Friday, 3 August 2018

Cloak & Dagger, 'Colony Collapses' - Aug 3


‘Colony Collapses’, ‘C&D’s’ S1 finale, aired this week. What can be said about it?

Firstly…either a disclaimer or a side-note. Jedi master Que-Gon Jinn had been a bloody genius; his statement that ‘there’s always a bigger fish’ might be said in passing and sounding trite, in a Captain Obvious way, but it was still correct. I thought that my reviews can be bitter in a sarcastic sort of way, and then IGN released its’ review of “Christopher Robin” the movie on YouTube. Man, this is potent stuff; I could never get close to it!..

Back to our topic. In CC, ‘C&D’ delivered as always, especially when it came to acting. The titular leads rocked, as they always do, but the rest of the supporting cast did as well, even though… even though their material was limited. Last week, father Delgado was little more than an exposition machine, and in this episode, the season’s finale, he was shown…in a cameo, as a friend of Ty’s family, (never mind that we have seen little indication of that in the seasons past), and a silent one at that. The role of the exposition machine passed onto aunt Voodoo, as she narrated…to the audience, but officially – to her niece, Evita, who then passed it onto Ty and Dy as they hanged in their semi-secret hideout of a church.

Let us pause for a second – before CC was aired on the screen, there were several clips-‘sneak peeks’ – circulating on YouTube and etc. Well, one of them showed Evita confronting Ty and Dy in the church…and it covered most of their interaction in the season finale, period. As a result, we got an imbalance – the aunt herself had waxed poetic, (and taking-up a large portion of the episode), about the various disasters in the New Orleans’ history, and how various heroic couples somehow resolved them, with one of them dying. And then, on the other hand, we’ve Evita passing the info onto Ty and Dy, and it took about a minute or two – “Hey, it’s my job to tell you that it is your job to save the city from the terrors, one of you is going to die though, bye!” Smooch to Ty and she is gone. Worst sidekick ever – Mina’s actually useful here.

As an aside, by now at least some viewers realized that Raina influenced Evita’s character – yes, AoS’ Raina, who had been…maybe not evil, but certainly selfish, and from time to time even crazy. At AoS’ S2 finale she did the right thing…for whatever reasons…and because AoS was experiencing a major character purge, one of the factors why the show began to go downwards from S3 on – the character/actor loss caused their scripts and plots to be seriously restructured, and it showed. And ‘C&D’?

Also yes, just to a lesser extent. Detective Mayhem’s plotline was resolved…in an unsatisfactory way. Yes, she became Mayhem proper, but the way it was handled? Clumsy. In the first half of CC, the corrupt cop, Detective Connors, was built up to be a force to reckoned, maybe even more so than your average corrupt cop was – and then it promptly collapsed, as the terrors began to invade and kill everyone, including the police. That was the beginning of the end – not only did Ty lose his upgraded superhero cloak and had to deal with his older, more basic and plain-looking one, but the corrupt cop’s demise was absolutely unexpected, as Ty’s cloak of shadows ate him.

Yeah, while Dy can drain people’s hopes, like some sort of an energy vampire, Ty apparently can just consume them, rather like Nyarlathotep, Hastur the King in Yellow, and the rest of the Old Ones can. Howard Lovecraft would have been so proud of him!.. However, before the corrupt cop became consumed, (and seriously, you are fighting some dude that can teleport from place to place, and you are not scared? He really was more than what he looked like), he did shoot and kill Mayhem so that she could return to life as…well, Mayhem. In the original stories, Mayhem became an ally of C&D, but here, apparently, she is being set up as a more Killmonger-like figure.

Another pause. When Killmonger appeared in February (or March?) of 2018, he was set-up by media as a new type of Marvel villain, as some sort of an anti-hero, (kind of how Venom is being set up in his own 2019 film). Yeah, no – Killmonger was a typical Marvel-MCU villain, and he died as one; he may have found some sort of peace at the end of the movie, but that is not enough. If ‘C&D’ team are setting up Mayhem to be like Killmonger, they are setting her up to be a villain, period, so they are deriving from her canon character in the comics. Fair enough, but there is nothing else.

Or rather – there is Mister Jip, who was another ‘C&D’ villain of a character, who was rumored to appear on the show ever since episode 1x06 – but he never did. What gives with that?

Well, probably, the ‘C&D’ cast and crew had to do some restructuring back in the real life, in the manner of AoS (from S2 onwards, in their case). Regardless, they still did a tight job, maybe not as good as AC did, (and these days the titular heroine is Mrs. Christopher Robin instead, cough), but still better than AoS was. Kudos to them, and especially – to their special effects team, who did a bang-up job with the special effects, especially everything Ty and Dy related. It balances-out the choppy time frame – in one scene it’s day, in another – night, in the third – morning, depending on what time of the day/night was needed to dramatize every scene further. Ah well, even Homer sometimes nods and all that.

Well, this is it for this time; see you all soon!

No comments:

Post a Comment