Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, Season 2, Episode 3: Shadow Selves
I am undecided on whether I will do all of Cloak and Dagger as two-episodes-in-one-review or one-episode-in-one-review. It depends on my personal speed of watching the show, I suppose.
And this episode is... part of it is sort of explaining what the fuck Mayhem is. Essentially, she's sort of like Reign or Red Daughter from Supergirl -- an evil clone borne out of comic book handwave plot magic, in this case the spooky dark energy that was unleashed at the end of the first season. We helpfully meet up with the scientist lady who is experimenting with mice exposed to the same energy, and apparently the violent mice tends to hunt down and consume the docile mice.
In Mayhem's case, as we learn via a series of random flashbacks peppered throughout the episode, we learn that Mayhem very nearly killed the real Brigid O'Reilly, but decide to pave her own crusade to hunt down both officer Connors as well as, thanks to a consultation with that priest from the first season, go and sate her desire to murder and kill people by killing those that deserve it -- i.e. the sex traffickers and kidnappers. And it's an interesting moral question that I can definitely see split the trio of Tyrone, Tandy and Original!Brigid. Everyone agrees that the sex traffickers are scum and deserve to be taken down, but Tyrone in particular is the most horrified at just how brutal Mayhem!Brigid is. Tandy, meanwhile, is the most receptive to her, to a point. She doesn't argue with her allies (yet) or try and help Mayhem, but she is definitely unable to bring herself to actually stop Mayhem from gunning down the mobsters in the final action scene.
The little emotional powers that Cloak and Dagger show off at the end also throw in a wrinkle into the ethics of killing sex traffickers. Sure, Mayhem kills a bunch of assholes who, let's be honest, pretty much deserves to be wiped off the face of the earth... but the fact that Tandy and Tyrone detect, respectively, "no hope" and a fuck-ton of fear within the girls that they rescue really throws an additional wrinkle. Yes, Mayhem's tactics might be the most brutal and direct, but it's an extra layer of trauma for the hostages. And I do like this topic, where we explore the murky grey area of "how far should vigilantes go in fighting reprehensible criminals?"
And I do like how this mindset translates to the two's tactics in the final fight of the episode. Sure, Dagger throwing light bomb hadokens is impressive, but as soon as Ty's teleported all the kidnapped girls to safety, Tandy doesn't really care all that much that Mayhem shows up and is about to murderize everyone there. Meanwhile, Tyrone ends up rescuing one of the young men that reminds himself too much of how his brother was killed due to the same kill-them-all-let-god-sort-it-out attitude. And I really do love the decision to make Mayhem such an interesting antagonist. It would've been too easy to just boil her down into another angry terrorist killing innocents and gangsters, a la Davos from Iron Fist's second season.
And in that vein, in crafting a relatively intriguing antagonist and how it relates to our main characters' growth, this episode succeeds a lot. I'm not sure if the flashbacks work quite as well, but they do enough to frame Mayhem's mindset and motivations for us to understand. What the conversations seem to imply is that Mayhem is not quite as whole, with the inability to feel guilt or empathy? The fact that the whole "soul" exchange comes from a drunk Father Delgado means this might not be exactly the case, but it's interesting that it seems to be what Mayhem is looking for.
There's also an... interesting scene where Tyrone's mother is voting 'nay' at some sort of meeting or whatever to decide about police force against a certain young woman or other? I don't quite understand that scene, but Tyrone's mother seems to be in slight distress, constantly glancing at some dude in a suit at the back of the courtroom, so she might be in some bad guys' pocket or something? I'm not sure.
The end of the episode is kind of interesting. With Tyrone unleashing his Cloak powers to rescue the random kid from being killed by Mayhem, he sends Mayhem to... another dimension? Teleports her somewhere? I'm not sure how much we know about Tyrone's power in this show, because between season 1 and 2 I ended up being reading a bunch of comics that co-starred Cloak & Dagger and I'm not sure how much of the Darkforce stuff is information from the comics or from the first season of the show. Regardless, though, zombie pancake boyfriend!
Overall, this show's definitely sucked me in more than I thought it would. Cloak and Dagger is honestly the best when it forces the main characters to actually stop and self-introspect about what is right, instead of floundering about in a half-baked doomsday conspiracy plot. I'm sure that since this is television, we'll still be getting some Darkforce Roxxon sci-fi plot in the second half, but this whole Mayhem stuff definitely interests me a fair bit. There are definitely scenes that didn't work as well, and some of the flashbacks feel either redundant or just there as foreshadowing, but ultimately, it's a relatively solid hour of Cloak and Dagger.
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