Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Season 1, Episode 3: Stained Glass
Well, we're back with Cloak and Dagger. I feel that I still don't have that much of an attachment to the very bogged-down pacing of this particular TV series, but I guess I can finish up the eight or so episodes I have left for this season.
But watching this episode, again, I'm just really confused just why they're taking their time to move things so slowly. Yes, I get the idea and the concept of what they're trying to do in this episode. Tandy and Tyrone are connected by their powers, and they have something to do with their... emotions? Dreams? Mental states? You don't have to take all that long to drag it out, though, and there were segments of this episode that repeated the post-car-crash scene that I genuinely don't think was necessary. Basically, Tandy tells Dream!Tyrone to stop using violence to try and kill the cop that killed his brother, and Tyrone tells Dream!Tandy to stop running from her problems. Both of them also see that the other is full of self-loathing, which I thought was kinda clever -- Tyrone believes he deserves to be punished and persecuted for his attempted murder of the evil officer, while Tandy 'poisons' everyone around her, because that's what she views herself as. That bit was kinda cool, I'll admit.
Oh, and there's a Vodun ritual thrown in there and a huge, huge drawn-out sequence of Tyrone and his new girlfriend Evita making a long exposition about that. Did we... did we really need that long of an exposition scene? I dunno. I'm not a particularly big fan of that. More bizarrely, while Tyrone accesses the weird dreamscape with Voodoo, Tandy accesses it with... um... dozing to sleep while nursing a concussion on a bus? What?
Speaking of Vodun, Evita's aunt apparently makes a 3D printing of Tyrone? Um... okay? I kinda want to think that this implies that she's the villain (other than officer Conners, the show doesn't really have a traditional Big Bad yet) but I'm not sure that the show would bend backwards to establish that, no, media depiction of voodoo is grossly inaccurate and it's as benign as any religion out there, and then have a Vodun practitioner be the villain. Eh.
The thing is, I'm just not that big of a fan of every episode so far ending with Tyrone and Tandy meeting each other, only to exchange a few words and then bugger off. I get why they did it the first couple of times, but this is the end of the third episode and the two have only really interacted via ephemeral dreams and going around their own problems and stuff. I dunno -- I really felt that everything that happened in the first three episodes could've very easily been trimmed down to an episode and a half, tops, and would've had the same, if not a greater, impact.
We also get the introduction of a brief subplot with Detective O'Reilly (played by Emma "Yellow Dino Ranger" Lahana) trying to investigate the possible assault done by the Rich Douchebag and... while it's not uninteresting, the whole episode feels so slow that adding another slow B-plot to it all just feels like a huge "why is this important" moment to me. O'Reilly is at least brought into both Tandy and Tyrone's spheres, with her having a conversation with Tandy, and Tyrone's cop nemesis Connors telling her to back off of the case while also being casually an asshole.
Overall, though, the episode at least is a pretty huge improvement compared to the previous two. While the dream sequence might be self-indulgent, it does show a whole lot more into Tandy and Tyrone's psyches than all the floundering and meandering of the previous episodes. I'm still unconvinced that it's worth the pacing of this show being reduced to a snail's pace, though.
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