‘Cloak & Dagger’ Boss Breaks Down The Season 2 Finale: “Tandy and Tyrone Is a Love Story”

It’s probably fair to say that the Cloak & Dagger Season 2 finale, “Level Up,” changed everything. While most superhero shows reset to the status quo by the end of a season, the often elegiac Cloak & Dagger has never been afraid of change… After all, personal growth is basically the show’s main villain. But after tonight’s events, Tyrone (Aubrey Joseph), Tandy (Olivia Holt), and the show itself will never be the same.

Spoilers for Cloak & Dagger past this point.

Yes, Ty and Tandy managed to stop villain Andrew Deschain (Brooklyn McLinn), a.k.a. D’Spayre, from destroying New Orleans (and maybe the world). And in the process, we got to see the duo in their costumes, finally, in an epic moment as they headed to the final showdown. we even got resolution to multiple ongoing plotlines, including Brigid (Emma Lahana) grappling with her vigilante alter-ego Mayhem, and whether Connors (J.D. Evermore) would survive after confessing to multiple crimes (he didn’t).

But the biggest surprise was left for the final minutes of the episode, as Tandy is seemingly headed out of New Orleans on a bus by herself. In classic Marvel fashion, though, a post-credits sequence revealed that Ty is headed out with her. Brigid has alerted them to some dead girls found on a beach, and they’re going to try their hands as superheroes, for real. Not only that, they’re going to do it literally hand in hand.

“The thing I’m most excited about to tell – now I can say it out loud – is I believe Tandy and Tyrone is a love story, and I’m excited to tell that part of it,” showrunner Joe Pokaski told Decider, to one would assume the screams of Cloak & Dagger‘s legion of Tyrandy ‘shippers.

Pokaski discussed a whole lot more about the episode, including the show’s seven season plan, what you didn’t see in that costume reveal scene, where Ty and Tandy might be going, and much, much more:

Decider: Season 2’s human trafficking storyline has been appropriately serious, but you’re still ending a season of a superhero show… How do you balance that tone? How do you get from what you’ve been dealing with all season long, to still give viewers a satisfying superhero finale?

Joe Pokaski: You go back to Joseph Campbell, which we try to do every season and over the course of the series, I hope. In loosest terms, we take our characters, pull them out of their comfortable situations, put them through hell – sometimes literally, with Joseph Campbell.

To be honest, with Olivia, we put her through as bad as I ever want to put a character through. Because it’s Cloak & Dagger, there’s always hope at the end of the tunnel. The important thing that we wanted to do by taking this very serious bedrock of storytelling, we wanted to make sure our characters could shine some light on it but still provide some insight as to where the hope is. That’s why we had always planned in Season 2 to have Tandy fighting her Dad. Fighting the ghost of her Dad. Doing what she can.

We’re very lucky to put this on Olivia and Aubrey’s shoulders. To carry this serious story in a way that you still care about the characters. For the finale we came back to the characters in spades. We created a villain so he could put them up against their worst senses of despair, and for Olivia that’s her Dad. And for Aubrey that’s himself. A lot of it is us keeping it on the characters. Also leaning on the thing I feel most strongly about, which is the relationship between those two. So when they switch partners and start fighting for each other, that’s just a reminder that we all should have each other’s backs, like Tandy and Tyrone do.

This is just my take on it, but the structure of these two seasons feel like diametric opposites in a way. The first season you had a very narrow focus on Ty and Tandy, and the eventual villain was this huge, city-wide, zombie-esque plague. And then Season 2 you widened out the cast, and narrowed the threat for Ty and Tandy to be very personal. Was that your take on it? And what was the overall goal for the season, Season 2 versus Season 1?

We wanted to make sure it was a different story we’re telling every season. We’ve got a seven season plan. We don’t want people to get bored, we don’t want people to think it’s gonna be monster of the week, every week. So what we did was basically lay in a different model.

I have a great group of writers, and we all try to keep each other excited about telling stories. When we started talking about this season we were like, “we want to get past some of their baggage. What is the scariest thing?” We were talking to Marcus [J. Guillory] and [J. Holtham], two of the writers in the room. We asked them, “what is the scariest thing a young black man could face?” And the idea of the perfect version of themselves came from one of them. We started building off that, and we talked about Olivia’s arc, and what is the scariest thing a young girl who’s had an abusive father can face. It’s the facing off against him. The stories we haven’t told yet built up to this, and allowed us to end in an intimate way that still felt epic with all the action behind it.

It’s interesting to hear you say it’s a seven season plan… Each season does a certain thing, Season 1 bringing Ty and Tandy together, Season 2 really does tie them in this knot. Where do we go from there? What are the specific beats that you have etched out?

The last scene of the show should not be taken lightly by anyone. I don’t think it will be taken lightly. I’m very happy that we’re working on a show where… I’m excited for our fans to react from two people holding hands. The thing I’m most excited about to tell – now I can say it out loud – is I believe Tandy and Tyrone is a love story, and I’m excited to tell that part of it. And because it’s our show, the love story may not go well. But we’re excited to explore that element that we’ve been relatively chaste about.

So Tandy and Ty holding hands at the end, that is definitively the beginning of their love story; beyond the platonic relationship they’ve previously had on the show?

The door is open. There’s been so much going on in their lives and the world and New Orleans that the option had not presented itself to them. Hopefully when the audience watches Tandy say Tyrone is more of a man than her Dad will ever be, when Tyrone is saying she rose above the ashes of her life, they’re slowly convincing themselves that there might be more. It’s gonna be really fun in Season 3 to explore what that means.

At the same time, it seemed like there was a clear visual call-out to the end of The Graduate, in the way that they’re set up on the bus in that scene, which seems to indicate rocky waters ahead.

That was one of the things we found. We wanted to get them on a bus for a few reasons, for future storytelling. But one can’t deny the idea of The Graduate of, “here we go… Where are we going?” Granted, we couldn’t find one of those cool, glass back buses. But our camera guys did do something cool with running a dolly along a luggage rack, so we’ll give them a break.

We wanted to end the episode at first thinking that Tandy was alone, and then understanding that that’s not an option anymore, that these two are in it together. It’s an uncertainty like The Graduate, but it’s a superhero uncertainty. When you ask what the new generation is, now they’re looking for danger. Now they’re running into trouble, they’re trying to find it. They’re running across the country and helping where they can. Which is a really big step, considering where they were even at the beginning of the season.

Do you have an idea of where they’re going? I think fans certainly immediately think when you say they’re going to the beach, that they’re going to LA, we’re gonna have a crossover with The Runaways. Are we going that far yet, or are we not quite there when we pick up potentially in Season 3?

I have three red sniper dots from Marvel on me right now, that are telling me I probably shouldn’t talk.

Fair enough… To talk about it thematically then, Ty and Tandy’s story has been so tied to the city, they’ve been so tied to New Orleans. And so much of the story so far has been about the fabric of that city. About jazz, about voodoo, about everything that makes New Orleans, New Orleans, down to the geography. What does it do to Ty and Tandy to take them outside of the city?

I think it does what it did to all of us the first time we left home. Whether it’s college, or moving, or whatever, I know for myself, it helps you discover who you were more, ’cause you had a different context. So it’s not gonna be forever, but them being away from the expectation of their lives for the first time ever, them being alone together and in it together, will create a different kind of chemistry and a different kind of dynamic that, when you’re growing up, you need to experience on some level.

With them leaving the city – and I’m not sure if you know this yet – does that mean we’re leaving the rest of the supporting cast behind? Evita, Brigid, etc. Or will they still be part of the show?

Let me answer that question with a question. If you worked with Emma Lahana, and Ali Maki, and Noëlle [Renée Bercy], would you let them go?

Nope.

That’s part of the reason I was in love with the scene we came up with with Mayhem in the MRI talking to Mina. Because I love both of those characters, and I wish they interacted more. If you rewatch that scene, it’s the beginning of it’s own little relationship as well.

Let’s jump back and talk about another big moment for the show. Ty and Tandy, even though we’ve had hints of this before, finally get into their costumes and are riding down the escalator together. What went into writing and crafting that scene? How important was it for the overall fabric, not just of the episode, but of the show?

God bless you for asking that question, because so much went into that scene. We’ve really wanted to get them into proper superhero costumes, but we didn’t want them to all of a sudden show up with these things that weren’t informed. So I think I said on Twitter to somebody, we wanted the audience to be a frog in a boiling pot of costume water.

The first season was about understanding the Mardi Gras Indians, and crafting that origin for Tyrone’s cloak. Which I think we did pretty well. And this season we started Tandy off in proper ballet wear. And there’s probably six or seven iterations that Olivia helped curate … We tried on several outfits to make sure we were getting the right vibe for Tandy.

We loved the idea of making sure they were in their costume,s but were informed in the way that we did it. It’s why we created those mirrors in the mall in the first place. It’s why we spent probably days editing that sequence. At one point, they could see themselves in the mirror, and then we decided to pull those shots entirely so there’d be a reveal.

If you ever watch the raw footage of the escalator scene, you will hear me at the bottom of the escalator just yelling, “now to him! Now feel this! Now do this!” Of course they did it a thousand times better than I yelled at them, but I can watch that [escalator] scene, which I guess is another Dustin Hoffman movie, someone called it The Rain Man shot. Where they come down and you just get a sense of both of them, that, “this is our destiny.” Olivia gives this look like, “whoa are we this badass? Yeah we are.” And she gets it all across. For the audience who’s been waiting on us putting on costumes, we’re getting there.

The human trafficking storyline reached a bit of resolution in the previous episode, in the scene with Ty on the rooftop. We loop back to that in the finale, him watching the drug dealers not selling drugs to the trafficker. I thought that was such an interesting decision for a superhero show, to not have him beat up everybody, but realize his own limitations. In the room, when you guys were writing that and crafting that, was there any debate about this move? Was there any thought to have Ty pull the typical superhero trick of trying to shut it down entirely? Or was it important to hold Ty back in that way?

That debate is what led us to this decision, to be one hundred percent honest. We want it to be realistic. Tandy and Tyrone live in a realistic world. That’s part of the reason I love Marvel television. There’s no superhero that cleans up all crime. Spider-Man still has to stop bank robbers. We’re fortunate to have a lot of talented writers in the room. One of them, Joy Kecken, worked on The Wire. We talked a lot about the research she did with David Simon on the Baltimore drug problem. I don’t even know if you remember, I think it was season three with Hamsterdam, that there is no solution you can necessarily find… So what can we do?

So we like the idea of Tyrone, particularly after what he saw Tandy go through, and what he saw his Mom go through, he says it pretty well on the roof in episode nine. He knows he can’t stop every bit of drug use. He doesn’t know if he should, if someone wants to do drugs. I like the idea of, this is a kid in his rookie season of being a superhero making a difference. We cast [Joshua J. Williams], who played Solomon, just to be a little brother to Aubrey. So we saw him as little brother, and now we see him big brother. The completion of that arc is… To sound lofty, none of us can change the world. But we all should try to change the world a little bit, and if we can all do it a little bit, maybe it’ll get a lot better.

I was surprised that Connors was ultimately killed off in the episode. There was a part of me that really wanted him to live, since we didn’t actually see the gun go off in that previous episode. Why was it important to kill him, particularly after he had gone through that emotional journey and a seeming catharsis?

Man, talk about debate. This is probably the most hotly debated thing we’ve done on the show. Part of it is because he did these horrible things. We live in a world where you play judge, jury, and executioner, and if you were a mother who lost not only one but two children to his shenanigans… We had a lot of debate about whether or not she should get rid of him. It’s ultimately why we ended up splitting it, by making Gloria [Reuben] seem like she did the profoundly right thing, by making Adina seem like she did the profoundly right thing, and then showing that she was not strong enough to not kill him. That’s part of the thing. If she were strong, if she were able to look past it, she might not have killed Connors for what he did.

When we got to the point where we were debating who should kill Connors, there were three candidates. We realized that he probably should die, and we decided that Adina should probably have the right to take care of them. Then we wanted Mayhem to push it even further. To understand that her need for revenge was so raw. He killed Brigid, essentially. He killed Pete [Wayne Pére], essentially. In a general sense of justice… You could be sorry. We always try to think of white privilege and how it exists and what people are allowed to get away with. We wanted to make sure we weren’t leaning into that too much.

Andre and Mayhem were clear mirrors for what was happening with Tandy and Ty. Mayhem seemingly redeemed herself, while Andre didn’t. What do you think that says about Tandy and Ty’s journey going forward?

We never want to get comfortable with the fact that they’re gonna be heroes, cause that’s the right thing to do. If we do our jobs right, we’re presenting human beings who change and evolve. I wish I could say I was a perfect human being; but I’m not, and I don’t expect Tandy and Tyrone to be perfect either. Tandy and Tyrone do the best that they can, but the reason I tell these stories is they’re kids and they’re gonna mess up.

Is there any news on a season three at this point?

There are plans, but I can’t say anything about news.

Okay, last question before I let you go: waffles or pancakes?

Oh, waffles. Come on.

This interview has been edited for content and length.

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