Constantine Episode 1.04 A Feast of Friends

John and Zed come back to the mill house to find the door busted down in an apparent break-in, but John keeps his cool - Jasper fitted the place with dozens of booby traps. Sure enough, they discover none other than John's old friend from Newcastle, Gary Lester, floating in midair, captured by the zero gravity trap and eager for their help. And not just with assistance getting down.

Clearly suffering from heroin withdrawal, He explains his disappearance from Newcastle after the incident with Astra and how he ended up in Sudan (the result of a long bender), where he attempted to atone for Astra's damnation by saving a young boy possessed by a demon. After bottling the demon and deciding to approach John for assistance, a customs agent in Atlanta detained him and opened the bottle... unleashing the demon.

And "unleash" is hardly accurate - this demon devours people and spreads across the city, transmitted through a swarm of abnormally large African beetles that enter a victim's mouth and instill him or her with an insatiable hunger while consuming the person from the inside. Once the local news picks up on the wave of cases, John identifies the culprit - this is the Hunger Demon. John, livid that his friend failed to keep such a threat contained, refuses to let Gary accompany him to the latest crime scene and requests that Zed babysit him at the mill house.

John visits the latest victim ravaged by the demon and a clue from a perceptive witness leads him to a meat packing facility. Once there, John isolates the possessed worker and performs a spell to bottle it - but the demon proves too powerful for the bottle and John is forced to flee. Before he escapes, John traps the hungry swarm of beetles in a locker, a temporary fix at best.

Meanwhile, Zed attempts to eke out more information from Gary and they touch, causing transference. She immediately receives Gary's withdrawal symptoms, a kind of contact high where Zed only experiences the lows. Despite her condition, she manages to sketch out a vision that John believes he can use to contain the demon for good. He just needs a little help.

Enter local shaman Nommo Balewa who, with one look at Zed's sketch, knows the demon's true identity: Mnemoth. Nommo and John ingest a powerful drug called The Mist that ignites an intense, shared vision revealing that a Sudanese shaman trapped Mnemoth in a boy, knowing the demon would eventually eat itself to death. But before the demon and its host died, Gary turned up and "saved" the boy - a clear case of bad timing and misunderstanding. The vision further proves that in order kill the demon, John must obtain a kusa knife.

Back at the mill house, Gary insists he be active while his mistake costs lives and escapes from Zed's watch by grabbing her for an extended moment - in effect, overdosing her on his high. John returns to a barely conscious Zed and dismisses her belief that Gary meant no harm. Sure enough, he locates Gary trying to score heroin and rescues him from a handful of nasty dealers. At a bar, the two hash out their shared guilt over Astra's damnation and John finally asks Gary to join him in the final push to eliminate Mnemoth.

They break into a local museum where Gary steals a sacred kusa knife on display while John deals with the sudden appearance of Manny, who suggests John may not have the mettle to do what's required next. The angel's warning makes sense later when John and Gary track Mnemoth to a theater... and John announces that a human sacrifice is the only way to destroy the demon. Gary goes pale, now realizing that John manipulated him and planned the sacrifice all along. Nonetheless, he agrees to allow John to use his body as Mnemoth's vessel and in a bittersweet moment between two old friends, John's spell sends hundreds of beetles flying into Gary's mouth, carves symbols onto Gary's face using the stolen kusa knife and traps the demon.

When John returns to the mill house with a dying Gary, Zed blasts him for betraying his friend. John counters, reminding her that Gary came to him and not the other way around. But in the end, whatever their differences, John holds Gary's hand as he writhes in unending agony, the demon devouring his very soul, and Manny, solemn-faced, kneels beside them...