Animation
Good Times
Netflix takes a classic sitcom, Good Times, and turns it into a vulgar, violent, sexually-charged TV-MA show.
Tragedy messes with us, changes us, deeply and intrinsically. Everyone who’s experienced it knows it. We bear the scars all our lives, and our responses to the world around us can be molded by them in ways we scarcely understand.
Rarely, though, does tragedy grant us superpowers.
So would we call Tandy Bowen and Tyrone Johnson … lucky?
As kids, Tandy and Tyrone were just in the wrong place at the wrong time: near an exploding oil rig near New Orleans owned by the energy behemoth Roxxon.
Tyrone had been trying to steal a car radio just before the mishap: His older brother, Billy, stopped him, but the police chased the pair anyway. And when the oil rig exploded, one of the cops used it as an excuse to put a little lead in Billy, who fell into the ocean. Tyron dove into the drink to save his beloved brother, but it was too late.
Meanwhile, Tandy, a rich kid from a rich family, was heading home from ballet practice with her father when the Roxxon rig blew. They, too, went careening into the ocean. Only Tandy made it out alive.
But a strange thing happened beneath those roiling waves: A mysterious energy surge enveloped both the kids and gave them powers—powers that only truly manifested themselves years later.
By then, their lives had traveled very different trajectories.
The death of Tandy’s father has wrecked the girl’s world. Her mom now lives in a haze of substance abuse (Tandy’s not immune from those temptations, either), and Tandy wants as little to do with her as possible. But the girl’s also somehow able to draw glowing white daggers from … some extradimensional nether region. Tandy can also use that power to see and experience happy, loving moments from the lives of anyone she touches. That’s nice, given how cynical and despairing Tandy generally is these days.
Tyrone’s the rich kid now, pulled out of poverty by his loving, hard-charging mother. But his losses have left him incredibly angry, which may help him tap into (what the originating Marvel comics called) the Darkforce dimension. The Darkforce grants him the power to teleport and to see the fears of those around him.
Tyrone and Tandy never knew each other before their powers mystically drew them together. But now they’re a team, in a sense—fighting not the Thanoses and Dormammus of the Marvel Universe, but rather thugs, drug dealers and crooked cops.
They need each other in some strange way. But they’ve also been attracted to each other (though Tyrone, as of Season 2, is seeing someone else). And that makes their working relationship all the more perilous
Freeform’s Cloak & Dagger takes some liberties with this Marvel franchise, and the show doesn’t take long to meddle with their backstory. And given that, in the comic, both characters were kidnapped and experimented on with a new strain of heroin, you could say the series’ new origin story actually lightens things up a bit.
Still, Freeform’s soapy superhero saga has plenty of problems: We see lots of strong violence and hear strong language. And sex and sensuality will certainly be part of the mix. (Tandy’s penchant for thieving, and several characters’ struggles with drugs don’t help matters, either.)
We should also mention of the show’s sense of spirituality, one that in the early going, cuts both ways.
Tyrone and Tandy seem to draw their powers from dualist forces that owe much to Eastern spirituality. Their characters represent, if you will, the yin and yang of the universe, one light and one dark, and they do so perhaps even more explicitly than we see with Star Wars‘ own Force.
But Christianity has a presence here, too. Tyrone went to a Catholic school, and a priest there was a positive influence in the boy’s life (even as he struggles with demons of his own). And Tandy, when she first runs away from her mom, finds refuge in an abandoned church—a literal sanctuary of last resort. It’s still a place they return to when things start falling apart.
This being a superhero show, Cloak & Dagger will likely have some positive messages to offer in the future, too: Tyrone and Tandy will figure out how to get their lives in better order (balance?) and stop a few criminals along the way. But Freeform has not been noted for its restraint as of late, and it seems that the pathway there could be troublesome, messy and dark.
The storyline leaps back and forth through time as Tyrone and Tandy help Det. Brigid O’Reilly rescue a group of young women being trafficked. There’s a catch, though. Through an odd temporal anomaly, Brigid has become two people: Her conscientious self and her angry, aggressive alter ego, Mayhem. The latter doesn’t just want to rescue the girls, she wants to kill anyone who allowed it to happen … and anyone who gets in her way.
We also see the fall of Father Delgado, Tyrone’s one-time mentor who’s always struggled with alcohol. He seems to get a push toward near annihilation from Mayhem, who gives him a bottle of booze as he stands outside a liquor store, shaking from withdrawal.
Later, Delgado stands in the middle of New Orleans, obviously drunk and with a bottle of booze in his hands, rambling on about how “despair will come to us all.” He also says, “No point, no purpose, no plan, brothers and sisters. No playbook, King James or otherwise. The Good Lord only helps those who help themselves.”
Throughout the jumping timeline, Mayhem sometimes talks to Delgado, and they discuss sin and souls. (Mayhem believes she doesn’t have one.) And when Mayhem sees the priest lying in the street, she puts the bottle he dropped back in his hand and whispers, “Bless me, Father, for I’m about to sin.” We also see the interior of a church a couple of times, along with some other symbols of Christian faith.
Mayhem sins a lot, too: She shoots people, beats up others and slices open someone’s throat with her fingernails. (We see the blood pour from his neck, along with a bloody wound the guy suffered when she slammed his forehead into a car engine. She chokes him for a good long while, too.) Mayhem nearly kills her alter ego when she’s lying in a hospital bed.
In a lab, a mouse—similarly bifurcated—apparently kills its more docile twin: We see the animal’s paws stained with blood, and the maze in which both were located covered in the red stuff, too. We see some obviously dead and traumatized bodies. Someone may drown someone, though by episode’s end it was unclear.
A scene takes place in a strip club, and some scantily clad women writhe around poles in the gloom. Trafficked girls are kept locked away in cages. Someone vomits in a street. Beer bottles sit on tables. Characters say the s-word three times. We also hear “a–, “d–n” and “h—.”
Needing an expensive new identity to escape town, Tandy and her boyfriend, Liam, decide to crash a high-class wedding and burgle the money they require. Meanwhile, Tyrone tracks the dirty cop who killed his brother but arrives late for basketball practice. When he shows up, his teammates are doing “suicide sprints” because of him, and they’re none too happy about it: They beat him severely, eventually knocking him out.
When Tyrone comes to, he finds himself locked in the school. In a rage, he beats the lock and chain on the gym door with a baseball bat. In that moment, part of him also teleports and appears before the dirty cop—shooting a gun at him. The officer, though, is uninjured. He also appears in front of Tandy, who’s driving out of town, and fires at her. The car’s windshield gets pocked with bullet holes, and the car itself crashes.
Tandy’s mom and her new “boyfriend,” Greg, are doing scads of drugs when Tandy stops by. (Powder and pill bottles are strewn around the living room; she also apparently steals pills and money from Tandy’s old, treasured backpack.) Greg is seemingly unclothed underneath a short robe: Tandy makes crude comments about him and warns her mother that he’s not her boyfriend, saying that he’s just “on a sex tour of the female islands.” Tandy and Liam dance and kiss. Liam helps Tandy remove her evening gown, though we don’t see anything revealing.
Through Tyrone, we see a vision of one of his mother’s greatest fears: Tyrone and brother Billy (who’s already been killed) run out of her eyesight (and ours), and we hear two gunshots. She then sees two tombstones. In real life, Tyrone’s mother points a gun at what we assume to be a raccoon (ransacking the family trash) and prepares to pull the trigger. We see bloodstains on a bit of pavement. Tandy seems to psychically pull a bullet from her abdomen, and the wound mysteriously heals.
Father Delgado warns Tyrone of the anger, the “poison” working through his system. “What if God heard you talking like this,” he tells Tyrone. “What would He say?” The priest later leads a school chapel service (most of the students, including Tyrone, are looking at their phones and texting), and we hear a worship song as part of it. The verse Daniel 2:22 hangs in the church: “It is he who reveals the profound and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him.”
The priest buys some liquor at a convenience store. We hear references to zodiac signs. Guests at a wedding party hold glasses of alcohol. Characters say the s-word four times, along with “a–,” “h—,” “p-ssed” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused three times, and Jesus’ name once.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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