Throughout this episode we get flashbacks showing Andre’s descent into darkness.  Meanwhile Tandy, Tyrone, and Mayhem are frantically trying to track him down before more people get caught up in his wake.

In the opening of the episode we get a flashback to 96 months ago, which is roughly 8 years, to the night Andre got his powers.  It seems that before he was a criminal, Andre was a talented and ambitious Jazz musician.  While on stage we see that Andre is overcome with pain from a migraine and collapses.  It’s unclear what transpired between that and the next flashback when Andre is contemplating suicide, but it’s clear his migraines are becoming too much for him to continue living.  Andre would rather die than live a life without music, which is rather sad.

As Andre is looking out over the bridge he gets spooked when the oil rig explodes in the gulf.  The next time we see him is in the hospital with his nurse Lia.  This explains how they got involved and shows just how manipulative Andre is.  The moment he touches her and unlocks his ability to feel her emotions he uses it to coerce her into putting her life on hold and doing what he wants.

This scene is also the only new information we get out of the sequence.  Andre had previously told Tandy about his migraines pushing him to the literal edge and how the oil rig explosion is what saved him.  However, we still don’t really know what Andre was like before he got his powers.  Was he always a manipulative and selfish jerk?  Or did he only become that way once he had this power to control people?  It would be nice to learn why he’s so comfortable hurting all these women.  Andre tried to justify it to Tandy in a previous episode saying that what he’s doing is helping people, but is he really that delusional?

While all this is going down Mayhem and Tandy come across Lia’s body on the side of the road.  It turns out that she’s not dead, just fully drained of hope.  This apparently leaves her, and the other women who Andre has drained, in a catatonic state.  Tandy and Tyrone use this to dive into Lia’s memory and encounter her younger self in a time when she still had hope.  Tandy finds her music book and attempts to bring it out, but they are seen by Andre in Lia’s memory.  Andre ominously tells them that he wants a big audience for his blue note.

Once they escape Lia’s consciousness Tyrone attacks the gang leaders to try and stop their violence as well as use their resources to find out where Andre is hiding.  This sequence with Tyrone using his powers to take out the gangs was really cool and a great way to showcase his abilities.  Tyrone confronts the leaders of the various gangs and tells them that they’re either going to stop pushing drugs on people who don’t want them and using innocent people for their own benefit or he’s going to continue going after them.  They all agree but it’s unclear how binding that’ll be going forward.  It’s unlikely the gangs are going to be fine with Tyrone taking away a significant part of their business.

But before Tyrone gets involved with the gangs, we get an interesting scene between him and his mother.  Tyrone calls Adina to find out how she’s doing and check on how everything is going with Connors.  Adina lies and tells Tyrone that everything is okay and she’s making progress, but Tyrone is looking through the window and sees her cleaning up some blood.  It still feels very out of character for Adina to have murdered someone in cold blood and she also seems fine lying to her son about what happened.  It’ll be interesting to see how she’ll try to explain Connors’ disappearance to Tyrone and if he’ll tell her that he knows what really happened.

By the end of the episode Tandy and Tyrone have found Andre as he’s playing the trumpet and trying to hit the blue note.  As Andre gets closer and closer to unlocking the veve, the two of them work together to try and take him out.  Tandy is initially too worried about her mother to work with Tyrone, but he gets her to throw a dagger at him which he then teleports directly in front of Andre.  Even though he gets hit with Tandy’s dagger, Andre appears to have finished playing and unlocked the powers of a Loa.  I guess we’ll have to wait until the finale next week to find out what the effect this will have on the city of New Orleans.

VERDICT

4 blue notes out of 5.  

The flashbacks with Andre were nice, but they didn’t really expand on anything we didn’t already know.  It would have been nice if we saw more of what Andre was like before the accident and if his new powers made him more of a jerk than he already was or if they are what caused him to become so manipulative.  Having Tandy’s mother be taken by Andre adds another layer of suspense because we know that Tandy will stop at nothing to get her back.  If it wasn’t personal before, it certainly is now.  It’ll be interesting to see if the conflict with Andre is wrapped up in the finale or if he’ll be a returning villain next season.

ONE-SHOTS

  • Tandy confirms that Mayhem and O’Reilly have become one.  It’ll be interesting to see how this affects her going forward, and perhaps it’s because of this that Mayhem didn’t shoot through Tandy to get at Lia.  The “goodness” of O’Reilly is dampening the “badness” of Mayhem.
  • The fight scenes with Tyrone were really compelling and well put together.  The sequence when he teleports Tandy’s dagger was great and I’d like to see more strategic coordination between the two of them going forward.
  • Of course we have to talk about the Luke Cage reference.  It was really cool seeing Tyrone and Solomon talk about how inspiring Luke’s story is and it makes a lot of in-universe sense for them to be talking about it.  Luke is a celebrity hero and is definitely an inspirational figure for a young man with powers trying to do the right thing.