Last night’s CONSTANTINE wasn’t very convincing, probably because it - like most of the episodes - was rushed. In their haste to get to what they considered key scenes - ConJob uses Anne Marie as bait! Chekhov’s Amulet comes through! - they skipped the details that would make any of it make sense.
My main problem was with the character of Lamashtu, the villain. A sister of Eve’s who turned down Adam’s proposal in order to become a goddess of Hell, she is as old as humankind (give or take the show’s anthropology, which is unclear). She is capable of disguising herself as a nun (did she replace one, or has she been Sister Luisa all along?) and interacting with humans without difficulty. And she has set aside her hunger for babies in order to keep them alive for the Brujeria, so she’s not an immediate gratification freak.
She knows there is a well-informed occultist wandering around. She knows Sister Anne Marie personally, and how upset she is about the disappearance of the babies. She knows the two are working together. And yet, when Anne Marie offers up an infant to her as sacrifice, it doesn’t even occur to her - as it would to any reasonably bright 8-year-old - that it’s a trap. (Just to make it more obvious, Anne Marie is openly wearing the Amulet of Pazuzu, Lamashtu’s enemy.) And she flits Flash-style around the hallways and never even notices the three grown men who are watching her and not really very well concealed. She now seems to be one of those near-mindless, obsessive spirits you sometimes see in shows like this, unable to think or plan. In order to drive the plot, whether it makes sense or not.
And consider: when John goes to Mexico, he knows that a baby is missing, but he has no idea what he’s dealing with. A fairy, a nursery demon, he speculates? He surprised to realize it’s one of Eve’s evil sisters, and then he still has to figure out which one. And yet somehow he just happens to have with him the Amulet of Pazuzu, Lamashtu’s ex. I wonder how many amulets he was carrying in his suitcase? Maybe it’s bigger on the inside….
The show has seemed rushed to me from the beginning, getting to “the map with Rising Darkness sites marked in drops of blood” and the “supernatural safe-haven house stocked with every artifact we will ever need” (obviously taken from the House of Mystery) stage much too fast. In the comics, the best Constantine stories often moved more carefully, as he cajoled, traded with, and defrauded a half-dozen different people and demons, while dealing with the fact that they were doing the same. And the personalities of the characters involved were more complex, and played more of a role. Too complex for a TV series, I suppose. I think I’d enjoy CONSTANTINE better if a story like last night’s worked itself out over four episodes - a whole one dedicated to wheeling and dealing for the Amulet of Pazuzu, as contrasted with “I just happen to have here….” John wheeling and dealing can be more fun than him casting spells. And a convent haunted by a baby-snatching Hell goddess, and staffed by John’s former one-night-stand and occult mentor, now a nun? Stuffing that into one hour means you miss out on some of the parts that could be interesting, and - as in this episode - hand-wave the rest and hope nobody cares.
I was pleased that this episode continued the Vertigo Constantine tradition of drawing on actual folklore and mythology. Lamashtu was a Mesopotamian demon/goddess (daughter of the skygod Anu) who was known for kidnapping new-born children and eating them. Pazuzu was, in Assyrian/Babylonian mythology, ruler of the wind demons, was the son of the god Hanbi, and had a serpentine penis. (Oh, the details of old myths!) And, although evil himself, he was a rival of Lamashtu; amulets with his image were used to protect people from her. (Their star-crossed romance, and Lamashtu’s relationship to Eve, are not part of the myths.)
(Actual amulet of Pazuzu, 1st millennium BCE, now in the Louvre.)
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