Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Season 1, Episode 6: Funhouse Mirrors
An okay episode, even if it still reeks of just throwing in a bunch of random encounters and steps to get to the final goal without really telling much of a story. It's like side-quests in a video game -- it's a great sense of accomplishment when you do it, and it is a great feeling to experience it. But for everyone not involved, it's pretty dang boring. And this episode basically tries to set up a similar concept. Both Tandy and Tyrone become interns in two different places -- Tandy interns for the daughter of one of her father's friends, while Tyrone interns as a drug-dealer courier for Duane. Both trying to find information or 'get close' to their respective targets.
The actual performances done by the actors involved are great, and I'm not so emotionless that I can't appreciate Tandy bonding and geeking out with fellow geek girl Mina Hess, especially when they got to talking about their father, but the only real thing that happens there is just "Tandy gets slightly closer to the Roxxon higher-ups". It's certainly miles more interesting than merely interviewing to be an intern like we saw last episode, for sure, even if some of the speech that hammers in "New Orleans is a survivor" is pretty eyeroll-inducing.
Also, I guess the oil rig that Mina is trying to build safely and the cartoonishly jackass and misogynistic superior with the Rolls Royce is trying to stop it? Not a bad villain plotline, but not one that I think is interesting enough to dragged on for more than a single episode.
Tyrone's whole deal about trying to infiltrate Duane's drug-dealing business honestly felt convoluted, though, and I really thinks that it kind of lacks the better moments of the Tandy/Mina bonding moments. I guess a huge chunk of why Duane's attempts at being brotherly to Tyrone is kind of spoiled by the knowledge that Duane is involved in causing Billy's death, and Tyrone knows this. That leasds to a genuinely slow story that kinda-sorta intersects with Connors and O'Reilly's story, which is a genuinely dull, by-the-books cop story. At least the confrontation between Tyrone and Duane about how Duane genuinely doesn't trust the corrupt police system to do anything, hence keeping quiet, is something?
The episode ends with Tyrone warning O'Reilly about the ambush that Connors has forced Duane to do, and in the proceeding shootout, Duane gets shot and killed just as he starts becoming sympathetic to Tyrone. Tyrone ends up teleporting into their shared church-base, utterly broken as Tandy comes back in with hopes that she has finally found a lead to the Roxxon conspiracy. That ending scene definitely salvaged what's an otherwise pretty snail-paced episode.
I do like the usage of Cloak and Dagger's emotional powers, if nothing else. Tyrone touching that one random drug runner and trapping him in a vague scary room with the lighting that goes on and off is pretty scary without going too overboard, and Tandy's very peaceful look into Ivan Hess's vine-grown mess of a mind is a pretty great visual, and both are far, far better usages of their powers than the convenient mind-reading they've been in the previous couple of episode. Also love how Tandy decided to wordlessly not violate Ivan's mind's privacy presumably out of respect to Mina, which I do like.
Also, we've got the framing story of Tyrone's girlfriend Evita and her voodoo-practicing aunt talking about a magical pair that keeps showing up in times of distress and destruction and stuff, and that most of the times, one of this mystical magical pairing dies, which... which kinda-sorta-but-not-really adds an air of tension to this whole thing? Okay? I don't mind mysticism since this is still the MCU, but this one is genuinely off compared to the tone of the rest of the series, like a draft for a video game's information-dump sequence. Not a big fan of this particular episode, honestly.
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