Episode 8: Ghost Stories
Directed by: Alex Garcia Lopez
Written by: Christine Boylan & Jenny Klein
“Ghost Stories” focuses on the eight-year anniversary of the tragic Roxxon off-shore platform explosion that took Tandy’s father and Tyrone’s older brother. Naturally, this episode is interwoven with emotionally charged flashbacks. But rather than dwell on the past, our two teen heroes bring relative closure to their respective stories by executing their own grand plan for bringing down their individual antagonist. It is somewhat heartbreaking that this series is so hell-bent on keeping these two characters (and their stories) separate, when the main crux of their comic identity is their almost unbreakable togetherness.
Tandy’s arc is more straightforward, overly convenient and a bit hollow; while Tyrone’s is actually the more interesting one, if not for its (subtle?) Batman Begins homage and the inclusion of O’Reilly and her intersecting sub-plot. On a side note, the appearance of Tyrone’s iconic and titular cloak is a welcomed addition that poetically ties it to the source material while making sense contextually. Everything nicely seems to have a resolution by the episode’s end, but the plot twists in the epilogue – one being an infamous gender-bend comic trope – remind us we still have two more episodes to go before the season officially concludes.
The greatest travesty of “Ghost Stories” is not in its execution, but rather it has taken painstakingly too long to get to this point. In terms of the actual ending of “Ghost Stories”, I’m not really sure, or interested for that matter, of where this goes from here, as it pretty much could have ended on this note and picked up in the second season – which apparently has been confirmed.
Hailing from the eastern-most Caribbean island of Barbados, Fabian Wood has long since been fascinated by the power of storytelling to inspire and invoke emotions – whether in film, comics or video games. No longer content to be just an avid comic book reader and videogamer, he’s eager to exercise his literary acumen as an aspiring writer and reviewer.
