NBC’s Constantine continues it’s surprising meteoric rise in quality with each episode after what was, truth be told, a rather lackluster pilot in retrospect. I’m not going to spend a lot of time here as, honestly, I would genuinely say this was the show’s best episode yet for a number of reasons that I really want to get into below. So, without further adieu, let’s dive into the horrors of Constantine‘s fourth episode, ‘A Feast Of Friends’.
1. Are they…? No… wait, really? They’re really going for it?
Those were pretty much my exact words upon the opening of this episode. After the pilot dabbled a little in delving into the mythology of “Hellblazer” by opening at Ravenscar Mental Institute and referencing (repeatedly) the “Newcastle Incident”, the show has only ever really had winks and nods to its comic book roots since then. This episode changes that. And what better way of doing that than by just straight up adapting the comic’s first story. Yes, the sad and lonely tale of Gary Lester and his encounter with the hunger demon Mnemoth is the subject of our episode this week and, honestly, it’s none too soon. While episodes two and three where, by all (my) accounts, pretty good, this was the exact kick in the arse the show needed. While I was worried at first about how the show would handle adapting this particular story not only because it kicked the comic off in a rather bleak and horrific fashion, but was also rather jet-setting, I think they did rather well with what they had.
2. A Surprisingly Faithful Adaptation
I was actually surprised by how faithfully this episode recreated the story beats of the storyline in the comic. While it had to take a few certain liberties here or there and flesh things out in places or simply change things in order to make it fit the show’s narrative better, it actually held up pretty well. And, I think a lot of that comes down to Jonjo O’Neill’s turn as Gazza the junkie, who brings a bleak and hopeless feel to the story as he conveys the guilt not just of his actions here, but also of the aforementioned “Newcastle Incident”. Which is another thing this episode actually does: it makes the pilot retroactively better in a few ways. While the pilot was pretty hamfisted in how it referenced Newcastle and the guilt it weighed on Constantine, this episode explores the incident from another perspective, namely Gary’s, and gives the incident more context and, therefore, more weight. Sure, anyone who’s read “Hellblazer” pretty much knows what went down there, but in terms of the show, this episode handled the topic a lot better.
3. Needless Liberties
On the other hand, there were more than a few liberties taken in adapting this stories that actually make very little sense. One of the ones that bugged me throughout the episode was changing the origin of Gary’s encounter with Mnemoth from Morocco to Sudan. I don’t if there was a specific reason for the change, I certainly didn’t get one from the episode itself, but all it did was change the country of origin from one North African country to another, more eastward North African country. It’s a small detail, but the more it came up, the more it got on my nerves. The other major problem with how the show adapted the story is in how it handled the supporting cast. In the comic, it being the first issue and all, Chas and Zed had not been introduced and the story focused on John and Gary. Here, Chas gets a handwaved mention as to why he’s nowhere to be seen, which is fair enough, but the show decides to let Zed stick around without actually giving her all that much to do. She seems to be the audience avatar for allowing Gary to explain his side of the story about what happened in Newcastle, but after a while the show seems to just give up on trying to find things for her to do and has her lie on the couch for the rest of the episode. Literally, she gets a psychic transference of Gary’s withdrawal symptoms and is couched for the rest of the episode. I understand why, of course, as the end of the episode wouldn’t have given her anything to do anyway, but it was disappointing as I’ve found myself really liking Angelica Ceyala and the more she has to do, the better.
Continued below4. A Conspicuous Absence
This is the other liberty the show took that really just made no sense to me, so much so it’s getting its own bullet point. Where the hell was Papa Midnite? In the comic, this storyline served as the introduction to Papa Midnite as John is forced to go to his Manhattan casino (oh yeah, and in the comic it takes place in Manhattan while he it’s Atlanta because that would have been too much fun) to get help in containing Mnemoth. However, because last episode was, for some reason, Papa Midnite’s introduction on the show, he is completely written out of this episode. What that leaves is a gap where the show has to fill ten minutes between John learning how to contain Mnemoth and the actual climax of the battle where all they really do is talk about Newcastle some more. Sure, it allows for a nice scene of bonding between John and Gary, but it’s clear just pausing for time because they had ten minutes to fill. Maybe it’s just me, but as soon as I realised Midnite wasn’t going to be showing up this episode, I was really disappointed both as I wanted to see Michael James Shaw’s Midnite again. Still, the episode made do with what it had and even though it definitely still has its share of problems, this is easily its strongest episode yet.
5. John Constantine, The Bastard
This is the part of the the Five Thoughts where I just gush about how much I love Matt Ryan as John Constantine. This guy really knows how to capture the facets of Constantine as a character and this episode sees him delve into the much darker side of Constantine and come away with something that feels a lot more “Hellblazer” than previous episodes. The trick to it seems to be the fact that this episode acknowledges that John is not that good of a person. He’s abrasive, he’s selfish, he holds a grudge, he’s weighed down with the guilt of the mistakes of youth that seem to keep coming back to haunt him. And this episode paints the picture of Constantine as a tortured soul who creates his own suffering and Ryan pulls it off incredibly well this episode. There’s no chanting while naked and covered in blood this episode, just the tortured soul of a man on display. Spoiler Alert: If you’ve read the issues of “Hellblazer” that this story is adapted from, you can probably guess how it ends. If you haven’t, and you haven’t seen the episode yet – although why you would read this before watching the episode is beyond me – then I’d stop reading now.
Ok. They gone? Good.
What really sealed the deal on this episode, despite the unfortunate absence of Papa Midnite, were the final moments as John is forced to sacrifice Gary to contain Mnemoth. That would have been enough to leave the episode on a powerful note, especially the moment he has with Zed where she finally realises the kind of person Constantine is, but what really pushed it over the edge into greatness was that final scene. As John holds the hand he has finally forgiven and subsequently damned, he is visited by the angel Manny in a dialogue-less scene that really brought home the grey morality of the show and the character. It’s perhaps the most “Hellblazer” the show has gotten so far and if it can keep it up, we could see even more great things from it in the future.
