Cloak & Dagger: Season 2 Review

A Journey Into Darker Elements

Cast:

Aubrey Joseph … Tyrone Johnson / Cloak

Olivia Holt … Tandy Bowen / Dagger

Gloria Reuben … Adina Johnson

Andrea Roth … Melissa Bowen

Emma Lahana … Detective Brigid O’Reilly

Miles Mussenden … Otis Johnson

Dilshad Vadsaria … Lia

Noëlle Renée Bercy … Evita Fusilier

If you are a glutton for teenage melodrama, misery, and angst combined with extraordinary fetes of inhuman abilities, I welcome you to the second season of Cloak & Dagger, on the Disney-ABC owned Freeform network. Cloak & Dagger is from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) without the pomp and ceremony of their more established stable of superheroes of Thor, Iron Man, Avengers roster. If one were to rank Cloak & Dagger against the roster of superheroes, there are the blockbuster movie heroes, there are the television heroes and then there are the streaming service on demand heroes. Cloak & Dagger falls in the latter category. With the demise of Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and Jessica Jones from the Netflix streaming services, only Cloak & Dagger and The Runaways remain as fixtures to the comic book adaptation world that’s not streaming on Netflix. While not a rating juggernaut, Disney-ABC is keeping it propped up for now as it enters its second season.

To give those unfamiliar with Cloak & Dagger a fresher course, here is a quick summation from Season one. Tyrone Johnson and Tandy Bowen were children growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana. While growing up, they both experienced tragedies that would set them on a path of discovery and a pairing neither one could foreshadow. On that particular fateful night, Tyrone witnessed his brother being executed by the police by the water’s edge and Tandy was in the backseat of a car driven by her father as it plunged into the water killing him. At the same time these events are going on, an explosion at a Roxxon chemical plant erupts sending unknown gases into the water below. As Tyrone’s brother falls into the water, he goes in to rescue him but is unsuccessful. Instead, he finds Tandy stuck in the backseat of her father’s car and he attempts to rescue her. The next we see in Tandy and Tyrone unconscious and clutching each other's hand. Tandy wakes up first and takes Tyrone’s hoodie jacket. They don’t see each other until years later at Tyrone’s high school outing one night. Tandy boosts his wallet and Tyrone goes after her. He catches up with her and when they go to touch, light emits from her hands and dark clouds emanate from his body. And so it begins.

In a two-episode story arc, Season 2 opens up eight months later from the Season one finale where Tandy and Tyrone combine their new abilities to defeat a near catastrophic event affecting New Orleans while dealing with bad guys. The roles and fortunes have been reversed for Tandy and Tyrone. Where she once stayed by herself, homeless, in an abandoned church is now the new habitat for Tyrone as he was framed for the murder of his brother’s friend by a crooked cop he was absorbed by Tyrone’s dark cloud. Tandy is back living with her mother whom she discovered that her mother had been abused for years by her father whom she adored and saw him as a person who could do no wrong. This revelation changes her perspective on her father as well as the specter surrounding family violence.

In a group meeting with women victimized by family violence, Tandy takes one woman to task for not taking steps to remove herself from the abuse she’s been receiving. Her intense passion emboldens Tandy to take measures into her own hands and she goes after the man by entering his home and leaving behind a message on the wall but that episode fails to dissuade him as he writes it off as vandals and he embellishes the event where he comes off as a hero as told by the woman. Tandy goes back and confronts the man directly warning him to change his ways.

Tyrone, on the other hand, is skulking around drug havens stealing money and drugs directly from the dealers. He lies to Tandy about what he is doing because he is living a life of isolation and he has to do something he feels is positive to stop this scourge. When Tandy discovers what he has been doing, she is pissed but she also wants to help. Both of them seems to have this need to help when they see a wrong.

Detective O’Reilly has a new friend, herself. In a twist from the source material, O’Reilly’s has a doppelganger named Mayhem. Mayhem is Dirty Harry with an A-cup on steroids. Tandy and Tyrone don’t know that O’Reilly has a doppelganger until unrelated events lead them to an ambulance storage yard where they track the abduction of the abused woman to the yard. Tyrone had retrieved O’Reilly and transported her to the yard where Tandy is there with Mayhem. Tandy, Tyrone, and O’Reilly officially meet Mayhem. Mayhem makes no excuses for her actions but was she responsible for the execution of all the drug dealers at the club?

There were elements to these two episodes to evokes a much darker tone for this season of Cloak & Dagger. A woman victimized by domestic abuse is systematically abducted through an elaborate system using ambulances. Who is behind it? A group of drug dealers is killed under a minute with no signs of any weapons being used. One of the dealers leave behind an etching of some juju sketched out in cocaine powder next to his dead body. Are Tyrone’s parents separated? Does Tandy still have any lingering resentment towards her mother for not leaving her abusive father? After viewing these episodes, you get the sense that dark themes are foreshadowing this season of Cloak & Dagger.