Cloak & Dagger opens with the eponymous Tyrone and Tandy as children. Tyrone listens in as his older brother plans, and then decides against, stealing a car radio with his friends. Tandy struggles in ballet class, stumbling while all the other girls perform perfect pirouettes. Tyrone decides that he’ll get that car radio, brother or not, while after class, Tandy is left waiting outside the ballet studio in the rain. The show cuts back and forth between them, their lives not parallel but resonant, building towards the accident that will give them powers and send their lives on a radically new path.
I first saw Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger pilot at a SXSW sneak peak, back in March. The screening was followed by a Q&A with showrunner Joe Pokaski, director Gina Prince-Bythewood, head of Marvel TV Jeph Loeb, and lead actors Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph.
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Prince-Bythewood and Pokaski want us to see the show as both the latest and greatest Marvel superhero show, and as an indie movie that happens to be airing in several parts as a serial. They emphasized Prince-Bythewood’s directing chops and their shared commitment to creating a diverse, empathetic and real show about teen dealing with weird powers. And while I can see why they’d pitch the show that way -- more prestige television than CW soap -- Cloak & Dagger hasn’t yet found the balance between superheroic action and character study.
While I appreciate that the didn’t rush towards superheroics, instead focusing on Tyrone and Tandy’s everyday lives, at times the episode dragged. Once the characters are reintroduced to us as teens -- who don’t know each other or about their powers -- each successive flashback to their childhood has diminishing emotional returns, and only serves to slow the story down. Unlike Hulu's Runaways, which put off the actual running away by using tension between super kids and their parents to build suspense, Cloak & Dagger takes its time in establishing a central source of conflict. Discovering what caused the accident that Tyrone and Tandy powers will obviously drive the plot of this first season, but so far the show treats it as an aside, less important than the domestic and personal struggles of the leads. The almost leisurely pace grates a bit, but what all that time spent on careful character building does prove, is that Cloak & Dagger is more interested in who Tyrone and Tandy are than in what they can do.
Another positive sign is that the show doesn't set them up as simple opposites -- light and dark; rich girl and poor boy -- but instead is invested in complicating them, and finding possibilities for them to connect beyond their powers. Tyrone struggles to live up to his parents' high expectations and their fear of losing him, as they did his older brother, to police violence. Tandy has a different problem, a mother so focused on recapturing the past that she neglects her daughter completely. But they both feel alone with their problems, alienated -- and they are literally alone on the screen, a lot of the time. They’re both introduced with significant familial relationships that they immediately lose -- and as teens, they both seem to lack deep friendships. They’re solitary characters, and they will need each other.
Like Runaways, Cloak & Dagger departs from Marvel comics canon just enough for the show to stand on its own, appealing to new and old fans. Tyrone and Tandy aren’t, so far, runaways, and they don’t immediately embark on a vigilante murder spree. Instead, they both demonstrate a certain moral flexibility, and are given clear grudges that they will inevitably spend the season trying to settle. In a neat inversion of their comics origin, it's Tandy, not Tyrone, who’s the pickpocket.
So far, Cloak & Dagger looks less adept at the kind of long prologue that Runaways (or even Westworld) managed so adroitly, but it does still have plenty to say about these characters, enough that the show's current status quo could be maintained for at least the first season.
Cloak & Dagger is firmly a teen show, aimed at younger viewers while welcoming older, longtime fans. I keep mentioning Runaways because this show is very clearly its sibling, but in Cloak & Dagger, Marvel and Freeform wanted something very different. Where Runaways is glossy and LA bright, Cloak & Dagger is desaturated and sometimes gloomy. Tyrone’s family is firmly middle class but their house is small by TV standards. Tandy, meanwhile, lives in a crumbling shack with her mother, when she’s not squatting in a church. Marvel TV shows often have a strong sense of place, and in Cloak & Dagger, New Orleans imparts a sense of age and shared past trauma.
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It’s clear that Marvel wants Cloak & Dagger to be a gritty teen drama, something that can expand their brand the way that the Marvel Netflix shows did, but it’s unclear from this first episode if their hopes will pan out. It's their stab at prestige TV by way of teen drama. But while Holt and Joseph are endearing and ably handle the material, they don’t yet impress. Similarly, Prince-Bythewood and her crew make interesting choices in terms of composition and music, but they’re not yet inspired decisions. There are outlines of a lot of very good ideas but none of them are quite fleshed out -- yet. So far, Cloak & Dagger is strictly OK.