“Does she know about you? That you’re a superhero?.”Īnger, grief, humiliation, and sexual arousal – all emotions she’s unable to control. (“He had something in him, Syd, something that he was always wrestling with, and that thing, won.”) What triggers Syd’s powers? (“He always said that no one could possibly know what he was dealing with, no-one could make him better.”) He was paranoid, thought he was being followed, said that he was dangerous and avoided confrontation, ultimately choosing to take his life instead (we assume) of putting his loved ones at risk from his uncontrollable power. The way Syd’s mother describes him, Syd’s father could well have been experiencing the same symptoms as his daughter.
His guilt over that, it’s suggested, led to Syd’s father taking his own life. On that tour there was an incident, “some sort of explosion,” explains Maggie, in which everybody died – the enemy, friends, innocent civilians – but him. In the penultimate episode, ‘Like Father Like Daughter’, Syd learns from her mother that her dad was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder following his last tour as a US Marine. Whether there are more like him and just how deep the show’s supernatural mythology goes are both questions for an eventual second season. He’s the Watcher to Syd’s Slayer, the Yoda to her Luke, the Professor X to her Jean Grey. That, we can assume, is the role of Black Cloud Man. He asks her if she’s had any recent contact with “…an unknown visitor, a professor, a wise old sage, some form of a mentor figure.” Their role in all this, Stan explains, would be to “visit the hero, explain their abilities, the mythology behind them, and how they can harness those powers for good.” In episode four, Stan attempts to pinpoint the nature of Syd’s superpowers using his comic book collection. It isn’t her dead father, because Syd didn’t clearly didn’t recognize him and asked who he was. When she ran to the forest tower after accidentally killing Brad at the dance, Black Cloud Man revealed himself. And then in episode six, she felt it following her home from school.Ĭonvinced by her counsellor that she was only experiencing grief hallucinations of her father, Syd told herself and Stan that the stalker was all in her head. An episode later, Syd encountered the mysterious black cloud in detention when the lights started to flicker before she destroyed the library. As Syd stormed home, a dark figure in a long coat appeared behind her before dissipating into a moving black cloud. Her mysterious stalker first made an appearance at the end of episode four, when Syd was walking next to the railway line after her and Stan’s bowling ball-related argument. “It felt like I was supposed to follow it, or maybe it was following me.” When Brad said that Homecoming was going to be “fucking mind-blowing”, he can’t have expected such a literal interpretation.ĭazed and covered in blood, Syd ran from the scene and was contemplating a life in hiding when she was approached by a mysterious, similarly supernatural figure.
Seconds before Brad also outed her superpowers, Syd silenced him in the bloodiest way.
In front of their classmates, he humiliated her, outed her and homophobically abused her. In seconds, her girl’s ex had hijacked the stage to read aloud from Syd’s diary. Dancing together at the school dance, the girl she loved leaned in for a kiss. After a decidedly testing week (losing her virginity, failing a quiz in Bio, burying a family pet, manifesting uncontrollable telekinetic powers, getting detention), it all came this close to working out.
Sydney Novak almost had the perfect high school moment. This I Am Not Okay with This article contains spoilers.