Spoiler Alert!

Gotham is forever over. And Agents of Shield is returning, but that’s next week. 🙂

For this week, Cloak and Dagger delivered a most heart-breaking story, where the villain actually gains a victory, and breaks a hero.

Cloak and Dagger

2.06 “B Sides”

I knew Andre was guilty as sin! I knew it!

But, apparently I failed to grasp the exact nature, and severity, of his evil and depravity.

Apparently, he gets these terrible headaches, and they got so bad that he tried to kill himself. Actually, he did kill himself. But it was at the exact moment of the rig explosion, so he woke up alive again, and now he drains people of hope, feeding on their despair, simply as his anti-headache fix. He uses people as his pain pills.

Oh, and he thinks he has some moral high ground because “ninety percent” of the people who come to him for help, he helps, and only feeds on that last ten percent. I mean, what a saintly, upstanding guy, right? He lets all of these walking happy meals go, and better off than they were before, healed of their psychological injuries, and only eats some of the people who entrust themselves to him, leaving them broken in despair with families and communities grieving for them.

Now that is one instance where Tandy’s usual unforgiving judgment is one I absolutely concur with. So much suffering and loss, so much despair, and so much of is entirely the doing of Andre du Shane. He is a predator, a deceiver and betrayer.

Unfortunately, he is particularly cunning as well. Even worse, he is insightful. He can read people and find their weaknesses, that one point where, if he applies appropriate pressure, he can not only beat them, but break them entirely. And he has Tandy in his grasp for this entire episode. The whole thing is just him using his power on her. She struggles mightily, and almost makes it up more than once, but Lia (apparently I misspelled her name before) keeps drugging her and Andre keeps working her, casting illusions within her own mind.

There’s this whole thing with records and music, and apparently that record shop of pain in the shadow world was his. At first, I thought it was someone else playing the records, deliberately trying to rouse her out of her drugged up state, but I had that backwards. That was Andre pushing her down, and Tandy was rising up again just because she’s strong like that.

The first album begins as her ideal world, filled with hope. In this version of what could have been, the rig still exploded and her car went into the water, but her father lived through it and Connors didn’t accidentally shoot Ty’s brother. Indeed, Ty himself dove into the water to save her, inspiring Connors as a mentor to this young hero. They woke up on the beach, and were found by their still-living loved ones. Her father got his act together, as did her mother, and the two families became eternal friends. Everybody was saved, in more ways than one. Tandy became a prima ballerina in New York, and Ty is joining the police force.

Then they go for a walk, just to get some ice. They get hassled by some sexist, racist rednecks, things go sideways, and they grasp each other, only to awaken their powers.

And cut to the next scenario.

Tandy is a rookie engineer for Roxxon, whose established father left his family and flew off to Silicon Vally, and Ty is a rig worker, who got the job through his brother. Tandy flies to a rig at risk, where Mina is in charge and doesn’t like anyone, especially anyone associated with Scarborough. But things are going wrong, something’s wrong with the heat and the pressure, and the alarms are sounding and they touch again…

Next.

Tandy is a conning pickpocket, and picks the pocket of Liam (her ex-boyfriend from the first season). She gets nearly caught, but Ty is stealing a car nearby, so she jumps in and threatens him into taking her with him. She’s all alone in this version, a thief and an addict, while Ty’s brother survived that night only to be busted for stealing the radio that Ty stole, and came out of prison an addict, who likely died from it.

But by now, Tandy is cracking through the illusion. There are indicators, like flashing lights, sirens, loss of balance as if rocking, seeing an ambulance door, seeing an ambulance in place of a cop car, an irrational fear of ambulance sirens… and seeing a shadowy figure in a suit and gloves, humming a tune.

This time, when they touch, it cuts to the record shop, where Tandy confronts Andre and shatters the record and player both. She wakes up, climbing out of the ambulance as Andre and Lia drive off, getting back to Ty, getting Brigid’s help to go after the bad guys, getting Mikayla out… and Ty gets shot to death. And they’re back in the record shop. It’s just another illusion. But this one, this one truly attacks Tandy’s hope with the illusory death of Ty, and the one self-fulfilling self-criticism she isn’t truly over: she thinks she destroys everything she touches.

Loss of her best and only friend, loss of her strength, loss of her self-worth… she hands Andre what he wants: her light.

On some level, it is a choice to give in to despair, to give up on hope. The most foul creatures in the world are those who deliberately nudge us towards that awful choice, and know how to do so effectively.

So, Andre wins, and Tandy, having given away her light, is left alone in the dark.

While she is wheeled into a motel called Hotel Viking (or Viking Hotel).

…not good.