I’m not going to pretend like I’ve ever read any of the comics, but given the track record of decent television shows, I looked forward to Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger, and figured I could figure out what was going on from just the show with no prior familiarity of them from comic books.

However, there were some red flags for me that I kind of knew of going into the show, and although I did make it through the first season, I have to say that I’m not really that impressed as a whole, and if I had to rank the show it is a definitive last place behind most all other Marvel television shows out there.

For starters, the show aired on the Freeform network.  I didn’t even know that that network even still existed; I knew it did at one point, because there must’ve been one show that I saw while channel surfing in the past when I used to have cable television, but for the most part, it’s a no-name cable channel, and it should have been some sort of indication of the quality of the programming, even if it did have the Marvel name printed in front of it.

Going blind into this show worked against me in this instance, because I lacked any “Oh! That’s so-and-so” moments that tended to keep me engaged and interested in just about any other Marvel property show previously seen.  That being said, the first two episodes of the show were a complete slog, and I was wholly uninterested in the characters and plot. 

I stopped watching after the first two episodes, citing a poor mood to be watching new television, and told myself to give it one more episode before giving it the Legion treatment AKA walking away before feeling like I’m wasting my time.  The third episode was on the verge of making me throw in the towel, but then the plot started to get interesting in the final eight minutes of the episode, which saved it from abandonment, and then the fourth episode finally started to get somewhere and kept it watchable.  But with a ten-episode season, it literally takes 40% of the season for it to become watchable.

Continue reading “Cloak & Dagger is obviously Marvel’s C-squad” →