Constantine Episode 1.12 Angels and Ministers of Grace

John finds Zed in a calm room of the mill house, attempting to recover from all her recent stress. He urges her to jump back into the fray, but she resists - until Manny gifts the gang a new case centered at St. Catherine's Hospital. To force a skeptical John to pursue it, the angel destroys the scry map. Looks like they don't have a choice now.

The trio uses an "injury" from Chas to gain entry into the hospital and get a close-up look at a patient brought in for a drug overdose... except John notices black veins across her entire body. What drug would have that effect? Zed touches the patient's arm and it triggers a cryptic vision - and seconds later causes her to crumble to the floor in seizures, right as the patient suddenly flatlines. While Zed recovers, John and Chas visit the patient's body in the morgue and a quick spell reveals she embodies pure darkness - the product of dark matter, not a demon.

Meanwhile, emergency room stalwart Dr. Galen performs a CAT scan on Zed and introduces the possibility of a brain tumor, which may exist as the cause of her seizure and could be the reason for her visions, too. This lands hard on John, who now feels guilty for applying such pressure on Zed to help him, and when Manny reappears on the rooftop during a smoke break, John focuses his anger on him. An irate John demands that Manny fix Zed, and after the angel refuses, John performs a spell that temporarily traps Manny in human form, infusing him with all the requisite emotions and feelings.

With Manny still stunned by his new existence, they discover another dark matter victim in the hospital storage room and determine only one thing could have caused such a bloody mess - the Black Diamond. A legendary mass of pure evil that shattered before the Great Flood, the Black Diamond exists in fragments throughout the world... and at least one is in the hospital.

In between experiencing pleasure and guilt for the first time, Manny snags details on the two victims so far - they suffered substance abuse, achieved sobriety and then chose to return to their addictions. John combines that information with his findings from an experiment on Chas using his own Black Diamond shard (one of many oddities in the mill house) that saw Chas nearly explode with heightened strength and anger. The killer must be harnessing the diamond's power and punishing those he believes eschew a second chance at life - an assertion confirmed when John discovers a third body in the hospital with a similar story.

Back with Zed, Dr. Galen recommends surgery to remove the tumor, emphasizing the hardship involved when harboring a life-threatening object in your body. And he should know - as a corpsman in the Marines, he still has shrapnel lodged near his heart from an attack on his unit in Baghdad. But Zed hesitates to consent to the surgery - would her unique power vanish without the tumor, or is it truly a gift?

It's not until John learns of the potential surgery and Dr. Galen's backstory that he makes the connection - the doctor's shrapnel could be shards from the Black Diamond. After all, Jasper obtained John's shard from an area near Baghdad. So when Zed turns down the surgery, a confrontation with John and his piece of the shard puts the doctor over the edge - he transforms into an ugly, powerful creature and races away.

John, Manny and Zed chase him down, but John explains no human can stop dark matter... that's a job fit only for an angel. He reverses the spell on Manny, releasing him from the human body. Manny, now charged with a sense of duty and understanding, envelops Dr. Galen in his wings and calms the beast, bringing him peace. The defeat of the dark matter, of the shrapnel in the doctor's body, becomes serene - the Heavenly Light emanating from Manny sends them both away to Dr. Galen's "place of rest"... and leaves behind the tiny Black Diamond shards in their wake.

Later, John joins Zed in a chapel as she contemplates her decision to leave alone the tumor (or whatever undefined mass might be in her head). Manny arrives - and Zed remarks that she too can see him. This impresses John, but her explanation for refusing the surgery speaks even louder - she's willing to brave through the pain if that's the cost of her magic.

Now that's something John really understands.