Constantine Recap With Spoilers: Danse Vaudou

The episode opens in New Orleans, as a drunk man stumbles out of a bar and into an alley, where he begins urinating against the wall. A college student on a cell phone walks by and the man flashes a policeman's badge at her to get her to keep moving. She bumps into another girl – a woman wearing a surgical mask – who asks whether the first girl thinks she's pretty. When the girl says no, the woman in the surgical mask takes out a pair of shears and stabs her repeatedly, killing her and then running away, all while the cop fires round after round into her and the bullets simply vanish under her skin. Baffled, he returns to the victim, upset.

Back at the mill house, Zed is having a hard time crying. She's afraid her powers are slipping but Constantine just tells her to keep trying. He's working on a Victorian zoetrope, which he spins and suddenly Zed sees something. She's transported to the pas,t where a boy named Jimmy is being taught how to shoot by his mother, who is teaching him how to kill his father if the father comes at him drunk.

The map starts to bleed, directing the group to New Orleans. They arrive, with Chas telling Constantine the story of what happened last night. Constantine puts a device on his wrist that detects the fact that there had been a spirit there recently. He susses out that something weird has happened, since the cop's shots didn't hit anything in the alley so they must have hit the attacker.

The cop walks up, clapping, and introduces himself as Jim Corrigan, asking who they are. Constantine introduces his team, and Corrigan dismisses them as con artists.

Zed realizes that Corrigan is the boy from the vision, and asks him whether his mother taught him how to shoot. Constantine asks Corrigan whether it's his case. Corrigan says that he's off active duty because after reporting what he saw, his superiors think he's crazy. Constantine gives him his business card, but Corrigan is not impressed.

At a hotel, Constantine and Zed are waiting for their room keys, flirting back and forth. Constantine wants to know where she came from and what she's running from, but she won't answer.

That night, a car is driving outside of town and picks up a young man headed into the city. After some awkward conversation with the driver (who touches the boy's leg in creepy ways along the way), the boy vanishes from the passenger seat and appears in the middle of the street. The man swerves to avoid the kid in the road and crashes his car into a tree. Along the way, Zed walks out of the hotel elevator and sees the accident happen. Constantine is surprised to see there's a second case, but calls Corrigan to report it.

The next morning, Chas drives the cab to the scene of the accident, where they find police already examining the scene. An officer tells them that the man died en route to the hospital and that he was talking about a hitchhiker when they arrived, but that nobody was there. He further says it's the third time in the recent past they've had to tend to a similar accident against that particular tree.

Corrigan arrives and places Constantine under arrest, suspecting that he somehow set up the accident because he reported it before it happened. Constantine tells him that both the girl in the surgical mask and the hitchhiker named Philip are likely to be in the obituary files if Corrigan looks; he ignores Constantine and puts him in the back of a police car.

Back in the alleyway, Chas is looking at the wrist-mounted supernatural device and sees that it's changing colors; he shouts at a man to get out of the way just as the girl in the surgical mask arrives. She asks Chas if he thinks she's pretty and he says yes; she removes her mask to show a slashed, disfigured face and asks him again and he still says yes, so she offers to make him pretty, too – slashing and stabbing at him until he collapses in the alley.

At the police station, Corrigan joins Constantine, who's chained to a table. He asks Constantine what he shot in the alley. Constantine sees that Constantine was right about them being ghosts. He's stunned by the revelation, but wants to continue the investigation. He tells Constantine that the girl was a model who was slashed up by another model and committed suicide. The other girl is already out of prison on good behavior, and Constantine tells Corrigan that he needs to talk with her.

He asks about the hitchhiker, who left behind only a grandmother. He wants to talk to her as well. He wants to know why now, the pair (who died years ago) have suddenly come back.

Corrigan asks Constantine how he lives with the knowledge of what he does. Constantine says it marks you for life, but it doesn't change who you are.

In the alley where Chas was slashed, the EMTs find no pulse and are about to start working on him when he wakes up and starts to heal rapidly, telling them that he thinks he just hit his head. He asks the stunned EMTs for a spare shirt.

At an animal shelter, the model who slashed up the girl with the mask admits that she had snapped out of jealousy. She's now crippled by guilt.

Philip's grandmother reveals that she was paying for him to go to college and he wasn't going, instead leaving every day to go play video games and smoke weed with friends. She kicked him out to scare him straight and Philip died. 

Both women reveal that they had spoken with the spirits of the people whose guilt they felt responsible for via a medium called Papa Midnite. Constantine says he's going to go talk to Midnite and that he wants Zed to go put up flares to prevent any more accidents on the road.

Constantine walks in on a voodoo ritual being conducted by Papa Midnite, who is channeling the spirit of a woman's dead husband. She feels guilty because she didn't get a chance to say good-bye. Midnite is talking to her in the voice of her husband when Constantine arrives, interrupting and telling Midnite that his magic is bringing back the dead, not just channeling them.

Midnite doesn't believe him at first, knocking Constantine out with a powder and having his men take Constantine away and throw him in the trunk of a car.

Zed is on the road, protecting the tree, when Corrigan drives up. He invites Zed to go pick up the hitchhiker with him, eliminating the risk of anyone else doing it.

In his home, Midnite is talking to a skull, surrounded by candles. He asks it whether Constantine is telling the truth, and while the skull doesn't speak audibly, he is visibly shaken by what he hears from it.

The next morning, he goes to see the wife of Clark Devereaux, the man he was channeling the night before. He gets there and Clark is alive, looking well and cancer-free while his wife seems shaky and unhealthy. The man's ghost says he's taking care of his wife and she'll be fine. In the car, Midnite tells the driver to open the trunk so he can talk to Constantine, but Constantine has let himself out. Constantine tells him that it's the rising darkness playing havoc on his magic. Midnite erases Constantine's debt related to the acetate and Constantine gets him to agree to ask his sister a question if they're successful in fixing the situation.

In the truck, Corrigan reveals to Zed that he knows who she used to be and what she's running from. Before she can respond, they see the hitchhiker and pick him up. Along the trip, she makes small talk, saying that it was hard for her to leave home, too, but that it was time. Philip disappears and reappears in front of them, but Zed drives through him rather than driving off the road, and Philip vanishes.

At a cemetery, Papa Midnite and Constantine break into Clark Devereaux's masoleum; they plan on stealing the three bodies and burning them in a ritual to force them to rest. Constantine tells Zed that the ghosts are operating by their own set of rules. He realizes that the only thing uniting them besides Papa Midnite is the fact that their survivors all feel guilt. Constantine and Midnite start their ritual, while Corrigan and Zed pick up Phillip again. He doesn't seem to remember them, or if he does, he's compelled to take the ride anyway.

Zed tells Philip that his grandmother loved him and that she understands what he was going through. He asks her to pull over, and she does, letting him out in front of the tree where he died.

As the ceremony comes to what seems like it should be a natural head, the fire goes out and Midnite and Constantine start arguing with one another. Eventually Constantine realizes that it wasn't Midnite, but the women who had inadvertently raised the dead.

Back in the alleyway, Chas asks the model in the mask whether she thinks he's pretty, whether she thinks she's pretty, whether she thinks it will rain. Aparently, being asked a question back instead of answered is what prevents her being able to continue on her routine.

Back at the site of the ritual, Madeline Devereaux has to be convinced to let go of her husband, so that the three women will agree to perform the danse vadou with them. It's only with the women's participation that the ritual can go forward -- and does, almost immediately, with Midnite being possessed, the bodies exploding into flames and the ghosts dissipating.

Back on the road, Zed thanks Corrigan for his help and Corrigan, drinking from a flask, tells her that he used to work missing persons. He says he remembers her face from back then -- that her family had reported her missing and she was never found. She asks whether the file still exists, and he says not anymore. She's relieved and he shakes her hand, kissing it, and she sees him bloodied and glowing green, surrounded by smoke and light. He asks if she's okay and she says yes.

Back at Midnite's, he tells Constantine that they've got the duration of one drink before their truce is over. Midnite offers Constantine a chance to talk to his mother, but Constantine tells him that he needs to talk to Midnite's sister in hell about the rising darkness. He wants to know what's going on. Midnite goes to the skull and asks, then looks alarmed by what he hears, telling Constantine all his efforts are in vain; the darkness is coming, heralded by someone close to him -- someone who will betray him.