Constantine Review – S01E06 – Rage Of Caliban

This week’s Constantine episode, Rage of Caliban, is a great example how the plot of a story can tie into the development of its character.  Faced with a possessed child, John Constantine must face his past and his biggest fears.

Spoilerific Recap

The screams of multiple people are heard right outside a large suburban McMansion.  We enter the home and are greeted with a horrific mess: blood is everywhere and a woman has been crushed by the fireplace’s bricks.  Following a long trail of blood from the floor, to the wall, to the ceiling, we see a battered man levitating and pleading for his life.  A little girl, Emily, sits at one corner of the room looking at him.  She finally drops him to the ground dead.

Police are at the scene of the murders.  As a female cop, Sullivan, comforts Emily, her partner rudely tries to get her back to her post, as social services will be here any moment.  Both cops start to argue, and Emily becomes agitated.  A coffee mug on the counter starts to shake and eventually explodes into pieces.

John Constantine is woken up by a woman he’s been sleeping with.  She tries to get him out of the house because her boyfriend has just gotten home.  Climbing through the window, he narrowly escapes.

At Jasper Winters’s home, Chas Chandler makes a quick note that Zed is in art class, so it’s up to him to get Constantine working.  Chas finally gets Constantine to cooperate, and they find that the latest signal on the scryed map points to Birmingham, Alabama.

Arriving at Emily’s home, Constantine breaks in through a window.  Venturing into the kitchen, Constantine sees an ectoplasmic stain.  He licks it to get a sense of what it is.  Suddenly, he gets a jump from Manny’s unexpected appearance.  Trading riffs, Manny again warns Constantine of a rising darkness — something that Constantine will stop.

As Constantine asks what makes him special, Manny lists famous saints (Joan of Arc being one of them) and states that Constantine is unlike them and more of a desperate choice.  Constantine wants to know what happened in the house, but Manny is unable to answer him.  The reason is that when God gave humans free will, angels lost the power of intervention.

Constantine notices the broken coffee mug and its suspicious pattern of destruction.  He creates a spell by burning a piece of paper and quickly putting it out.  A smokey scene of Emily and the cops is recreated.  As Emily gets up to leave, Constantine notices the apparition of a child left behind.  Constantine quickly concludes that Emily was possessed by the spirit of a child, and that Emily was the attacker.  The entity inside her is now loose, and will be looking for a new host child.

At another home, a boy, Henry, wakes up screaming.  His parents, Daryl and Claire, run in, and Henry claims that there’s someone in his room.  Daryl, who looks like a poor man’s Chris Evans, checks his closet for monsters.  Finding nothing, Daryl and Claire try to comfort Henry.

Later, from the point-of-view of something ominous, we approach the home and go through Henry’s bedroom window.  Henry is woken up by the creaking noise of his closet door opening.  He closes it by tossing a large plush toy.  When he turns to the window, he sees the silhouette of a boy approaching him.  Screaming, his parents rush in again.  This time, to his parents’ surprise, Henry tells them that he doesn’t know why he screamed and that he’s okay.

At a bar, Constantine meets with a paralegal, who does investigative favors for him on the side.  She tells him that Emily is completely inaccessible and in protective custody.  It turns out that there have been a series of related killings all over the Southeast.  In the past, law enforcement have been unable to link the cases due to the time between attacks.  As she leafs through a series of pictures, she shows evidence going back thirty-five years.  All the parents had one child, and each household had both parents murdered, with only the child surviving.  Because three of these types of killing have occurred in the last month, law enforcement have been taking a closer look.  She tells Constantine that the children had fits of rage days before the killings, and then asks if her dead husband, Walter, was possessed by the same thing.  Constantine corrects her and says that Walter was just an angry spirit himself.  Knowing that an angry spirit can cross over by reminding him of who he was, Constantine needs access to one of the children, to see if they remember the name of the soul that possessed them.  Since all of the recently possessed children are in protective custody, the paralegal suggests that Constantine visit a man who was the first to be possessed thirty-five years ago — Marcello Panneti.

Arriving at a mental hospital, Constantine is taken to the yard area.  Going through Marcello’s history with an orderly, Constantine thinks that Marcello, being ten at the time, would’ve been an unlikely suspect in the decapitation of his parents.  The orderly tells Constantine that Marcello may have snapped after years of abuse.  Approaching Marcello, Constantine finds that he’s catatonic and unresponsive.  Noticing the missing fingers on Marcello’s right hand, Constantine understands that the abuse he suffered was severe.

At Henry’s home, Daryl is woken up by noises.  Henry knocks the floor with a light bulb, attracting Daryl into the kitchen.  Looking under a table, Daryl finds nothing.  A sudden electrical spark, surprises Daryl, making him step backwards onto strategically placed bulbs.  Injured, Daryl sees Henry with a flashlight.  When Daryl asks him if he did this, Henry claims that he was woken up by the same noises.

Discussing with Chas about Marcello’s catatonic state, Constantine makes a note that his parents got what they deserved.  As Constantine works to get ahead of the possessions, he shows Chas a map that has ley lines — mystical track rays that are flowing with electromagnetic energy.  Ley lines act as psychic railroads for a child’s soul to travel.  Superimposing the ley line map on top of a traditional map, Constantine notices that the possessions are occurring on the ley lines, which allows them to predict when the next possession will occur.

In his neighborhood, Henry runs into a crazed dog.  Showing no fear, Henry quickly calms the dog with one devious look.

As Constantine goes through Jasper’s library, Chas picks up an antique sword.  Wanting to know what it is, Chas suddenly starts to talk about someone named Renee and his regrets of her being gone.  Constantine quickly takes the sword from Chas and tells him that it’s the Sword of Night, which compels the holder to speak the truth.  After breaking their awkward moment, Constantine retrieves a treasure chest containing a thurible.

Claire, getting markers in the kitchen to prepare for a pumpkin carving, comes back out to the yard and finds the pumpkins completely hacked to pieces.  Henry is admonished for handling a knife.  With Claire demanding that he give the knife to her, Henry’s rage starts to build.  Claire finally grabs the knife from Henry without incident.  As Claire is about to open a sliding door, Henry kills a bird by compelling it into the door.

Constantine and Chas try to detect supernatural evil by burning frankincense in the thurible.  The frankincense smoke suddenly starts to divert towards a home.  Constantine states that frankincense actually flees malevolent energy, therefore, the real source of evil is the home that’s opposite to the direction of the smoke.  Constantine makes a strategic decision to find an opportune time before introducing themselves to the family.

At the school playground, Constantine keeps a watchful eye on Henry.  A teacher approaches Constantine and starts to question his presence.  In the distance, a bully confronts Henry.  Constantine implores the teacher to stop the bullying, but it’s too late.  In a fit of rage, Henry sends the bully flying across the playground and into a spinning roundabout.

At home, Claire, who found out about the injured bully because she’s a doctor at a hospital, disciplines Henry for hurting someone.  Constantine shows up and pretends to be the school counselor checking up on Henry.  He quickly presents a mandrake root, causing Henry to scream and telekinetically throw the root across the room.  As Constantine reintroduces himself as an exorcist, Daryl tries to force him out of the house.  Leaving his business card and about to exit, Constantine is knocked out by Daryl.

In jail, as Constantine blames himself for getting rusty at Ravenscar, Manny appears.  Manny tells Constantine that even though he can’t help him, he’s still here to guide him.  As Constantine tries to brush him off, Manny reassures him that he has always been by Constantine’s side — when Constantine’s father abused him, and when Constantine contemplated suicide.  Manny tells him that if Constantine wants to save a child, he just needs to remember what it’s like being one.

Listening to his parents argue over the schoolyard incident, Henry causes various objects in his room to explode.  When Daryl and Claire enter the room, Claire notices Henry’s reflection — Henry’s eyes have turned black.  His eyes quickly switch back to normal when he faces his parents.

Claire bails Constantine out of jail.  Going over the various cases of possessed children, Constantine explains to Claire that a violent eath can leave behind a traumatized soul.  Because Constantine doesn’t know who the soul was when he was alive, he’ll need to cast it out or perform a forceful exorcism.  At that moment, Constantine recollects to his failed exorcism of Astra.  One other problem with exorcism is that the soul can just find another host.  Constantine then suggests binding the soul to a particular spot with a seance, which requires three people to perform.

Back at home, Claire arrives with an injection kit and gains the trust of Henry by telling him it’s a B12 vitamin shot.  In actuality, the injection puts Henry to sleep for several hours.  She then leaves, with Daryl looking after Henry.

Constantine and Claire meet Chas at Marcello’s childhood home.  Constantine’s plan is to bind the spirit to the home — the first occurrence of the possession.  Holding the seance in the room where the murders occurred, the front door creeps open and a shadow emerges.  Preparing for the worst, they soon find that it’s only a three-legged fawn, which means the seance failed.  Chas thinks Marcello was never possessed, and that he killed his own parents after being pushed over the edge.  Constantine refutes that theory because the house is on the ley line.  Claire, desperate to free Henry, implores Constantine for an exorcism.

As Henry dresses up in his Halloween costume, Constantine and Claire enter.  Daryl, angered that Claire believes Constantine, immediately starts an argument.  Henry, enraged, sends a chair flying into Daryl.  Constantine quickly enchants one of the room’s mirrors.  When Henry is about to use his powers again, Constantine uses the mirror as a shield, which reflects Henry’s force back onto him, sending Henry sliding down the hallway.  Henry quickly recovers and runs out the back.  When Chas tries to stop him, Henry sends a car smashing into him.

Henry runs into a haunted house attraction, and Constantine soon follows.  Going through the attraction’s labyrinth, Constantine eventually finds Henry in full costume.  It turns out to be a ruse when the costume collapses to the ground.  Henry then sends one of the attraction’s dummies into Constantine’s mirror, smashing it.  Finding Henry standing right in front of him and armed with an axe, Constantine calls out to Marcello.  Constantine is telekinetically thrown around when he tries to talk to Marcello.  Finally seeing his chance, Constantine grabs Henry and binds Marcello to his rightful place.  A smokey plume rises out of Henry and disappears.

In the epilogue, Constantine explains that Henry was possessed by the soul of a living person.  Marcello was the oldest survivor because he was the first killer.  His murderous acts were so traumatic that his soul fled his body and continued to kill.  Because the original body is still alive, the soul couldn’t cross over.  We see Marcello at the mental hospital enraged, with orderlies trying to stop him.  Constantine then contemplates his own damaged childhood, but what’s really important to him is the rising darkness.  If he can’t stop it, then the world will change forever.

“Hell” Yeah! Moments

• The image of the boy’s silhouette standing in the window was creepy as hell.
• The interaction between Constantine and Manny was top-notch this week.  They went from humorous to poignant.

The Devil is in the Details (References)

• The Sword of Night is a weapon belonging to a DC universe superhero named Nightmaster.  The sword can compel the wielder and others to tell the truth.  It also warns the wielder of immediate dangers, and surrounds him with an aura that keeps him from aging.
• The ley line map Constantine uses was created by a man named Ken Ondaate, who later goes by the name Map.  Map could’ve become the king of the magi, but felt that his duties were to clear up the London rail lines.  Map’s powers are also linked to locations in some way.
• Still on the subject of the ley line map, keen observers will notice that the coast on the map is labeled Alex Holland.  This is no doubt a reference to Alec Holland — host to the Swamp Thing, whose comic book was where Constantine was first introduced.
• Chas talks about his wife Renee when he picks of the Sword of Night.  Chas’s biography, which included a section about him being married, was covered in a previous article, Constantine – Who or What is Chas Chandler?
• When Constantine goes through the haunted house attraction, he pauses a moment in front of a wall of skulls.  This is in reference to Sean Phillips’s art on Hellblazer.
• Another DC reference: at the end, when we zoom out of the trick-or-treaters on the street, viewers can see a child dressed as Robin.

Final Thoughts

Another superb episode from NBC’s Constantine.  Rage of Caliban uses the story of a possessed boy to convey themes of child abuse and regaining self-confidence.  With the right balance of creepy moments and emotional notes, this episode only stands a close second to A Feast of Friends.

We dive much deeper into Constantine’s emotional past when he’s forced to confront the soul of a tormented boy, Marcello.  Reflecting on his own abuse, Constantine knows the pain, but also knows that it doesn’t justify the killing of others.  I thought the interactions between Constantine and Manny were also excellent.  In the scene when Constantine was in jail, we saw him shaken when Manny admits that he was by his side during his darkest days.

It was a shame that Zed wasn’t in this episode, and was left absent with the excuse that she was in art class.  Getting visuals of Constantine’s childhood via Zed touching him would’ve been the cherry on top.  As of now, we’ve only heard Constantine describe his abusive father.  Sooner or later, we’ll definitely need an episode dedicated to his past.

The writers also made a smart move in not going with the expected.  By introducing Marcello towards the beginning, the ending was also not out of the blue.  The idea of a living person’s soul possessing other people is a unique take, and one that definitely makes the episode interesting.  Kudos to the writing team for not going with the conventional.

By now, fans have probably already gotten the memo that Constantine will only have thirteen episodes for its first season.  With episodes like Rage of Caliban, NBC is definitely making a mistake by not allowing it to simmer more.  It’ll take time, but the fanbase will only get bigger.