cyan

I kind of wish the characters, including Constantine himself, would calm down about all the deaths around him. Because it's actually quite normal to have people die when you deal with dangerous people, creatures and gods who mostly just want to kill lots and lots of people. The remarkable thing is not that they die, but that John manages to stay alive.

And she didn't seem to recognize Anne Marie either. She can probably be thwarted with wet tissue.

Yeah, those would work. I asked earlier because I decided to rewrite the script* for this and a couple of other episodes, as a screenwriting exercise. But I ended up replacing her, because she is just some random supe, and in the material they used, there was lots of opportunity to use villains that would make more impact on everyone involved. ------ * Since it's what I am doing anyway, when I watch this show. Although this was one of their better eps.

Well, the eps have already been shot, so hopefully not.

Feels like one department of NBC is trying to convince another department to renew the show.

You know what puzzles me from the screenwriting point of view, though, is why enlist a supernatural entity to snatch babies, when a human would be perfectly capable of doing it? Like, she is narratively not necessary at all.

I assume the traps are like home alarm systems, where you have to reset them. I guess. Dammit, this show sucked me into this state of general over-investment in the Hellblazer universe and Constantine's character, and it wasn't even anywhere near good when it started. What the hell. It's getting better, and this episode seems to be when the writers finally had the epiphany that what makes the story is the main character and the way his unique brand of fucknuttery scorches everyone he ever meets and, like, entire planes of existence. The more they do this, the less various creative team shortcomings matter. Tossing Constantine onto the pitchfork of Anne-Marie's righteousness is always going to be awesome - it doesn't much matter if the monster suit zipper is showing. And I think what they get right is this balance between showing Constantine as a total jackass and yet keeping him likeable and sympathetic. So, I end up rooting for him, but also deeply enjoying it when people yell at, punch and shoot him. Never gets old. On that note, the more absurdity, the better this show works. Like, the chicken thing pretty much made my week. I would not trade it for all the food porn on Hannibal, exquisite cinematography and homoerotic chewing be damned. I mean, faking a baby by injecting blood up a chicken's butt. How do you top that? You don't.

(Bruinsfan! Hi! You may or may not remember me as 'random') Yeah, series Chas is actually half-way interesting. And a nice opposite set of character traits to play off John: calm, thoughtful, capable of sequential reasoning and planning, vs. intense, excitable, lethally non-linear and normality-avoidant.

I think it's the disobedience that's the issue. Manny interfered in the outcome of events, which is against the Prime Directive. Imogen interfered even more, but both of them acted as bad weather butterflies. I hope the story takes that somewhere, and aside from Manny being spanked by Bid Daddy, there will be some pleasingly horrible consequences. I enjoyed the ep well enough, but I am so sick of the episodic format. The writers can't quite tie them to John. Even when there is a strong thematic tie to his character, they don't make a good use of it. Like the ep with the kid - telling us via Manny that John was abused as a child isn't character development, it's backstory. Now how does it affect John's choices in the present? Not in any way that I could see. Same in this ep - the angels were fun, but Constantine was kinda like an extra - if you replaced him with a totally random do-gooder, it would all still happen the same way. As the recapper said, all this juicy stuff Constantine's knowledge of heaven/hell vs. Zed and preacher's faith got totally sidelined. The series is called Constantine, dammit. Where is the damn title character in all of this? I remember back when, some Buffy writers talked about how even in MOTW episodes, their central question was, "what's the Buffy of it?", as in, how does it affect her and what are the choices she makes and how do her *choices* affect everything that happens? The reason I watch is the character of John Constantine, who is unique even in the current anti-hero-rich story terrain. Every ep, I keep hoping that this is where they start developing him more, but so far they did it only in Feast of Friends. In this one, he is... present but not accounted for? Like, (mediocre) quips and smoking do not a character make. It's frustrating to watch writers bumble and waste fantastic story potential. I watched one of the behind the scenes clips on NBC and they had the ep writer, who was basically a kid. I was like, this is what you get when you hire someone's nephew to write the series. Someone who should still be in writing school. Don't put the money into special effects, put them into paying good screenwriters.

Hey, art class is serious business. Many classes go all day - morning, lunch break and until evening. Not for the faint-hearted :D So licking walls is a thing, apparently? Whatever will they think of next. I actually want John to deck Manny. Never enough punching angels in the face.

Heh. Manny the concern troll. Pretty much, in a nutshell. This ep was fun to watch - fast paced and swinging between creepy and hilarious in a good way, but they wasted so much character and thematic material. You have two adults who were abused as children; one is possessing kids' bodies to murder their parents, whereas the other is John the exorcist/demonologist/fuck-up of the dark arts. This mirroring should have been a bigger deal. You have this whole internal conflict of John having to exorcise a kid after Newcastle, which is huge for the character. I mean, ghost, man and angel had to drag him by arms and legs into leaving the nuthouse and dealing with life and demons again. That's how fundamentally fucked up he is by what happened. And here something as major as attempting another child exorcism gets breezed over in a ridiculous way. "I'm worried about doing this." "Well, man up." "Oh, OK." I hate when characters change their mind about something critical just because of something that another character says. That kind of change should be motivated by an event, action or consequence of action/inaction, not just by a freaking conversation. And there should have been a cost for his delay. The whole ep should have been structured around John getting to the point where he could risk an exorcism, and building up to a climax, with major things at risk not just for the family but for John himself. Instead we got a fun potpourri of genre bits that has no depth whatsoever, and three lines of lazy, stencil dialogue addressing the implications at play. I hate when people waste material like that. It's all there for the taking. It's sitting there begging to be used. Ugh. Writers. Beatings for all of you. The show has a goofy charm, which I like, but "goofy charm" is the last thing that Hellblazer stories and the character of Constantine should be described as. Having said that, licking the crime scene is deeply true to Constantine. Thumbs up there. Also, does Chaz just... habitually serve John his meals? Like, he's not so much a friend as an actual manservant? Not a complaint, but I need to know more about this relationship and its deep strangeness. I mean, I really enjoyed the ep, but it could have been so much more.

It's actually a pretty oppressive trope - as if people with mental illness need to be dehumanized further. Those places are not "asylums", they are hospitals, like any regular hospital, where you get regular ol' health care, not gothic edifices where reality no longer applies simply because the residents have mental illnesses. On a different note, what if Mama helping Abbie and Jenny was a whole-season thread? That slowly built up so that while the Cranes face their loss (one of them has GOT to be toast by end of season, please Lord), Abbie and Jenny face theirs. Because the reunion was a loss - they gained a sane, caring mother and lost her at the same time.

Abusive action is abusive regardless of intent. You can't alter someone's physical autonomy, state of consciousness and level of ability to defend themselves. If you do that, you are taking a level of control over another person that you have no right to. Hence it being abusive. (I mean general "you", not directed at a specific person). And that wasn't no NyQuil, either. Abbie! The universe needs you to be in command and use Hawley for foot massages and food delivery and booty calls, as God intended, and if you want to play doctor with him, you should be *the doctor*. Anyway, I forthwith solemnly declare that I shall no longer broach this topic. The thing that sticks to me in this ep for some reason is that Jenny used to be all whatevs about the psych hospital, like, I'll stay here because right now it's convenient. Suddenly she is all fearful about it? That was weird. As was the lack of any staff at all. Incidentally, psychiatric hospital nurses do hourly rounds to make sure no one is running around trying to off themselves or get high, and glass or cutting objects are not allowed on ward. Incoming patients' belongings get searched, and any potential improvised suicide material gets confiscated, including headphones, phone chargers, belts and shoe laces. Just a fun bit of mental health care trivia for y'all :). So having patients try to off themselves in front of a security camera is incredibly silly and lazy. I always fail to understand why the writers feel they always have to resolve the story in one episode, when actually giving the material its due over a couple of eps would prevent the stencil screenwriting they end up resorting to. Like this episode, there was so much important stuff that was just rushed through head-first. Abbie and Jenny even being willing to acknowledge and look at their past is major, let alone have such a reunion with their mother. It all could have been far more powerful as the culmination of some kind of proper build-up.

Seriously. I was so shocked to see it played for laughs. Friends don't drug friends without their friend's knowledge and consent. Drugging someone is what *villains* do, because it's a grotesque violation of a person, regardless of intention. What concerns me is that the writers apparently didn't see this as a significant or wrong thing to do, so they are clearly not all that well-versed in, I don't know, the basic moral and psychological dynamics of basic forms of abuse. Awesome.

You know the end times are nigh when the FOX network's vision is more progressive than the writer's. Yeah, it seems kind of basic that sometimes, concepts work and sometimes what looks good on paper doesn't work and ideas don't pan out, in which case you come up with some other ideas. Hannibal writers frantically rewrote more than half of the first season while it was already airing, when they saw that their initial ideas weren't working that well. Well, whoever is driving this debacle is an idiot.