Constantine gets a visit from an old acquaintance, Anne Marie. She got Constantine into the occult as a teenager and was part of the Newcastle crew. She and John also slept together once, but John went trolling for another girl while the sheets were still warm. It’s hard to tell what she is most upset about. She appears in the bunker via bi-location, the power to be in two places at once, to help her find a newborn whose mother was killed in the kidnapping. She suspects some kind of demon, and John knows it is serious because she hates him. “She must be desperate to come to me.” Constantine insists Zed stay behind to rest up more after her angelic encounter last week.
The address Anne Marie gives Constantine is a convent in Mexico. After the Newcastle incident, Anne Marie became a nun as a form of penance. She takes Constantine and Chas to the room where the crime occurred and Constantine casts some runestones to get an idea of what kind of evil they are dealing with. The runestones ignite almost instantly, which is always a bad sign. Constantine sees this as a sign that the demon who took the baby took care to cover its tracks, which means the baby is probably still alive. Luckily the father of the missing baby, Hugo, buried his son’s placenta in the yard, so Constantine and Anne Marie go dig it up. John hopes that the placenta will direct them to the kid.
They can’t find the placenta, but the tree it was buried beneath grows flesh fruit. John cuts into one, and it squirts blood. This is very bad, and he thinks that one of biblical Eve’s evil sisters took the baby. Diego, a cop, gets a call: another baby was taken.
Returning to the convent, Diego is upset to learn that the missing baby is his grandchild. His estranged teenage son knocked up his girlfriend, and that is the baby that was taken. This changes things: something is targeting the bloodline. Constantine uses a fountain in the convent to perform a spell which will show him the face of the demon. Sister Luisa comes to retrieve him, but John can’t be bothered. The nun is strangely insistent, and Constantine notices his bowl of worms is getting weirdly wiggly. A glance in the fountain reveals the face of Luisa as the demon who took the babies. Knowing she has been found out, Luisa turns demony and attacks Constantine. He knifes her, and she disappears into the shadows.
John fills in Anne Marie and Diego on the demon. She is Lamashtu, she likes to feed on babies, and John needs to know about Diego’s familial roots. They go visit his grandmother Pia, who was born in Chile, and she is immediately scared. “They are back.” The “they” she refers to are La Brucharia, powerful, prehistoric Chilean warlocks who Constantine insists were eradicated centuries ago. But Pia insists he is wrong, they have just been in hiding. Her grandfather was La Brucharia, and they lived to cause pain. Her father ran away from him to protect his family. Constantine doesn’t understand how La Brucharia could be back without them knowing about it – they wouldn’t be subtle. Then he realizes: La Brucharia is the Rising Darkness.
Since Lamashtu is after Lopez blood, Constantine has a plan: fill a chicken with Hugo’s blood, place a glamour spell on it so it looks like a baby, and offer it to Lamashtu as a sacrifice. Anne Marie knows that Constantine is trying to trick her into volunteering to do the hand-off. She doesn’t like it, but she agrees to do it. While they wait for Lamashtu, they talk and seem to clear the air a bit. Constantine kisses her, something only slightly more intimate than a kiss he would give a sister, but she comes back and kisses him much more passionately. Before this can turn into nunsploitation, it is time to summon the demon. It works, and Lamashtu appears, collecting the “baby” from Anne Marie. Hugo, who is watching from around the corner, is overwhelmed with anger and starts shooting at the demon. It races down into the sewer. Anne Marie, Chas, and Constantine follow it down.
With little time to spare, Chas goes one way and Constantine and Anne Marie go another. They find the two babies laying in cages. They collect the babies but the demon stops them before they can leave. Constantine points out that Lamashtu is under strict orders to deliver the babies to La Brucharia unharmed, so he threatens to kill the one he holds unless she tells him exactly what the plan is. La Brucharia are far scarier than Constantine, so Lamashtu admits that she is working for them because they have promised to expand her domain on earth. They have figured out a way to break the boundary between hell and earth, and once that happens, there will be no place to hide. Satisfied with this answer, Constantine pulls out a Pazuzu amulet, chants, and a blue flame engulfs the demon woman and sucks her into a blue portal.
As John and Anne Marie are leaving, they hear more crying. Is there another baby? A hideous, twisted demon (one that Zed had been drawing at the start of the episode) appears, and John is frozen – he doesn’t know what to do. Anne Marie does. Diego had given her a gun before she entered the sewer, and she takes it out now and shoots John so the demon will attack him while she and the babies leave. Constantine doesn’t seem too surprised by this solution. He is left alone, bleeding.
Meanwhile, back at the bunker, Zed is supposed to stay inside, but that is not Zed’s style. She goes to buy new art supplies and runs into Eddie. They go get a drink, and he texts his cohorts, “I have her.” At the bar, things are going well, until Zed touches Eddie’s hand. She gets a vision of him, all in white, sitting in a white vault. This troubles her but she puts it aside and invites him back to the bunker. As soon as they get there, Zed throws herself at Eddie, but it is all a ruse to get his defenses down and get him in a submissive position. She wants to know who the hell he is and what is going on. “Father wants you home, Mary. Our believers are everywhere, we will always find you.” Two other believers burst in: Baldy from last week, and Blondie. Zed threatens to kill Eddie if they take one step closer, so Baldy takes care of him for her. They start chasing her through the cavernous bunker. Zed fights with blondie down the “forbidden hallway” and shoves her through a door at the end that is a vast, empty void. Baldy gets the drop on Zed and injects her with a sedative.
So this is a two-parter, obviously. It looks like Constantine is going to bind the twisty demon to him in order to survive (subtlety is lost on the NBC promo department) but what they don’t show you is what happens to Zed. I can only imagine that it would follow with the comic story line: she is taken back to her father’s cult with the attempt to “breed” her with an angel. I wonder if that angel will be Manny? It would finally give him a reason to be on this show.
You can check out the promo for episode 9 of “Constantine” in the player below.
