No sooner had the companions of John Constantine received some much needed fleshing-out last week, than we got an episode that sees John on a solo adventure with an oddly brief hand-wave about Zed and Chas being on holiday or something.
There is nothing inherently wrong with doing a solo one-off episode, except that it falls into the obvious trap that a solo one-off would tend to imply, namely that it devises a terrific concept and then finds itself without the necessary time or space to give that idea its full due.
Specifically, this episode sees Constantine help yet another old occultist chum from his younger days - and since to my recollection we have yet seen neither footage nor photograph of his whole former entourage together, the show can keep on doing this more or less indefinitely - to fight a mad doctor in a magical mindspace in which the power of the consciousness determines the nature of reality.
This is a terrific idea, packed with not only exciting story and visual potential, but with tremendous thematic resonance if the show were only to start digging for it. Unfortunately, the time constraints inherent in an hour-long show do not accommodate the possibility of making good on all of this potential, and so even the grand climax less resembles a Dark City-style reshaping of the world than one good CGI shot and an array of underwhelming greenscreen effects.
In short, the key phrase of the day is unrealized potential. A very interesting idea is left without the necessary room to breathe, and the result is an intriguing but ultimately middling episode of the series. The teaser for next week's episode seems to imply the return of the main season arc along with the side characters the show has been slowly developing over its run, so that will be worth returning for at any rate. Until then, we are left with this noble failure of an episode, and at the very least I would much rather see an installment that fails due to an surplus of ambition rather than one kneecapped by a dearth of it.
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