Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Season 1, Episode 9: Back Breaker
Yeah, these last couple of episodes are moving at pretty much a breakneck speed, huh? Insert an obligatory speech about how the first half of the season dragged on insanely slowly.
This episode isn't exactly perfect. I felt some moments felt genuinely rushed, and some -- like the bit with Evita's aunt's scenes and the whole bit with the speech about the hero's journey -- to be awkwardly paced. I do appreciate the hero's speech thing trying to show just what Tandy, Tyrone and O'Reilly find themselves in -- the part of a hero's journey where they are tried and they can either choose to be a hero or regress and give in to all their demons. In Tyrone and O'Reilly's case, this means throwing away all their principles and unleashing their frustrations in physical violence. In Tandy's case, it means stealing people's hopes in a literal fashion. I really like that fact, but the actual speech about the hero's quest is dragged on for so long that I genuinely rolled my eyes when it took forever to get to the point that the episode wanted to tell.
Tandy is just kind of all over the place, first delving back to her life of seducing rich people and then using her powers to steal their dreams (and get off on them, apparently) as well as their money. She then goes to Mina Hess and gets into a bit of a piss-off contest with her and her dad, and then springs Liam out of jail because she wants to go back to her life before all of this. Her dreams, it seems, is to get married with Liam and have a happy life... something that is shattered because, guess what? When you leave your boyfriend in jail without any sort of explanation for however long it took between episode 2 and 9, he's not going to be very pleased.
Meanwhile, Tyrone's big victory from the previous episode is negated with bureaucracy and "we'll look into it", as well as apathetic parents (while we learn the reason why, there really is no excuse for them to not at least go "yeah, sorry, we were wrong in not trusting you" in the car), causing Tyrone to go into this spiral of anger and frustration about how his whole crusade, his whole fight, all his struggles, amounted to jack shit, and he ends up beating up some random kid in school and getting into a lot of trouble.
The scene with Tyrone's priest-mentor really made me wish that the priest had actually more scenes in the slower-paced parts of the season, because apparently he showed up before, but I genuinely don't remember him at all. Tyrone's speech to the priest is decently written as he lets out all of his anger and frustrations, but ends up seeing the priest's fear of... crashing onto some kid while drunk-driving or something? Oh, and Tyrone also ends up popping into Tandy's hope-stealing bit with Liam.
And just like the whole talk about the low point of the hero's journey where they are faced with the fact that they can't ever go back, we get an actually powerful moment as Tandy chases down Tyrone in his school, and bombards him with statements that put down both herself as well as Tyrone, chiding him for being a naive little shit, and claiming that she's nothing but a sadistic bitch. Not... not exactly wrong, honestly. Tyrone, for his part, still refuses to give up on Tandy, while Tandy is trying to bring him down? Yeah, Tyrone, you're a good man.
Both Tyrone and Tandy return to their respective families, and after an honest heart-to-heart (Tyrone and his mom talk about the responsibilities of staying safe and standing up for society. Tandy... just sort of speaks to a wall) are both thrown into chaos. A hit-woman from Roxxon has thrashed Tandy's house and is holding her mom at gunpoint, while Tyrone is being framed for the death of officer Fuchs, with the police coming into his house. Both of them are faced with a huge, climactic cliffhanger at the end of this episode, and that's pretty cool.
The side characters are a bit more... iffy, I think. Evita's a cool character and I do like how she's able to snap out of Tandy's hope-stealing bit, but she's trapped by being the only one who kinda-sorta gets this whole "Divine Pairing" thing (Ty and Tandy certainly don't) but it's all so vague and mysterious that I genuinely don't think I would even care if they end up explaining it in the final episode. O'Reilly's story is pretty basic, too. All her optimism is dashed, she attacks an instantly-free Connors at the police bar and gets a bloody nose out of it.
Meanwhile, Mina and Ivan are being a happy family, but then because Tandy zapped her with her hope-stealing powers out of nothing but spite (it's really hard to root for Tandy right now) it apparently burnt out Mina's idealism and she goes and kills a bee. And then at the end of the episode, Mina finds out that, hey, Roxxon really should've listened to her as the vague mumbo-jumbo hate plague gets unleashed again.
Overall, there's way too much going on, the pacing is inconsistent, and I'm genuinely not quite sure why I'm rooting for Tandy with how the episode portrays her as a pretty self-centered, hateful bitch. I mean, I get that she's not in the best shape due to the revelations that her father is an abuser in the previous episode, but I kinda felt that the transition really could've been handled a lot better. I dunno. It's still a solid episode, I think, my own hang-ups with the pacing aside.
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