Summary
“White Lines”, with an intriguing plot and a killer twist, suddenly puts Cloak & Dagger Season 2 in a very interesting position.
We rejoin Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph) and Tandy (Olivia Holt), aka Cloak and Dagger, as they survey the nightclub gangland massacre they recorded at the end of the Season 2 premiere. Just before he died, one of the bosses had used a bag of cocaine to draw quite an unreasonably well-rendered symbol on the ground, which Tyrone recognizes as a Vodun symbol of some kind. In the absence of any better options, Tyrone and Tandy evidently called Brigid (Emma Lahana) at some point, who arrives so speedily that you’d be mistaken for thinking she has the same power as Tyrone. She’s pissed off, naturally. She told Tyrone not to meddle, and here we are. In a big sulk, she opens a door to an interior corridor (which somehow creates a gust so strong that it wipes the cocaine symbol from the floor) and tells them to get lost.
Tyrone goes to see Chantelle (Angela Davis) for more information on the symbol, and without getting too technical it works thusly: When drawn by someone who knows their death is imminent, it summons a death god for transactional purposes, either for guidance into the next life (unlikely) or for revenge (much more likely). Cloak & Dagger has made no secret of its intention to weave Vodun/voodoo mythology into its plot and here in “White Lines” we see that begin to take a much more explicit shape, rather than sitting in the background as cultural flavor. While there, Tyrone also bumps into his boo, Evita (Noëlle Renée Bercy), Chantelle’s niece, who is not unreasonably fuming that he vanished for eight months and never came to see her. Tyrone, kind of adorably, reveals his powers to her, which doesn’t help either. Evita is even more annoyed that he could have teleported into her room at any point to let her know he was okay, which is a fair point.
Back at the church, Tyrone chalks the symbol on the floor and prays at the behest of Chantelle, which teleports him into a moving ambulance with Mikayla (Cecilia Leal), the woman from Tandy’s mum’s therapy session whose boyfriend’s apartment she trashed, strapped up in the back. He tries to rescue her but is unable to; something else for him to moan about!
Tandy, meanwhile, despite lecturing Tyrone about how interfering does no good, still can’t stop herself from telling Mikayla off. This goes predictably poorly, and she disappears; not to her boyfriend’s house, or her friend’s, which leads Tandy to dig up more clues with the help of Andre Deschaine (Brooklyn McLinn), who runs the outreach programs. He’s immediately compelling as a sagely nice-guy role model and is credited for several episodes according to IMDb, so we can expect to see a lot more of him. Tandy, though, has a vision, makes a taillight explode, and legs it. Curiouser and curiouser!
Brigid, meanwhile (“White Lines” keeps returning to the opening crime scene and following each character from there), is getting sloshed and trying to avoid any responsibility, which proves difficult when her smug doppelganger appears to her while she’s vomiting into a puddle. All of a sudden she’s breezing back into the crime scene with fully-formed theories of a lone attacker and discovers the identity of the mystery victim who drew the Vodun symbol in coke, who apparently wasn’t a gang boss at all. He was a “legitimate” businessman who, according to his wife, was being handsomely paid to store private ambulances at his salvage yard. Things are starting to come together, aren’t they? When Smug Brigid arrives at the salvage yard she runs into Tandy, who is also snooping around there.
Back in time a little, we learn how Tandy got there. Mikayla is discovered in hospital, having apparently overdosed. When Tandy touches her she sees a vision of her in an ambulance, being forcibly injected with heroin; the exact scene Tyrone interrupted earlier. Together with Brigid, she breaks into the salvage yard and pursues one of the ambulance drivers. The lights bursting out when Tandy runs past with her daggers drawn is a cool visual; if nothing else, this show really does well with getting Cloak and Dagger’s powers across. Speaking of which, Tandy develops a new one: as the ambulance looks to be getting away, she conjures a destructive ball of light to flip it over.
With the suspect apprehended, Brigid, evidently not herself, slashes his throat with her nails, which is quite a gloriously grim lowering of the tone that this kind of teen-focused show will probably benefit from. Tyrone, meanwhile, is trying to replicate his prayer-symbol-teleportation from earlier, which Evita is able to help him with. He’s able to teleport them both to the hospital where Mikayla is. Armed with slightly more information he goes to Brigid’s apartment, where he finds her bound and gagged. Teleporting the pair of them to Tandy at the salvage yard, both versions of Brigid find themselves face to face.
That’s… interesting, as far as twists go. The setup was obviously suggesting a more played-out multiple-personality angle, but the fact that there are two physical versions of Brigid is a lot better, dramatically-speaking, just as a concept. This, needless to say, is the MCU’s version of Mayhem, a popular Cloak & Dagger antagonist; the green killer-nails are a dead giveaway, even if the evil, physical doppelganger is, as far as I know, a slightly new twist on the character. Suddenly, after a relatively steady opening episode, Cloak & Dagger finds itself in a much more exciting and intriguing position.
