Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Legends of Tomorrow season 5, episode 7, “Mr. Parker’s Cul-De-Sac” and the graphic novel Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits.
The latest episode of Legends of Tomorrow has done the unthinkable, with resident warlock John Constantine announcing that he has stopped smoking. While many will decry this move as political correctness run amok, the reasons for the announcement have nothing to do with pacifying anti-smoking crusaders.
For many fans, the idea of John Constantine without his trademark Silk Cut ciggies is as impossible to imagine as a smiling Batman. The image of Constantine smirking with a cigarette clinched between his lips is so entrenched in the character’s portrayal that it managed to find its way into the Justice League Action animated series, albeit with the “cigarette” being revealed to be a lollipop stick. Indeed, it was the character’s chain-smoking which gave writer Garth Ennis the idea to kick-off his now legendary run on Constantine’s comic book Hellblazer with John facing a more down-to-Earth enemy; lung cancer.
Dangerous Habits, the storyline in which John Constantine fought lung cancer and won, went on to become one of the most influential Hellblazer stories in history. It provided most of the plot of the Constantine movie starring Keanu Reeves and has been referenced by the current season of Legends of Tomorrow. The most recent episodes have seen Astra, the girl turned demon who currently owns John Constantine’s soul, attempting to accelerate his death by allowing the lung cancer he’s already developed to spread faster. Astra has a personal interest in making John suffer beyond her job description, due to her becoming a demon after Constantine’s botching a magic ritual resulted in her being taken to Hell.
As in Dangerous Habits, John was able to stave off his death by cutting a deal. In this case, he convinced Astra that he could find a magical artifact called the Loom of Fate which could be used to rewrite a person’s past and arrange it so that Astra never went to Hell. Astra agreed to let John have a little more time to locate the Loom and restored Constantine back to his previous state of relative good health.
As “Mr. Parker’s Cul-De-Sac” opened, the Legends’ historian Nate Heywood discovered John in his library, hurriedly chewing sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into a waiting cup while researching the Loom of Fate. When Nate asked if John was trying to find an entirely new way to defile his library, John explained that he had stopped smoking and needed to adopt another habit. Presumably the brush with Stage 4 lung cancer left a bad taste in John’s mouth and inspired him to try and cheat fate another way.
It remains to be seen if John’s new habit will stick and if he’ll begin grossing out the other Legends of Tomorrow by leaving chewed-up sunflower seed shells all over the Waverider. It seems likely, however, that this is a temporary measure and that John will relapse as soon as his soul is safe. Ignoring how difficult it is to kick a nicotine addiction and Constantine’s infamous inability to avoid temptation, the concept of John Constantine without his cigarettes is as blasphemous as an American actor playing The Doctor from Doctor Who
