel for help, but that proves about as fruitful as it always does. But when attempting a spell as a second course of action, he comes across another angel nearby, Imogen, who is both corporeal and dying. It seems she was the angel escorting Zachary to the next world when he plucked off one of her feathers and returned to the mortal coil, leaving her in her current sorry state. Constantine concocts a plan to get the feather from around Zachary’s neck and back into Imogen’s wing where it belongs. But the feather has a protective spell on it, making snatching it impossible, and the legion of now-demonic healees makes matters even worse. Plus, Imogen might not be as on the level as she initially appeared.

“Blessed are the Damned” does a lot of valuable work on the show’s two most problematic characters. First off, this is a Zed episode (and, true to the show’s bizarre either/or sidekick pattern, it opens with an explanation of why Chas isn’t around this week) and Angelica Celaya is still not the best thespian on the show’s cast list. But Celaya doesn’t seem as wooden this week as she has in the past and the show is beginning to chip away at the character’s mysterious past, as when the handsome male model who asks her out at the beginning of the episode appears to have a sinister ulterior motive by episode’s end. If Zed is going to continue to be a presence on the series, now is about the right time to start making her matter.

The other iffy character is Manny, who has seemed a pointless irritant in every episode thus far, and seems to occupy that same role again this week until the Imogen development puts him in the game in an actual noteworthy way. For once, he’s not just around to trade snide barbs with John and obliquely allude to the “rising evil” that’s coming before vanishing into thin air (he still does all that stuff, of course, but he does other things as well). His interactions with Imogen give us a better understanding of just how alien the human experience is to angels in this world and he actually gets his hands dirty by helping to resolve the crisis at hand. Harold Perrineau has done notable work in other places and this is the first episode of this series where he doesn’t come across as an irksome afterthought.

The show also continues to assign some surprising shading to its one-off characters. It resists the obvious temptation to make Zachary into a villain, never once attributing devious intentions to his actions. He truly thinks that he’s helping people and only clashes with John under the misapprehension that he, not Zachary, is the evil party. He is even allowed to redeem himself for the chaos he unwittingly caused rather than double-down and make a desperate power grab, as anyone who’s seen a lot of shows like this would expect him to do. He isn’t a deep character, but he is refreshingly drawn in a less predictable manner than a lesser show would have bothered with.

Constantine is developing into a solid otherworldly procedural. It’s ironing out its early wrinkles in a way that the constantly stumbling Gotham has yet to do at a point further along in its season. A couple of decades ago, The X-Files slowly built a fervent following on Friday nights covering similar ground, but it was awarded the time and nurturing patience to find its audience. Constantine doesn’t look like it will be so fortunate.

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