Cloak and Dagger Season 1 Review: Sharp and Enveloping
This is a repost of something I wrote before. Cloak and Dagger is sharp and gives you a lot of emotional depth, dealing with really issues.
I'm not much of a Marvel TV fan, truth be told I'm not much of a Marvel fan in general. I don't feel the need to see the MCU films with any kind of urgency, there are a few which are more than a few years old that I haven't gotten around to. I watched the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but got bored and never bothered with the rest. I haven't seen any of the Netflix shows and I probably never will.
So when I say that I am a big fan of Cloak and Dagger, you can understand the context in which I'm saying it.
The thing about what makes Cloak and Dagger different is that while it is based on a Marvel property, it's not really a traditional comic book hero story. While most of the shows follow a rather simple formula of hero call to action in the very first episode and spend each episode solving a problem, Cloak and Dagger doesn't.
Because the story is about a team, much of the first season is about building it. The main characters, Tandy and Tyrone, are not known to each other in the pilot. They meet for the first time in the pilot but don't become fast friends or entangled in each other's lives right away. The characters slowly find their lives becoming ever more connected as the episodes go on. They come to rely on each other for help in their separate problems, finding a certain amount of comfort in their shared pain and suffering.
The super powers and magical aspects of the world being built are in many ways a C plot. In most stories, the abilities they have would be central to the resolution of an episode's plot. But in this show, it's a means to their bigger goals. Their abilities are more passive than active. Tandy's dagger being the most active, but she doesn't understand how to use it properly. It takes her half the season to figure out how and even longer for Tyrone.
But their more passive abilities are quicker to develop. Almost by accident, they figure out how to enter the hopes and fears of others and use that to their advantage. One episode in particular was fantastic at using it for story and character development. It involves them going into a character's catatonic mind and working out how to save them from their comatose state. It's truly unique and yet we have seen this before.
If there's one criticism that I have of the season is that so much of the episodes are spent setting up the finale that the true heroism doesn't get a lot of time to shine. But the upside is that with all this out of the way, the villain for season 2 they set in motion can go full speed ahead and wreak some serious havoc.
Olivia Holt is a brilliant actor in the role of Tandy. She makes Tandy a sympathetic character despite how many hard edges she pushes against people and problems she causes for herself. The circumstances of her life make her sharp way of approaching people understandable. But it's Holt's performance that gives the pain depth and layers.
Aubrey Joseph by contrast is equally brilliant but for the opposite reason for Holt as Tyrone. Unlike Holt's confrontational and hard edges, Joseph succeeds by doing and saying almost nothing. His quiet and uncertain Tyrone is the water that keeps crashing up against Tandy's sharp rocks. Constant and cautious but never afraid of pushing back against Holt's rage and bad decision making, they make for the perfect contrasting leads.
The last time I saw a show coming this strong out of the gate was two years ago with Riverdale.
I just hope that the same thing that happened to Riverdale's sophomore season doesn't happen to Cloak and Dagger.