Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger episode guide

Marvel’s brand-new superhero series Cloak & Dagger has been hailed as “the superhero show of the summer” by Vulture, and described by Variety as a show that “takes its stories and itself seriously, and is hoping you do the same.” Season 2 is now streaming first and only on Showmax.

In case you missed anything in Season 1, here is a recap, episode by episode.

Episode 1

The series opens by introducing us to Tandy and Tyrone as kids. Tandy is an eager ballet student, Tyrone is a little boy who “helps” his big brother Billy by committing a petty crime on his behalf. Things quickly wrong for these two New Orleans kids. Tandy gets stranded by her parents outside her ballet lesson and has to wait for them in the pouring rain. Tyrone and his brother get caught by the cops and try to make a run for it. Both Tandy and Tyrone’s lives change forever when the storm hits and they both end up in the lake, where a Roxxon Corp oil rig has exploded. A powerful force emanates from the rig and rips through their bodies – and somehow helps them to survive.

When they run into each other again, they are teenagers at a party in the woods. Tandy, whose family lost everything after her father’s death, is scouting for rich kids to steal from, and Tyrone, a basketball player at a wealthy Catholic school, is there because of a promise he made to a pretty girl in his class. He realises that Tandy has stolen his wallet, and he manages to chase her down. When he finally grabs hold of her, they’re both (almost literally) blown away. They realise that they know each other from the day after the storm, when they washed up next to each other on the beach, and that they’ve both got mysterious powers they never knew about. Tandy can conjure up a dagger made of light, and can go back in time in other people’s memories, and Tyrone can disappear in an instant and teleport himself away from danger. But neither of them have any idea how to control their new abilities.

Tandy and Tyrone go their separate ways, and find that their powers can get them out of trouble, but that they’ll be at their mercy until they learn how to control them. There’s the shadowy presence of Roxxon Corp hovering in the background, and we get the sense that everything’s connected to the company. But who is the mysterious cop with the scar on his face that killed Tyrone’s brother? And will Tandy get caught for her crime against the rich boy who attacked her in the alley?

Episode 2

We meet Detective Brigid O’Reilly, a detective who doesn’t speak a word until the very end of the episode. She’s onto Tandy after the incident in the alley – the boy Tandy stabbed is now in the ICU – but perhaps not for the reasons that we think.

We find out more about Tyrone’s family. After his brother’s death, his mother decided to go into politics, and they are now an affluent, well-respected family. Tyrone’s parents expect a lot of him, and while trying to get his head around his newfound abilities, he neglects the responsibilities from his normal life, including to his basketball team. And then, when he discovers that he knows where the cop who shot his brother lives, he plots revenge for Billy’s death, even if it means risking everything his mother has built in the last eight years.

Tandy and her boyfriend Liam gatecrash a wedding in the hopes of stealing the thousands of dollars she needs for a new identity and to escape New Orleans. Her powers assert themselves against her will, but she manages to hide them, and she and Liam get away with the cash they needed. But that’s when she realises that they don’t have a future together, and she leaves New Orleans just as he is arrested by Detective O’Reilly.

At the same time, Tyrone has cornered the cop and is pointing a loaded gun at him. And then, in an instant, Tyrone and Tandy collide, and this time, it doesn’t look like they’ll get away from each other as easily as the first time they met.

Episode 3

This is the eeriest, strangest and most complex episode so far. Last week’s episode ended with Tyrone appearing out of nowhere, having teleported away from having Connors, the cop who killed his brother, cornered with a loaded gun, into the middle of the dark road that Tandy is speeding along in her getaway car. She manages to avoid hitting him, but ends up with a concussion. And later, Tyrone gets a similar effect from a voodoo ritual that he undergoes, a kind of “clearing of the spiritual sinuses”.

While they’re in this state of heightened consciousness, they “meet” with each other’s younger selves, and start to understand more about the other’s hopes, fears and the path that led them to where they are today. They connect through a pane of stained glass in their shared dream (nightmare?), and seem to realise that there’s no escaping their shared destiny.

Towards the end of the episode, Tyrone finds Tandy in the church where she’s been hiding out, which happens to be the site of the tomb of a High Priestess of voodoo, which is only the third time they’ve seen each other in their waking lives. How we knew where to find her, we’re not sure, but we do know that they – and we – are due for some answers soon.

The episode ends with a shot of the priestess who treated Tyrone creating an effigy of him using a 3D printer. Can she sense his otherworldly powers? What does she want with him? Whether she’s pinpointed him to protect him or harm him, it looks like this won’t be the last episode that uses New Orleans’ past as an important seat of voodoo culture and traditions as a way for the heroes to make sense of who they are and what they need to do.

And let’s not forget that this is a Marvel series. When are the superheroes and supervillains going to come into their own? We hope it’s soon!

(Is it just us, or does Chantelle come across as a version of Detective O’Reilly, who has been chasing Tandy down for reasons as yet unknown? Both women are mysteriously interested in our heroes. Will they help or hinder Tandy and Tyrone as they start discovering the potential of their powers when they link up?)

Episode 4

Tandy and Tyrone finally come face to face and get to have an open and honest discussion about their pasts, their hopes, their fears, and what they plan to do to bring down the forces that destroyed their families. In Tyrone’s case, that’s the cop (or is he?) Connors and the NOPD, and in Tandy’s that’s the Roxxon Corp.

To get closer to her goal, Tandy uses her powers at will for the first time to find out what her mother’s lawyer boyfriend Greg’s true intentions are. He says he’s helping her mom fight Roxxon Corp for pinning the explosion on Tandy’s father, but Tandy is suspicious. Once she realises her concern was unfounded, she and Greg agree to work together on the Roxxon case. But in a shocking plot twist, we find out towards the end of the episode that their partnership is just not meant to be, and it will be up to Tandy to take on Roxxon on her own.

Tyrone also gets more than he bargained for in this episode, when his dad takes him on a trip where Tyrone learns about his father’s past life as a member of the Mardi Gras Indians, a secretive society of carnival revellers in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood they left behind. This serves to teach Tyrone something he didn’t know about his family.

Before the episode ends we see Tyrone walking into a police station, and while we know he’s there to confront Connors, we don’t know how he plans to do that. Earlier in the episode, he and Tandy discuss how dangerous it would be for him to do that, as a young black man in New Orleans. Will he take her advice to “not be a thug”? Or is his passion for revenge against Connors too great?

Episode 5

Tandy is consumed with getting answers about the Roxxon cover up. To get the answers she is looking for, Tandy tests out her power to gain new insights, and not always in the right way. Tyrone, on the other hand, is just trying to be a normal kid and get ready for the basketball state finals. With so much weighing on him lately, Tyrone is struggling to keep everything together for the big game. Meanwhile, Detective O’Reilly looks into the city’s drug problems to get some answers of her own.

To get more information on Roxxon, Tandy creates a fake identity to get a job at a high-end party the company is throwing. She’s warned that some “members” may take a swing at her, but she’s willing to do anything to find out who the man was that framed her father. Tandy pretends to break down outside his house but doesn’t kill him while he helps her change the tyre.

During the basketball game, the ref starts making bad calls to benefit Tyrone’s team. This doesn’t sit well with Tyrone, as the calls are racially motivated. Tyrone then misses the final shot of the game on purpose to let the other team win. It shows that Tyrone seeks justice above everything else, and is willing to throw the game to let the other team win if it’s the right thing to do. He also does this to honour his brother, as you’ll see during the game.

Evita notices that Tyrone threw the game intentionally, and lets him know about it. The two connect, and after the big game they spend the night together. Watching this you’re glad something is going right for Tyrone.

Tandy and Tyrone are still coming into their powers, but it is a slow process and the two are inexplicably linked with each having their own agenda. Tandy wants to clear her father’s name and take down Roxxon, while Tyrone wants to bring Billy’s killer to justice. And it’s through their superpowers that our heroes try to achieve their goals.

Episode 6

Tandy poses as a Roxxon intern to get closer to Mina Hess, a scientist whose father worked with hers – the biggest difference being that he survived the explosion that killed Tandy’s father; and Tyrone poses as an aspiring drug runner to find out what one of his brother’s old friends has against Connors. Tandy has more luck than Tyrone in getting an “in” where she needs to be, and when he visits her at the church, she suggests he use his powers to find out what his mark’s fears are to get the upper hand on him. Can Tyrone harness his superpower to get what he needs?

Meanwhile, Evita’s aunt Audrey is convinced that the future of New Orleans is closely tied into the “energy” she sensed in Tyrone. But throughout history, it’s always been down to a “divine pairing” to save the city from disaster. If Tyrone is one of the pair, Evita wonders, who’s the other? One thing’s for sure – if the past is anything to go by, in this divine pair, one will live … and one will die.

At the end of the episode, we find out that Tandy’s been “made” by her mark, so she’s further from finding out the truth about the explosion from Ivan Hess, the man who worked with her father. And Tyrone exposes his true intentions – to mete out revenge against the cop who killed Billy. It looks like it’s over for Tyrone and Tandy in their mission to avenge their loved one’s deaths. That is, until they use their powers.

Tandy gets inside Ivan’s mind and is confronted with a closed yellow door. She knows that the truth is behind it. And Tyrone pulls the cloak over himself to disappear to avoid being killed by Connors. But not before he sees Detective O’Reilly killing Billy’s friend, the only person who could help him put Connors away.

Episode 7

We found out last week that the reason the Roxxon rig exploded eight years ago, killing Tandy’s father and indirectly leading to Tyrone’s brother Billy’s death is that Roxxon wasn’t drilling for oil. The substance they were pumping out of the bottom of the lake burned much, much hotter, leading to the pipes exploding. This week, we find out more by following Ivan Hess, the only survivor of the explosion, deep into the rig on the day of the explosion in his memory.

And then we follow Tandy and Tyrone as they enter Hess’s mind using their powers together – Tandy needs to get behind the mysterious yellow door to get the ammo she needs to clear her dad’s name and get justice for his death. This is the first time Cloak and Dagger use their powers together. First, they fight off the rig workers, who have turned into zombies in Hess’s mind, and then try to navigate their way to the core room to hit the kill-switch. But before they can get there, the rig explodes. And they’re right back where they started. The explosion repeats itself on loop in Hess’s mind.

But the question is: Is this version of events more than the trick of a madman’s mind? Could it, in fact, be a memory, repeated again and again, of what actually happened? What is the “energy” that Roxxon was drilling for on the day of the explosion?

When Tandy hears her father’s voice on the phone, we realise that she’s in no hurry to get out of Hess’s mind, and Tyrone leaves without her. When he reenters to bring her out with him, he finds that Tandy’s in the same position that Hess was when they first found him – her grasp on the “real” world is slipping, and she’d rather stay in this timeline than go back to reality. Tyrone tries to get her to go back with him, and she refuses. This is when we see them using their powers against each other for the first time. Their fight is pretty epic, and more proof that Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph are two of the most talented young actors you’ll see on your screens this year. They can do human intimacy, they can do fear, and they absolutely dominate in this hardcore fight scene.

Episode 8

“A cape’s just an add-on to a shirt. But a cloak … it hugs you.”

This episode marks the eight-year anniversary of the Roxxon oil rig explosion, the night Tandy and Tyrone lost the people closest to them. It was the night that both started and ended it all. Tandy uses the opportunity to gain as much info as possible to clear her father’s name, and Ivan Hess is the first stop on her mission. Since Tandy and Tyrone helped free him from the prison of his mind in the last episode, he’s back to his old self. And he’s the only first-hand account of what happened on the night of the explosion. He tells Tandy that her father wrote a memo containing his theory of what Roxxon was really drilling for (because, as we found out last episode, it definitely wasn’t oil), and that he locked it up in a safe deposit box. Now all Tandy has to do is find it – and her mother is, so to speak, the key.

Meanwhile, Tyrone and his family are struggling to get through the day, the anniversary of Billy’s death. After getting the key for the safe from her mother, Tandy visits Tyrone at his home for the first time. She completely charms his parents, despite Tyrone’s reluctance, and invites him to the memorial that she and her mother are planning that evening.

Back to Detective O’Reilly, who shot Billy’s friend in self defence two episodes ago – she is certain that Connors had something to do with the shooting, and vows to bring him down. We’re rooting for her, because Tyrone’s not had much luck getting his revenge against, other than seriously spooking him. She’s still working with him, and can’t let him know that she sees through him. When he asks her to confirm Tyrone’s appearance from the night of the shooting, she says she didn’t get a good look at him, even though we know that she knows exactly who Tyrone is. She goes to his house to warn him to stay away from Connors, who’s on to him. But he refuses to stop – especially not today.

At his home, Tyrone’s family gather to honour Billy’s death. They’re sewing a cloak, decorating it with sequins and jewels. It used to be Billy’s. In a cleverly veiled allusion to the ways Tyrone stands out from other superheroes, he asks his relative, “What’s the difference between a cape and a cloak anyway?”. He gets the reply, “A cape’s just an add-on to a shirt. But a cloak … it hugs you.”

This gives Tyrone the idea to “haunt” Connors using a shirt stained with Billy’s “blood”. He wants to use Connors’s fear and paranoia to elicit a confession when he appears to Connors as Billy’s ghost. Detective O’Reilly and Officer Fuchs, her beau, are hesitant. Until Tyrone puts on Billy’s cloak, and, for the very first time, is able to control his superpower. He steals Connors’s gun right out of its holster, whispers in his ear, “You killed me”, and disappears as Connors turns around. O’Reilly helps to play tricks on Connors’s mind, and when Tyrone confronts him, he’s convinced that this is the ghost of the kid he shot eight years ago come to avenge his death.

At the same time, Tandy is sneaking into the Roxxon headquarters, armed with her light dagger. She’s got her father’s memo in her hand, co-signed by Ivan Hess. She ambushes Peter Scarborough, the Roxxon exec who has a lot of reasons to want to keep Tandy’s father’s memo a secret. Tandy holds him up and demands his confession. He offers her money to take the evidence off her hands, but the one thing she wants, he can’t give her.

Tandy and Tyrone have their quarry right where they want them. But this isn’t the end. As Tandy says at the memorial, maybe they do have a future together after all.

And then she journeys into her mother’s mind, and discovers something about her father that she never suspected. And realises her mission has been misplaced all along.

The episode ends with Detective O’Reilly making a gristly and devastating discovery in her fridge, which opens a whole new mystery.

Episode 9

Evita’s Aunt Chantelle, the voodoo priestess, once again predicts disaster, this time at the hands of Roxxon. The only people who can stop it, she says, are the “divine pairing”. Chantelle asks Evita to find out from Tyrone how far he is in preventing the destruction of New Orleans. Later in the episode, Evita discovers that Tandy is the other half of the divine pairing when Tandy tries to see into her hopes and fears.

But Tyrone is in no mood to be asked for help. His parents find out that he led the cops to getting Connors’s confession for killing Billy, but they’re not as grateful as he’d hoped. He reverts to his old ways, getting into fights at school – first with other students, then with his mentor Father Delgado.

Tandy’s up to her old tricks as well, lying to her old boyfriend Liam and bailing him out of jail. She even uses her power of seeing inside his mind to steal his hope of getting married to her, while Tyrone uses his power to see Father Delgado’s greatest fear.

And Tandy and Tyrone aren’t the only two acting out. Detective O’Reilly strikes out at Connors at Fuchs’s memorial, quite rightly, and he beats her up, saying “You and me ain’t finished yet,” so we know this isn’t the last time they’ll come up against each other. We hope that next time Detective O’Reilly gets the upper hand.

Tyrone and Tandy may separate in anger later in the episode, but that can’t be the end of it – will they ever realise how much they need each other? Next week is the final episode of the season, and we can’t wait to see if all these loose threads will get tied up.

Episode 10 – finale

As Vulture wrote, this episode had a huge job to do – Tandy and Tyrone had to save New Orleans from the “terrors”, the crazed zombies infected by the Roxxon fumes emitted from valves all over the city. Tandy had to save her mother from Peter Scarborough’s hitman and Tyrone needed to clear his name as a “cop killer”, after being accused of Fuchs’s grizzly murder.

And Evita is tasked with a life-changing responsibility, too: her aunt tells her stories of divine pairings saving the city throughout history, and asks her to deliver the message to Tandy and Tyrone that it’s up to them to save New Orleans this time. And that, as with pairings of lore, one of them will live, and one will die. Her aunt’s stories of sisters, brothers, strangers and lovers sacrificing themselves to rescue New Orleans from doom seem to echo Tandy and Tyrone’s fate.

But, as we find out right at the end of the episode, when Tandy and Tyrone combine their powers to hit the kill switch at the Roxxon core to stop the deadly energy escaping, there’s something different with the two of them. Perhaps it’s because they are the only divine pairing in history that were told about their fate – they’re the only ones who’ve faced death knowing that one of them had to die.

Make sure you keep watching to the very end for a glimpse of a new Detective O’Reilly. Connors might have been dispatched with, but do Cloak and Dagger now have a new enemy in the form of their former ally?