Two young children are brought together by separate tragedies which involve them in the same strange incident. Many years later, the two are living completely separate lives, but something seems destined to draw them together.

I’ll start with a caveat – I am not a big reader of comic books, though I adore TV and movies based on them, and so I am completely unfamiliar with the source material for Cloak & Dagger – my reviews will therefore reflect the objective quality of the show as I see it, rather than how faithfully or otherwise it represents the comics it is inspired by.

With Cloak & Dagger, it feels like ABC/Amazon are having a try at edging into the territory occupied by Netflix’s Marvel properties. It’s a lot grittier, dirtier and edgier than something like Agents of SHIELD or Agent Carter, with language, blood and themes to reflect this. However, it never reaches the same levels as Daredevil or Jessica Jones, occupying the same sort of aesthetic ground as Hulu’s Runaways.

We begin with a brief childhood introduction to our two title characters, Tyron Johnson (Cloak) and Tandy Bowen (Dagger). Tandy is a little girl with a busy, important father and a mother who is absent due to some vaguely defined ‘illness’. Tyron is a little boy who looks up to his older brother. Tragedy overtakes the both of them as the Roxxon Corporation’s oil rig explodes, and then the show catapults us forward into the modern day.

A look at the lives of our two protagonists gives us very much not the average superhero duo. Tyron is a dedicated student struggling under the pressure of his parents’ expectations and his own bubbling anger at the world for an injustice which has never left him. Tandy is a petty thief who rips off rich kids with her boyfriend to make cash, while largely avoiding her alcoholic mother. This opening episode builds up slow, gradually allowing the two to discover their respective powers by accident and watching them struggle with the idea of them. They don’t get much shared screen time, each dealing with their struggles alone, but we do get a decent grounding in the lives of both.

It’s also a show that deals with some serious themes. In this pilot, we have police killing of innocent black people and attempted rape as events that the show throws at the audience, and it doesn’t shy away from either. In the case of the former, it’s so shocking, so sudden, and it doesn’t get lingered on. The latter feels unnecessary, and almost as if the writers plucked it from the air for narrative convenience, and therefore doesn’t land as well. There were other routes that could have been taken, and I think the object was to attempt to solicit sympathy with a character but it was ham-fisted and could have been handled differently.

By the end of the episode, we have only the vaguest idea of our protagonists’ respective powers, but we’ve been given enough to pique interest. What remains to be seen is whether the show can sustain this going forward.

Verdict: More mature in tone than previous ABC/MCU properties, this takes the Runaways approach to both pacing and aesthetic, Whether this can work for these characters remains to be seen, but I’m quietly intrigued. 7/10

Greg D. Smith