‘Cloak and Dagger’ S1E4: “Call/Response”

For the most part on Cloak and Dagger, Tyrone and Tandy have been doing their own thing and not really interacting.  Aside from their origin story when Tyrone saves Tandy, her trying to scam him in the first episode, and Tyrone teleporting (and almost killing her with a gun by accident), the two have been mainly separated from each other.  However this week on Cloak and Dagger, we actually get to have Cloak AND Dagger together.

Following last week’s head-trippy voodoo ritual which had the two of them see each other’s dark side, they decided that it was finally time to meet and have a discussion about their powers as well as their unexplained interconnectedness.  Tyron tries to tell her about his experience after the cleansing bath he took last week, but she laughs it off as tourist stuff that local New Orleanians put over on visitors, but then he starts making sense and telling her about her own problems that he shouldn’t know about.

This episode is not told in a straight linear format as their normal activities continue to intercut their conversation in the church together.  While we see most of the episode with Tandy and Tyronne talking, most of the other scenes are what happens after their conversation in the church.

Tyrone is still having problems with his family, which all seem to stem from his anger over his brother’s death and not being able to properly process his grief after all these years.  His parents want to try and get through to him, but he’s closed off.  He feels he needs to right the wrong and get back at the corrupt police officer who killed his bother.  Tandy tells him that he needs to run a con, the same way she did on him.  In order to do that, he’ll need to learn as much as he can about the cop.  Tandy recommends going to the police station.  But what young black teen willingly goes into the police station in our current age?  He comes up with the idea to report his bike stolen.  He does his homework and stages the scene properly.  He takes a bolt cutter and snaps his lock, takes pictures of the cut bold on his phone, and disposes of his bike.  This gets the police to believe him.  However, he gets nervous when he gets to the station and leaves.  His father’s discovery of the bolt cutter makes him believe that Tyrone is up to no good.  As a result, he takes his son into his old hood where he runs into his old Mardi Gras Indian group.  There, it’s a sense of community and his father hopes that instead of doing petty crimes, he can focus on a Mardi Gras costume.  Tyrone notices a cloak that was unfinished.  His father is a little taken back as it was his brother’s costume.  He promises that he will finish it to honor his brother.  As a result, Tyrone and his father have reconnected.

Tandy on the other hand, is trying to work through the grief of her father dying, but her mother’s refusal to let go of her rage against the Roxxon Corporation.  Her mother’s sleeping with a local lawyer (who’s married) named Greg to try and help out with her case.  Tandy doesn’t trust the lawyer who thinks he’s just using her mom for sex, but after touching him and using her “light” powers, she sees the good in him, to the point that in a possible future, he could be a replacement father figure for her.  From that point forward, Tandy trusts him and wants to even help him research what’s going on with the Roxxon Corporation.  All seems well, she learned from Greg that Roxxon is still working on his father’s old research, meaning he really was a fall guy for something nefarious and he promises Tandy that he will get to the bottom of everything.  Everything seems to be going well, until she, Greg, and her mother are having dinner together and Greg’s wife calls.  This makes her mother realize that Greg isn’t the one for her and breaks up with him.  Tandy comes to Greg’s office, later on, to try and talk to him about her mother as well as the Roxxon Corporation.  However, the cleaning lady in his office is not a cleaning lady, but instead, she’s an assassin.  Greg is murdered and then his office is set on fire.  This is the first time we get to see the Roxxon Corporation as evil and ruthless as they are in the comics.  So far in the movies and TV shows, they are just name-dropped as a rival to Stark Industries, or builders of machinery and weaponry for other shows.  This time, we get to see them as the dark, scary, and evil corporation comic fans know they are.  Expect them to be the primary antagonists of the series.

Back in the church, Tandy and Tyrone’s conversation has blown into an argument.  After trying to test the limits of their powers by touching (and getting hurled to opposite ends of the building), the discussion turns towards the darkness they saw in each other via the voodoo cleans.  Both attack each other for their upbringing.  Tyrone speaks to her privilege as a young white woman.  She mentions that she has to scam and con her way through life because she has nothing.  Tyrone brilliantly retorts that she is able to scam and con people, because her white privilege gives her the benefit of the doubt in life, while he (even though middle-class black kid at a private school (which she scolds him for)), is treated as a thug and the whole country wants to kill him.  The show is low-key woke for moments like this.  They go their separate ways.  Later on, Tandy tries to commit suicide by chaining her legs and tying ropes around her hands and jumping into the lake (he suicidal thoughts are what led to the argument with Tyrone), she then cuts the ropes free with her light daggers.  She has now managed to control her powers.  She then heads to Greg’s office and uses her light daggers to break open the safe (that the Roxxon assassin overlooked) and she now has all the files needed to continue investigating them.

Next week, Tandy and Tyrone start looking into Roxxon.