Marvel's Cloak and Dagger – S01E10 and Season Review

And so Freeform's 10-episode superhero series Cloak & Dagger ends its first season. What happens? Lots of stuff. So much stuff that it all feels a bit rushed. Not only do we get some wrap-up to first season threads, but we get flashbacks to other "divine pairings", and the creation of a new supertype,

We also have some loose ends. So Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph) and Tandy (Olivia Holt) are squatting at the church where Tandy lives. Mina has disappeared, Melissa (Andrea Roth) gets to live without her daughter, Adina (Gloria Reuben) and Otis (Miles Mussenden) get to live without their son. Connors (J.D. Evermore) presumably gets his comeuppance, teleported off into the darkness of Tyrone's cloak. Father Delgado (Jaime Zevallos) shows up for about five seconds without dialogue: it's good to have an agent who can get you a show star credit (and pay). Mina disappears, and who knows if she'll show up?

And Tandy and Tyrone are never called Cloak and Dagger. Which probably left viewers unfamiliar with the comic book characters wondering why the show is called Cloak & Dagger. Yeah, one has a cloak and one has a dagger. Still, it's a little vague. Maybe in season 2.

And so much for an "interracial romance" as the early press releases promised. Tyrone and Tandy are just... friends. It's almost a relief that they didn't go the romance route. Barring some really good writing, they're better friends than romantic partners.

Let's recap the episode. Tandy gets close enough to the assassin holding a gun to Melissa's head to get the drop on her. Tyrone gets out of his house fine, and makes his way to the Red Hawks' parade warehouse or whatever it is. His father Otis gives him Billy's cloak, and Tyrone teleports away.

That wraps up last week's cliffhangers. Tandy goes to rescue Mina, who is hiding in her home from the two Roxxon workers who were exposed to the infection gas and became Terrors. After Tandy takes them out, she and Mina figure out that New Orleans is going to explode because of the pressure from the gas. So they go to Roxxon to find out from Peer how to stop it. After that, Tandy gives him his greatest hope--of becoming God--which involves showing him a vision of the rig which apparently puts him in a coma.

Tyrone gets captured because he can't teleport away when the police corner him in the middle of a Mardi Gras parade. Brigid (Emma Lahana) tries to rescue Tyrone and gets captured with him. Connors is going to kill them both and make it look like they shot each other, but more of the Terrors attack the station. Tyrone helps out a cop who is having second thoughts about teaming up with Connors, then teleports away to help Tandy.

Tandy and Mina have taken refuge in a warehouse, but Mina gets infected when a Terror touches her. Tyrone teleports in and uses a taser to knock her out.

Meanwhile, Chantelle has been telling Evita about how New Orleans has been saved several times by a "divine pairing". Which always requires one of them to die by sacrificing themselves. Evita goes to the church and tells Tyrone and Tandy everything they kind of need to know. She and Tyrone share a kiss, and who needs a Tandy/Tyrone romance when you have an Evita/Tyrone romance?

Tyrone and Tandy head to the Roxxon annex with the controls for the gas. Brigid plays sniper from the roofs, helping them. Connors arrives and shoots Brigid, and she's exposed to some of the Roxxon gas before he kicks her into the water by the docks. He then confronts Tyrone and Tandy, and it doesn't go well for him. Tandy cuts his shotgun in half, Tyrone tells him to back off, and when Connors tries to shove Tyrone off of a roof, Tyrone sucks him up in his blackness.

Tyrone teleports into the annex, willing to sacrifice himself so that Tandy doesn't have to. She isn't having any of that, and cuts her way into the building. Tandy and Tyrone then shut down the gas. However, there's too much energy and they realize that they have to discharge it using their powers. They touch for the first time, and use the energy backlash to draw the energy into themselves and then discharge it into the sky. So neither one of them has to die to save the city. Yay.

In the end, Tandy moves back in with her mother. Tyrone moves into the church because he's still wanted by the police for Fuchs' murder. And Brigid? She crawls out of the water at the end, all mutated and Ring-like. Presumably to become the Mayhem character that Brigid O'Reilly is in the comics.

Overall, Cloak & Dagger was a decent show. It had a lot of racial issues throughout its ten-episode first-season run. It never gave us a decent main villain, (unlike Kingpin, Killgrave, and Maria over on the Marvel Netflix shows), but maybe in season 2.

Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt had decent chemistry, and nobody in the cast was a failure. The supporting cast also had some standouts: Ally Maki, Noelle Renee Bercy, and Tim Kang were all good.

The main problem was that they spent a lot of time on extraneous plots. Episode 9 seemed kind of a waste, as it brought up characters like Delgado and Liam, hinted that there was something deeper going on with them, and then dropped them.

Meanwhile, we got a lot of open-ended plots. I didn't expect Tyrone to be cleared of the murder charge. But his parents are left to suffer the loss of a second child. Melissa gets her daughter back, but not really. Connors and Mina are taken off the board without any real explanation. Peter is comatose (why?). Roxxon is still out there even if Nathan's name has been cleared. The New Orleans police still seem like a festering pile of corruption. Maybe Brigid will become a vigilante preying on cops next season?

And Adina was some kind of press secretary for Roxxon. One gets the impressions some scenes were cut for time showing her involvement with Roxxon, but us viewers never got to see them.

Overall, I'd say that Cloak & Dagger was a success, and it earned its season-two renewal. It hit a lot of racial hot buttons, but it didn't feel quite so message-y as Black Lightning. Maybe because we had Tyrone rather than Jefferson Pierce: a teenager rather than a high school principal.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?