The problem with digging into the past is you might find something you don’t like. I don’t mean, you know, a disco-era photo of your dad on roller skates and short-shorts with a huge perm, I mean something even more profoundly disquieting than that. This week on Cloak & Dagger, Tandy learns some things are best kept buried, Ty puts a costume together, and there’s some equal-opportunities fridging. Fun!
1. “Bigger. Stronger. Braver.”
In real life, our vocabularies are influenced by our upbringing, our friends, but we’re also wont to quote things (consciously or otherwise) we’ve heard in movies or music, read in books or comics, and so on. From the sounds of it, the only culture absorbed by the characters in Cloak & Dagger are those inspirational mottos atop photos of mountain ranges your auntie shares on Facebook.
2. “Why did you stop by today, Tandy?”
Now, after that pre-credits inspirational motto nonsense, it was nice to see a subsequent scene with some bite. Tandy showing up to pierce the morose vibe of the Johnson family breakfast, on the anniversary of Billy’s death, is framed as a sentimental moment. It’s genuinely surprising — and totally in-character, I might add — when the button to the scene reveals Tandy was only there to pinch Adina Johnson’s Roxxon ID card. Ice cold!
3. “What’s the difference between a cloak and a cape anyway?”
The stoic Tyrone continues to struggle to open up emotionally, even when he finds his dad silently weeping. Instead, he’s dead set on taking down Connors as his way of becoming square with his parents…by pulling some weird-ass Hamlet stunt (“The Tell-Tale Heart” is the literary inspiration that gets credit though, bizarrely) where he pretends to be his brother’s ghost to scare him into a confession? Even when it works, the fact that Detective Brigid and her beau go along with it is asking a lot of the audience.
4. “Who’s there?”
Because as it happens, Ty’s plan does sort of work! We’re getting ever closer to Cloak and Dagger actually being Cloak and Dagger on the TV show which is called Cloak & Dagger, as he pulls on the shawl from his brother’s wake and uses both his teleportation and ability to resurface people’s worst fears to exploit Connors’s jitters. Except the corrupt cop has never seemed particularly superstitious or repentant with regards to his bad behaviour, so the fact he spills the beans feels a little less “organic conclusion to storyline” and more “woops season’s nearly over!” At least, until that final scene…
5. “What’s in your craw, kid?”
Tandy’s arc this episode is a little more credible, although her mother being on such an even keel on both the anniversary of her husband’s death and shortly after her new boyfriend/lawyer was murdered isn’t so believable (although perhaps what comes next explains that…?). Realising that what Tandy actually wants is her dad back, rather than revenge against the Roxxon execs responsible for his untimely demise, feels like a moment of authentic character growth.
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Who saw that final twist of the knife coming? Did that smug, ever-so-vague reference to Misty Knight do anything for you? Do paper lanterns ever actually work that well? Let me know in the comments!
