As Tandy tries her best to fight against her current circumstances, Tyrone goes on a mission to find his friend. Meanwhile, Adina talks to Connors about Billy as she weighs what her next actions should be.

Let it never be said that Cloak & Dagger is afraid to go dark, and nowhere is that more evident than in this latest instalment. It’s bad enough that Tandy is now at the mercy of sex traffickers, but watching them slowly and methodically break her spirit to ‘prepare’ her for ‘work’ is another level of misery altogether. The show has never shied away from the seedier elements of the bad guys with whom our heroes must tangle of course, but there’s a world of difference between knowing that sex traffickers are out there in the city and getting an up close and personal look at the mundanity of their methods and the downtrodden hopelessness of their victims.

Of course, Tandy is determined to fight, and to escape at the earliest opportunity, but as we now know, Deschaine is no ordinary adversary, and it would appear that he has robbed Tandy of her powers by robbing her of her hope – that hope being tied up in the idea that Tyrone may not be coming to her rescue after all. For his part, Ty is of course going nuts trying to track down his friend the moment he realises that she’s missing, but he isn’t without his own challenges in that regard.

Taking us away from this dual story of awfulness, the show chooses not to give respite and instead lets us witness the long conversation between Connors and Adina. The latter is torn between an impulse for revenge for the loss of her firstborn and an equally strong impulse to hang onto what might be the best opportunity for her surviving son to live a normal life. Neither Gloria Reuben nor J.D Evermore leave anything in the tank here, each committing 100% to scenes which are impossible to take your eyes away from. The very mundanity of the situation, as they chat to one another in a home, is juxtaposed both with Connors’ being tied to a chair and the subject matter under discussion. For his part, Evermore genuinely evokes sympathy and a need in the audience for him to follow through on what seems a legitimate need to get ‘justice’, while Reuben gets some absolutely killer lines which she delivers flawlessly.

Others get a chance to shine as well – Brooklyn McLinn is a fascinating villain, capable of turning on the charm when needed but never anything less than terrifyingly evil without having to ever raise his voice or make any sort of sudden movement. There’s also an appearance from someone we haven’t seen much of lately, and I don’t want to spoil it but they really get the very maximum out of their character in the time they’re given onscreen here.

As the show barrels toward what one hopes is the obvious conclusion, it’s not quite done with surprises – there’s a nice inversion of what appears to be being set up and then a slightly less nice inversion just before the credits roll. One thing’s for certain – things are getting increasingly interesting, week by week.

Verdict: Absurdly tense, almost depressingly dark and featuring one of the best two hander scenes I’ve seen for a while. Continues to be one of the best shows in its genre by some margin. 9/10

Greg D. Smith