Eleanor Bennett (Chipo Chung) has always had a relationship with water and likes to surf even though she is getting older. After she is wiped on the dashboard and hits her head, her Byron (Ashley Thomas) runs to her side. That's when the doctor comes in and tells them both that Eleanor has a brain tumor. Byron tries to contact her sister Benny (Adrienne Warren), but she doesn't pick up or respond to his text messages. Frustrated, he leaves her a message telling her that Eleanor is fine.
But she is not well; A year later, the brothers, at odds for years, are in Charles Mitch's (Glynn Turman) office to hear Eleanor's will. Part of the will is a flash drive on which Eleanor has made seven recordings that tell the story of her life, the real story that her children don't know because Eleanor never talked about it with them. They have to listen to them together, with Charles, if they want to know about her mother's life.
Creator: Marissa Jo Cerar
Stars: Jade Eshete, Mia Isaac, Samuel Lorenzo Bulgin
Her name was Coventina Lyncock, or Covey (Mia Isaac) for short, and she grew up in the West Indies. Things were going great as a child, but when she was about to turn 18 in the late 1960s, her mother had abandoned Covey and her father Lin (Simon Wan) due to Lin's gambling addiction. At the time, she and her friend Bunny Pringle (Lashay Anderson) were accomplished swimmers and she was in a promising relationship with Gibbs Grant (Ahmed Elhaj), a relationship of which Lin did not approve.
Covey's life takes a big turn when Lin's store is burned down, the result of a loan she had to take out from local crime boss Clarence "Little Man" Henry (Anthony Mark Barrow) and his brothers. To help pay off those debts, she gives Clarence her blessing to marry Covey. Covey doesn't find out about this until Clarence breaks into her house and almost attacks her.
Of course, Covey is horrified; Gibbs says they should run away to London together, but Covey thinks she can accept him until Lin pays her debts. She also thought that her housekeeper Pearl (Faith Alabi), a friend of her mother and the only adult she could trust, would be on her side. But when Covey sees her preparing the traditional black cake for the wedding, she thinks otherwise.
The wedding day arrives, and with it, Covey gets the chance to escape that she so desperately needed.
Black Cake is gearing up to be two different shows: one about Covey's life as she goes on the run as Eleanor, and another about how Byron and Benny deal with this new information about her late mother. Both have the potential to be fascinating, as we were drawn into young Covey's story in the first episode. The only thing we're worried about is how disjointed things will become as the story moves back and forth from Covey's life to her children, discovering what it means to them.
When we enter Covey's life we see a little bit of her backstory, but there had to be a little more. Lin complains after the fire that he is still treated like a stranger even though he grew up on the island and established a life there, but then tells Covey that he took the loan from Little Man because he was behind on the payment. of the rent. We don't really see how the game cost her marriage and what happened when Covey's mother left them behind.
We can forgive some of the missing pieces to the story, given Mia Isaac's performance as Covey. She plays the teenager as a strong person who tells her father in no uncertain terms how he has affected her life, but she also conveys the complicated emotions involved in agreeing to the fake marriage to Little Man to protect him.
There's also an element of mystery that we're not 100 percent sure will work, as it seems like Pearl has inserted herself into the situation to the point where both Lin and Covey become murder suspects. Will we return to that story or move to London, where it's pretty obvious that Covey will end up taking on someone else's identity to become Eleanor?
How Eleanor's story affects Byron and Benny is the other part of the equation, but the first episode moves away from the two of them within the first fifteen minutes and doesn't come back. At this point, all we know about the two of them is that Benny was separated from her mother and her brother for some time, but we don't know why. It's hard to judge whether this story will be worth the time we spend away from Eleanor's story, because there isn't enough information yet.
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