Red Stewart reviews the season one finale of Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger…
To avoid sounding like a broken record, I’m going to pitch you guys a hypothetical scenario: let’s say you are creating a long-term television show adapted from an existing property, be it a book or a comic or a play. Let’s say the the main protagonists of this preexisting property are well-known to a decent number of people or that, even if they aren’t well-known, it is at least obvious enough to regular audiences that said characters are in it for the long-run.
My question is this: given all this information, would you, as a writer of the very first season of this series, hammer into viewers a recurring idea that one of the main characters has to die in the finale? I imagine the vast majority of you wouldn’t, because one, it’s an idiotic concept that no sane person is going to buy for the first season, and two, it’s just cliche. When was the last time a show killed off someone, and actually chose not to bring them back (BESIDES Game of Thrones)? Superhero comics have become notorious for this revolving door between life and death, with the old saying going “No one in comics stays dead except for Uncle Ben.” Therefore, you would think that these adaptations would try and avoid said pitfalls.
But no, they don’t. I would list the many other instances of this fake-out happening in comic book TV shows or movies, but that would unintentionally spoil things for people who have not seen them. Regardless, Cloak & Dagger’s writing team and creator/showrunner Joe Pokaski really had no excuse for incorporating this trope when they knew full well they were not going to follow through with this banal set-up.
With only a 10 episode season count, I was hopeful in the beginning that the series would avoid the drags that the Arrowverse and other Marvel Cinematic Universe TV properties experience during their runs. By having a shorter network quota to fill, Cloak & Dagger really had the opportunity to focus every single one of its 10 episodes on the main plot and characters, and not waste time with filler. Unfortunately, that thinking proved to be wrong, and so I was left to deal with abysmal episodes like ‘Stained Glass’, ‘Funhouse Mirrors’, ‘Ghost Stories’, and last week’s ‘Back Breaker’. Episodes that clearly had an identity crisis because the writers couldn’t decide whether they wanted to focus on one protagonist or the other, explore some nonsensical sideplot, or throw a dumb monkey wrench into the narrative in a vain attempt at spicing things up.
I know I’m not talking much about the Cloak & Dagger finale itself, but I figure it’s better to use this time to do a semi-review on the problems that led up to the disappointing “Colony Collapse” than rehash and critique every issue with that specific episode’s teleplay. You see, superhero properties are welcome to experiment and mold the elements of the genre: in fact, I praised this aspect of the inconsistent but alluring pilot “First Light.” But at the end of the day, these projects do have to follow some basic principles that the genre has in place, or risk falling into the realm of arthouse indulgence or amateur filmmaking. Even M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, which acted a self-aware examination of the genre (and which I also compared Cloak & Dagger to in my review of the pilot) knew that it had to follow the schematics of the superhero film or else it wouldn’t have worked as the type of movie it was trying to be.
That was the opposite with Cloak & Dagger – the writing team was so intent on creating something different that they forgot to set-up the basic foundations that the superhero genre called for, starting with the lack of development for the antagonists. No time was spent developing their two villains, Connors for Tyrone and Roxxon/Scarborough for Tandy. Connors was just a reskin of the typical corrupt cop Harvey Kietel pioneered in Bad Lieutenant, using his position to make deals with dope peddlers and criminals. We never learn about his backstory, his motivations, why he got into law enforcement, and why he abandoned the “protect and serve” motto. In “Ghost Stories,” we received hints that he might have some ethics left, given that he apparently regretted killing Billy, but this idea was quickly dropped soon after. As I said in my review of ‘Back Breaker’, J. D. Evermore does a great job with what he’s given, but there was ultimately not much for him to grasp at other than a hackneyed archetype.
Scarborough, and by extension the Roxxon Corporation, were treated even worse, being typical greedy white collar crooks whose avaricious nature led to the neglectful deaths of many of their employees. The MCU as a whole has pioneered a new stereotype that needs to be banned from fiction alongside the Fu Manchus of the world: the rich Caucasian businessman who has a low moral compass. Don’t believe me, well, let’s just go through the 10 years of the MCU: you have Obadiah Stane/Iron Monger in Iron Man 1, Justin Hammer in Iron Man 2, Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3, Alexander Pierce in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Darren Cross/Yellowjacket in Ant-Man, Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in Daredevil, and the Meachum Family from Iron Fist. It’s become annoying to watch, and considering these projects deviate from the comics all the time, can we not have some changes in the character’s backstories whilst still honoring their creator’s intentions?
At least Pierce and Fisk were fleshed out. You could not get anymore cliche with Scarborough: he’s slimy, one-dimensional, malicious, and rapacious despite having immense wealth. There’s a concept only briefly mentioned in “Colony Collapse” that implies the development of Tony Stark’s arc reactor has caused significant market upset in the technology/energy market, but, again, it happens long past Scarborough’s introduction and is nonetheless never fleshed out beyond being a simple Easter Egg (speaking to one of many problems between the MCU’s seemingly inter-connected TV shows and movies: the lack of plot relations).
To be honest, I don’t even think it was necessary to have a ringleader; Roxxon as a whole is shown to be led by nefarious heads who all had a hand in the oil rig explosion. Yes, as the CEO, Scarborough is responsible for the direction of the company, but he still answers to the Board of Directors, meaning taking him out of the picture wouldn’t do much; he would just be replaced by another yes man. Likewise with Connors- he has so many followers/connections in the New Orleans Police Department that would killing/arresting him really make any difference?
But okay, let’s just say that Connors and Scarborough are the epitome of all the evil in this current arc of Cloak and Dagger. Rather than spend the season actually expanding upon them as villains, we instead get the introduction of a third antagonist by everyone’s favorite stereotypical Voodoo aunt: a hybrid mix of the Darkforce and pure light. Anyone remember the whole “Rising Darkness” thing from the Constantine show? Basically take that and make it 10x more cryptic and stupid and you have this tertiary threat in Cloak and Dagger, triggered by Roxxon’s continued need to drill into the ocean. And yes, just like with Connors and Scarborough, nothing is explained about it, though at least it has somewhat of a reason to be mysterious given that it’s tied to the show’s mythology. And as a comic book fan, I can appreciate the writers for incorporating it into the narrative, but it honestly feels too soon to delve into something that’s big enough to be worth an entire season of storytelling.
I don’t complain about all these things without reason. When you don’t develop your antagonists, your story lacks confrontation, and when your story lacks confrontation it means it is setting itself up for a disappointing climax, and when you set yourself up for a disappointing climax it means you’re going to have a lackluster resolution. In ‘Colony Collapse’s’ case, that resolution is so cheesy, so laughably bad, it makes the hand-holding, friendship is magic conclusion from Guardians of the Galaxy look gritty by comparison.
Connors and Scarborough were at least grounded threats that could have made for an interesting final battle or espionage/thriller finale. This manifestation of the Darkforce and light energy is so anticlimactic that it requires a deus ex machina to fix it. It honestly feels like the writers were so unsure about how to make this a credible enemy in less than an hour that they decided to screw originality and instead combine The Walking Dead’s premise with the phone frequency attack from Kingsman: The Secret Service. This is what happens when you don’t plan things ahead properly- you have to rely on improvisation and crammed narratives to get things done.
That’s not the only problem with the show. Next we move onto a big part of Cloak & Dagger’s narrative, which is of course the Cloak and Dagger part. Tyrone and Tandy’s relationship just wasn’t developed properly. Back in April 2016 and later January 2017, a plot synopsis was released that read as the following:
“Described as a superhero love story, Cloak and Dagger is based on the titular comic book duo (also known as Tandy Bowen and Tyrone Johnson) who have appeared in Marvel Comics classics, including Spiderman and X-Men stories.The live-action interracial romance follows the duo, two teenagers from very different backgrounds, who find themselves burdened and awakened to newly acquired superpowers while falling in love. Tandy can emit light daggers and Tyrone has the ability to engulf others in darkness. They quickly learn they are better together than apart, but their feelings for each other make their already complicated world even more challenging.”
Anyone who has watched the first season all the way through will notice several deviations from this synopsis: one, Tandy and Tyrone never get together romantically, two Tyrone never learns to engulf others in darkness, and three, they never learn that they are better together than apart. In fact, trying to touch each other with their powers results in them getting physically blasted away.
Look, I understand that the film and television industries are dominated by executives and clashing creative voices, and it’s only natural that a higher-budget production be cast under a greater spotlight. But when the end result changes this much from the publicly-released summary, it is a strong clue that something significant happened during either pre-production or principal photography.
Now to be fair, I actually didn’t mind the lack of romance, as, as a fan of the comics, I always felt Tandy and Tyrone had a more sibling relationship than one of lovers. But outside of that, one of the things that always drags a show down is a poorly-handled paramour, and so Pokaski’s apparent decision to axe that part from the original concept may very well have been a good choice.
To replace that, though, we never get a good look at the platonic, yet caring relationship between the two. Yes, we know they’re connected: the writers hammer that point home through the editing and dialogue. But the question is do they have a strong friendship? The truth is it’s not properly developed. At first I was fine with the slow approach the writing team was taking to getting them together as viewers do have to appreciate each protagonist individually before they can like them as a pair. But when we got to the end of the fourth episode, ‘Call/Response’, and they were once again emotionally separated, I got worried. When we got past the midway point of the season and were on the sixth episode “Funhouse Mirrors,” and they still weren’t actually talking, I was officially concerned. The show is called Cloak AND Dagger not Cloak OR Dagger. When we’re halfway through the show and nothing significant has been done on that titular part yet we’re wasting time talking about Voodoo fortune telling and the future, it just makes you wonder what exactly the writers were going for. I can’t bring myself to care about a prophecy involving the protagonists joining forces if the protagonists aren’t even together.
We finally got some development in ‘Lotus Eaters’ when Tyrone and Tandy listened to a recording of Billy together at the end, and little more in ‘Ghost Stories’ when Tyrone attended the annual memorial for Nathan. But that was swiftly sidelined by the dumb domestic abuse plot twist that regressed Tandy’s character significantly. And we all know the penultimate ‘Back Breaker’ didn’t help either. So when the writers finally acted upon their relationship in ‘Colony Collapse’, it was too late to do anything real, meaning we got forced pep talks and a poorly choreographed fight compilation to make-up for the lack of genuine affection. And so I just couldn’t buy their team-up and acceptance of fate at the very end.
But maybe, just maybe, this all would have been tolerable had they at least devoted the entire finale to making up for these deficits in logic. But no, someone thought that those painful, on-the-nose foreshadowing speeches from Auntie Chantelle needed to have flashbacks to accompany them! And we’re not talking cheap scenes either: these pieces of footage are clearly costly given that they are set in the past and require older costumes, specific weather visual effects, and dedicated extras. My head hurts thinking about the dumb decisions that went into this actually being written, storyboarded, filmed, and edited into an episode that needed to focus on everything but that.
Do I have hope for the next season of Cloak & Dagger? The answer is yes and no. These problems can be quickly fixed, but considering how easy they were to make I just don’t believe that this writing team can resolve them, or is even willing to for that matter. And that’s fine- Cloak & Dagger managed to score consistent ratings across its entire run, meaning their clearly is an audience for the series (and that a crossover with Hulu’s Runaways is imminent). The debut season wasn’t as bad as Black Lightning’s over at The CW, but in light of the fact that the MCU tends to have strong first seasons for its TV properties (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Defenders, and The Punisher), it was disappointing to see Cloak & Dagger join the Iron Fist and Inhumans side of the table.
Notes:
-Tyrone finally gets the (unconscious) ability to access the Darkforce dimension. Wonder if we’ll ever see that world in the show, or is it too expensive to do?
-Lot of loose plot threads left for the second season to wrap-up, whether it be what happened with Liam, confronting Melissa about Nathan’s abusiveness, or Tyrone getting his name cleared for good.
-On that note, can’t wait to see Tandy and Tyrone face off against Solomon Grundy next season…
Rating: 4/10
Red Stewart
