Johanna Constantine dreams. I am in love with her. She’s wearing the worst pants in the world, yet she still looks beautiful. How? I don’t know. I am surprised to find this level of allegiance to Jenna Coleman within my heart. She’s such a little chipmunk face! There’s some business I don’t fully understand where she has to clean up the satanic ritual mess of an irresponsible drunk with an adorable daughter called Astra, but it doesn’t matter too much because in the next shot Constantine has woken up from her scary dream and is getting out of a cab while flipping up the collar of a cream trench coat. Not to be shallow, but. She flips up the collar in a very good way, and I say that as someone who has the shoulders and bone-forward facial features that best suit a trench coat. Jenna Coleman is petite and chipmunk-faced, yet she boldly flips up her collar beyond anything I have managed in my own life. Wow. Wow.
An old lady named Hetty warns Constantine that Morpheus / the Oneiromancer / the Sandman is back, and he wants his sand. Constantine thinks Morpheus is a fairy tale, but wouldn’t you know it? She turns around, and there he is. Wonderfully, she does not have time for Dream, because she’s come to do a job for a lady vicar who flirts madly with her (fair) and tries to convince her to exorcise a princess who’s showed up insisting on marrying a footballer she claims she’s in love with. Constantine insists she’s done with the royal family, which I take to mean that she watched the Oprah interview with Meghan and Harry and drew the same conclusions as all the rest of us.
Eventually, she is prevailed upon to do the exorcism. Turns out it’s not the princess who’s possessed, it’s the footballer she’s trying to marry. Here we have a genuinely nasty and horrible bit of gore, with hands reaching up out of the guy’s throat to sort of tear his body apart and burst into a demon? I loved it except for this is the first nasty death we have actually witnessed, and it’s a Black character and that makes me feel weird. Just cast a white guy when someone needs to get torn apart. Then tear him apart. This is the ruthlessness that was missing from the show’s first two episodes.
Constantine tries to carry on with the exorcism, but Dream shows up to cause problems on purpose. The demon offers to tell Dream who has the helmet if he’ll stop Constantine from doing the exorcism, and Dream appears to be amenable to this dream. Constantine is not. She’s all, “Run along and fuck off back to hell,” and I’d die for her. Dream just stands there in disbelief that Constantine has ignored his commands to stop exorcising. The funniest bits of Sandman are always the moment when someone out-fuckboys Dream, which is what has just happened to him here. Dream cannot cope with not being the biggest fuckboy in the room! His eternal life has not prepared him for such an eventuality!
After a bit of farewell flirting with her vicar friend, Constantine comes out to have a chat with Dream, who is looking extra skinny and doomed. He tells her that they have to find the pouch of sand, lest dreams disappear forever. “Does this approach generally work for you?” Constantine asks. “You just turn up and order people about?” (Probably her time on Doctor Who prepared Jenna Coleman for this line read in particular.) Dream says, “Yes.” It is not unsexy (see previous posts re: Tom Sturridge having good chemistry with everyone, all the time). Constantine agrees to help him, but says that she works alone and refuses to be followed around London by Dream and his friend. This is shocking to Dream because he has no friends.
The friend in question is a raven. The raven’s name is Matthew. Dream does not need a babysitter. (As he is explaining to the raven that he does not need a babysitter, Constantine bounces. I love her, your honor.) The raven explains that he lived on earth all his life and can be really helpful to Dream, but Dream doesn’t want another raven. He recounts what happens to Jessamy as evidence for not wanting another raven. I cannot believe we are having a multi-episode arc about Dream’s grief for this extracanonical raven. That said, I spoke to my friend who is watching this show but has never read the comics, and they love the whole Jessamy thing, so maybe this is an entry point for people who did not read the comics.
While we’re discussing plot lines that aren’t as good as Jenna Coleman, I might as well run quickly through what’s going on with Ethel and John, over in Arkham Asylum. John resents many of Ethel’s parenting choices and does not believe in the Sandman. He thinks the person they’ve been running from is his father, actually, and he knows his father’s name, from reading The History of Ritual Magic in England. The moment of truth arrives! He says that if Ethel wants the ruby, she has to tell him everything, and be honest about it. Ethel comes clean, and John says he’s changed the ruby so it only works for him. He doesn’t want to give it back to Morpheus, he wants to use it to create a world without Morpheus.
Just as they are having a little bit of a moment, John asks her to bring him the ruby. She says that she can’t, because last time he had it, he killed people. Instead, she offers him the amulet of protection and tells him she’s sorry she was such a shit mum. Without the amulet, she ages swiftly and dies in his arms. I’m sure this will not end in tragedy. Jokes! It immediately ends in tragedy. John straightens up, splats the guard that comes in, and escapes the asylum, splatting two more guards in the process. Then he runs into the Corinthian, a very stable and reassuring presence! I’m sure this will not end in more tragedy!
Okay, so fine. That’s John and Ethel, setting up episode five, which we are all prepared to find very troubling. Back to Jo Constantine, my girlfriend! She dreams again, but this time we see the end of the dream/memory: Astra came running in when she was in the midst of doing her exorcism, and she was taken and killed, and Constantine couldn’t save her. (If you’re keeping track at home, the count is now at two people of color who have died gruesomely in this episode.) Constantine wakes up to find Dream in her room, and he offers to fix her bad dreams if she helps him find his pouch o’ sand. Now we’re cooking with gas, y’all. What we need, I have discovered, is someone irreverent and chatty to bounce off Tom Sturridge’s haughty sulk, and that is Constantine in spades. She gets it out of him that he was imprisoned in Roderick Burgess’s basement for decades, and he retaliates by finding a photo booth strip of pictures of her looking happy with another lady.
The woman in the picture is called Rachel. Constantine ghosted her because Rachel thought things were getting serious, and Constantine is a fuckboy, even when she’s Jenna Coleman. She and Dream agree that love never ends well. (Certainly that is very true for protagonists of comic books.) They roll up to Rachel’s flat, and Constantine insists on going in alone, probably because she doesn’t want Dream to witness firsthand the aftermath of her fuckboyitude. The flat seems suitably haunted for what I know is coming, but like… don’t other people live there? Do they mind living in this very haunted block of flats? As Constantine psychs herself up to chat with her ex, Matthew is giving Dream whatever the opposite of a pep talk is. Dream looks tremendously aesthetic in this mood lighting with the rain behind him. I don’t know if it’s altogether a sulk—I’m going to have to think about it—but it has the aesthetic of a sulk.
Constantine and Rachel have an awkward conversation that turns into kissing that turns into more awkward conversation that turns into… well, Rachel’s face sort of sloughs off into sand. Again, I am delighted that the show has started to lean a little more into the body horror that very much characterized the comic; but again, Rachel is Black and I wish that these grisly fates had not befallen three characters of color in a single episode. Dream is there in the clinch to wake Constantine up from this dream, and he explains that it’s the sand making her think she saw what she saw. In reality, Rachel is ghastly, gauntly ill in bed, her hand clasped around the pouch of sand. Dream takes it from her hand and starts to walk out, but Constantine demands that Dream do something to help Rachel. He’s bewildered that she thinks this would be necessary. “We’re all just Roderick Burgess to you,” she says with searing accuracy. “What is the point of you?”
Whatever you can say about Dream, he does his duty when someone makes it clear that it is a duty. After Constantine apologizes to Rachel and leaves the room, Dream mercy-kills Rachel. You can see that he is thinking, as he does this mercy killing, “idk what if I were slightly less of a fuckboy?” He puts this thought into action when he gets outside by telling Constantine that she’s not Roderick Burgess. Which is nice! Even nicer, he tells her that he’s taken away her nightmare for her.
Matthew and Dream have a little argument about whether Matthew needs to go home to the Dreaming or can be allowed to come with Dream where he’s going. Dream accedes that he might have use of Matthew where he’s going. Which is Hell. “I don’t get a sense that you’re listening,” Matthew says. “So fuck it! Let’s go to Hell!”
How I’d fix this episode: This episode is genuinely really good, and I enjoyed it a lot! Jenna Coleman is terrific as Johanna Constantine, and I love her with Dream. I would, however, rethink the casting of the three people of color who wind up gruesomely dead. I am all for creating a more diverse cast of characters, but I do want the show to think critically about how — in particular — its white characters interact with / violently murder / witness the violent deaths of its characters of color.
Number of things Dream cares about in this episode, other than his duty: Fucking Jessamy, still. Jesus Christ with Jessamy. I can’t believe we’re still hearing about Jessamy. He doesn’t in fact care about Rachel’s horrific plight, but he does accept her as his duty when Constantine points out that he should, which captures Dream as a character much better than him crying over the gargoyle. (Apologies to Gregory, who was a very sweet gargoyle, and none of this is Gregory’s fault.)
Does Dream do a sulk? I’m going to say no! He has a sulky energy at times, but I don’t think he properly goes into a sulk the way we’ve seen him do in the prior two episodes. When he briefly attempts to sulk, he loses track of Constantine, so I guess that teaches him that he can keep up with Constantine, or he can do a sulk, but he can’t do both.
Fuckboy energy: 9/10. If Dream had done what he intended and left the room with Rachel dying in there, I’d have awarded him the full ten points. The fact that he comes close is perfectly in character. Maybe he can learn something from Constantine’s cursed love life.