Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Season 1, Episode 2: Suicide Sprints
I'm not promising that I'll review Cloak and Dagger as vehemently as I did when I did my Agents of SHIELD or Legion catch-up. In fact, I think this is the first superhero show that I'm not legitimately sure I care enough about to catch up with. I'll still boot up the odd episode or two, I guess, when I don't have anything better to watch, but I dunno. This second episode is competent, but it doesn't really do anything particularly special and moves at such a slow pace that there were moments in this episode where I struggled to even pay attention. And honestly, I'm not sure why a lot of these information isn't already delivered to us in the first episode.
The episode keeps Tyrone and Tandy separate for most of the episode, only having them bump into each other (literally. With a car) in the final few seconds of the episode... and I'm not sure, again, why we needed an entire hour devoted to the things we go through here. We're basically just repeating the same thing we did for the two of them in the episode premiere, just kind of prolonged. The episode does have some good points, admittedly.
Tandy being cast in a pretty shady light is pretty interesting. A good chunk of this episode is just her wiffle-waffling about leaving after stabbing Richy McDouche in the pilot, arguing with her mom (who's obsessed with suing Roxxon) when she spends the money she saved up to pay her "lover", who will totally help them win the suit against Roxxon, and then setting up her boyfriend Liam as her fall guy to be captured by the police. It's an interesting story arc, for sure, and showing one of our two main leads as being extremely morally ambiguous is a pretty interesting move. Did it need to take the entire episode to show this, though?
Meanwhile, Tyrone's story is a bit stronger than the previous one, with his split attention between hunting the policeman that killed his brother and all the basketball team drama. Could definitely do without such a huge focus on the latter, honestly, although the school's reverend talking to him about poison and revenge -- not aware that Tyrone is someone who's recently gained powers to actually do something about his brother's killer -- is pretty interesting. It ends up being bogged down by rather poor and jumpy pacing, though. And while the moment when Tyrone randomly goes into that weird trippy vision is either a new superpower or something symbolic, it ends up feeling kind of a rather muted 'reveal'.
Ultimately, it's an extremely slow episode. I do applaud putting the focus on characters first, but at the same time it takes waaaay too long for the episode to do anything actually interesting with these characters, up until the big revelation that Tandy betrays Liam (which is a neat, if obvious, moment). Overall, definitely a competently shot and acted episode, but one that didn't really feel all that intriguing or exciting.
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