The Cape (2010 TV series)/WMG

The show is the events of his father's death retold by Trip.

 * The show is Troperrific enough to be devised by a ten year old, and is probably his way of making sense of the tragedy, ala Tommy Westphall.

There will be a Paragon of Justice known as The Cowl

 * For the Irony, a rival super hero with Superman-esque symbol of Inspiration will appear and call himself The Cowl. Said Cowl will probably be a Captain America styled safety goggle set up to protect his eyes during flight. The show's Troperiffic enough that I'm sure someone's noticed.

Peter Fleming AKA Chess is wearing contacts to hide his chess piece eyes.

 * Think about it. His lieutenant, Scales, has a skin disorder. It makes sense if Chess has a mutation related to his gimmick, similar to any number of Batman villains. The only time he's seen with normal eyes is when he's entertaining guests or setting a trap for the hero.
 * Chess-piece shaped pupils (I think it was a knight piece) are just a little bit more out there than the stuff shown so far.
 * But maybe his yellow eyes are the real ones.
 * With the introduction of ambiguously supernatural elements, its possible that contacts might not be a factor at all.
 * Jossed. As of "Razer", there are indeed chess-shaped contacts he puts on.

The Ark Corporation is trying to save the world in their own warped way.

 * By creating a crime wave to combat with its own privatized police force, the Ark Corporation is, in a way, trying to save Palm City from itself. Plus, the Ark Corporation is a very Meaningful Name for anyone who knows even one verse from the Bible.
 * Besides, privatizing the police and military is the first step towards Cyberpunk, which would make for a pretty awesome show.

Vince Faraday is still an Unwitting Pawn to Chess.

 * Peter Fleming AKA Chess had a guy framed for murder and blown up in a fiery explosion. Naturally, a body was never recovered. Then, a superhero with the exact same height and build appears. And still he hasn't figured it out? Impossible. Peter Fleming is working the long con here. He knows Vince Faraday is the Cape and must be using him to flush out Orwell, the real threat to the Ark Corporation. In fact, Max Malini may be in on it, explaining why the audience never saw how he was captured by Chess in the pilot episode. He let himself get captured to head off any suspicions Vince Faraday, an ex-soldier cop, might have had about him.

Orwell will become Rad Lass.

 * The Law Of Conservation of Detail at its finest. Rad Lass is a fictional character in-universe with a lightning theme. Orwell, the Cape's de facto sidekick, is pretty handy with a taser. It's a stretch but, hey, I'm just Wild Mass Guessing here.

Vince's wife will become Rad Lass

 * Granted she has to learn that ARK is evil first somehow. But if she does than this can go two ways: she either takes up crime fighting in secret to avenge her husband's (supposed) death or she directly teams up with him to take down Chess and make Palm City safe for their son.
 * For laughs, perhaps Vince's wife becomes Rad Lass. As Rad Lass and The Cape, they start to team up and start getting close (not realizing who each other are) but held back by faithfulness to each other. At the same time, Vince will be able to visit her sans-costume and reveal he's not dead (but not revealing he's The Cape). Cue the funny as things get awkward.

Vince Faraday is the stepbrother of Daniel Faraday.

 * Daniel has a different last name from both his mother and biological father . After Daniel's birth, his mother married Vince Faraday's father, who legally adopted Daniel.

Chess wasn't the first supervillain in Palm City.

 * No one seems to comment on the sheer absurdity of a masked criminal mastermind with a Code Name terrorizing a major city. The guy killed people but that doesn't make him any less absurd. The underreaction of the public might be because supervillains, at least, are not new. Max Malini and the Carnival of Crime seem to imply that Palm City attracts a strange breed of criminals.
 * They're treating him as a serial killer. IIRC, he worked alone when he was public. The get-up is uniform, but minimalist and not all that elaborate. He could probably pass for a psycho with weird fashion sense.
 * Although, on another note, both Scales and the Carnival of Crime are established presences. Chess' public face is not that large a step up.

Chess is just a pawn

 * There's no way that he's going to wind up the Big Bad of the series. As The Cape investigates, he'll learn that the conspiracy is much bigger than the ARK corporation. After all, what's the fun of a villain who's big, evil goal is the privatization of law enforcement?
 * Peter Fleming's ultimate goal might be to Take Over the World. Taking over Palm City would be a good start.
 * Either the writers want us to underestimate Chess or they don't know how to write a Magnificent Bastard.
 * The show's scope is pretty small, so far-nothing too ambitious. The story centers on a single city, and the Cape is more concerned with and motivated by his feelings for his family, with his sense of justice being secondary. So the conflicts are a little low key. A Corrupt Corporate Executive is more than enough for now. Think about the scale of Sin City, for reference, but remove the general public's involvement.

Tarot is not just a secret society of assassins.

 * Granted, it is a secret society with access to assassins. It is also an organization that even the nigh-omniscient Orwell has little intel on. Peter Fleming may, in fact, be a member like LaFleur. The Ark Corporation privatized the Palm City Police Department under orders from Tarot. High Octane Paranoia Fuel and the kind of thing that happens all the time in comic books.
 * Seems very unlikely, unless Fleming is unaware of his actions as Chess. Fleming talks down to members of Tarot and openly questions their competence, and is unaware of their methods or practices.

Vince Faraday is an ancestor of Desmond MIles.

 * Hooded cape, dark, fancy looking body armor, fighting a totalitarian authority... the only thing missing is for Vince to start killing some of his foes. Just look at Vince, Altair and Ezio side by side and tell me there's not a resemblance.
 * Do you mean Vince Faraday? If anyone, Cain fits the bill more than anyone, what with his hidden-blade-esque arm thingy.
 * In technique, maybe. But Cain's the evil guy, going after the (mostly) harmless girl. That is not the Assassin's way. (and, yes, meant Vince. Brain-fart.)
 * Obviously, this means that Ark is a subsidary of Abstergo Industries, and they're all Templars!
 * Or maybe Ark is actually an independent organization trying to overthrow Abstergo and Abstergo has manipulated their longtime enemies, the Assassins, into thinking that Ark is a Templar subsidiary!
 * The cape does not seem to be very acrobatic, and he's no killer, which is a big part of being an assassin.

The Cape is going to inspire a wave of real-life superheroes ala Kick-Ass.

 * The online comic already showed two unaffiliated superheroes getting in Vince Faraday's way in the Little Shanghai district of Palm City. People are already following his lead. It is fairly likely the writers will continue this plot thread in the actual TV series itself.
 * Isn't the comic metafiction? Portraying the in-universe comic version of the Cape, and not Vince Faraday?

Orwell is Fleming's daughter

 * A young woman with an obscene amount of money, mysterious motivations, and knowledge of criminal secret societies? Who else could she be.
 * Isn't this one already  according to the tie-in comic?
 * All but confirmed by the latest episode, which features Fleming watching a ballerina twirl in a music box right before we cut to Orwell twirling at the circus.
 * Plus the whole thing with Gregor claiming that Orwell had "Daddy Issues". There's really no way this could be made any more obvious.
 * That would make their encounter on the train in "Scales" a Call Back to "Kozmo" when he claimed he'd able to recognize his own daughter. Apparently, a wig and a feathery domino mask is enough to fool him.
 * Who says he didn't recognize her? They were in the middle of a crowd of people, and he immediately (but subtly) chased after her when she fled. It's not like he can say "hey everyone, this girl who's tearing my argument to pieces is actually my daughter."

There will be a crossover with Ace Attorney.

 * Think about it - Ace Attorney Investigations introduced characters surnamed Faraday - what's to say that Vince won't mention his brother Byrne and his little niece Kay?
 * Or other brother Daniel?

Chess comes from a superhero universe.
Although the setting seems to work like a superhero comic book, other than Chess there are no superheroes or supervillians at the start. There's also no aliens, mutants, magic, or any other kind of superhero comic wackiness. Obviously Chess is a supervillian refugee from a universe with all of these things, and he's starting to infect the real world with comic-book themes, maybe without knowing it. Palm City is a real-world city that just changed its name to something more comic-booky when he arrived, and the circus folk didn't start robbing banks until he started influencing them.

Orwell is going to go undercover as Summer Glau at some point.
Just to mess with us.
 * And Orwell will have Keith David on her arm (not Vince as Keith the REAL Keith), possibly playing Chess in a movie about Palm City while someone else plays The Cape or a made up new Hero.

"That's not a Cape that's a Cloak!"
We have had "The Cape" "You can work on it." and "Your not wearing a cape." This Troper feels confident someone will call him on wearing a Cloak not a cape next.

Vince has actual superpowers.
We've seen him get a surge of strength whenever he has a flashback of his family life. It's more than just heroic will- the longer he's separated from his family, the more this power will develop.
 * More Charles Atlas Superpower than anything else, right now. And that should be enough. To be fair, the show is hinting at supernatural elements, and Molotov was able to throw a guy across a room without really touching him.

Max is a retired supervillian from The Golden Age.
Come on its so obvious, not only is Max running a crew of pulp comic criminals. He used to be one in the 60s. Can't you imagine him runnig around in the Cape pulling off robberies with his usuall flair of the dramatic while fighting the hero of the city with good natured quipps. Unfortunatly the modern age of criminals who rape and murder has made him a little bitter hence to him taking to drink. The fact that two of his students have gone to the dark site has not helped. The other student.. Chess.

Flemming's motivation for creating a police state is related to his separation from his daughter.
Even more so if it turns out his daughter is Orwell. Essentially, something happened that he felt was unfair and he tried to 'fix' while she felt he was being a bad guy; she leaves and he, trying to fix things more, becomes a Well Intentioned Extremist intent on creating a safe place for his daughter.

Orwell and Rollo will eventually hook up as a Beta Couple.
The show seems to be treating Rollo as an actual supporting character rather than comic relief or for The Worf Effect so it'd be something to do to give the character something to do every so often in B-plots.

The Cape's smoke outs are a combination of tricks and hypnosis when he does it in the open.
Basically, in the instances where he would have greater difficulty just tossing a smoke bomb and disappearing into darkness or people are too close to do so effectively, he lightly hypnotizes them so they loose track of time and what's going on. In this case, the smoke acts like the slap on the table in the pilot, breaking them out of the light trance and making it seem like he disappeared in an instant when it may have been much longer.
 * This might been an example of me assuming that Viewers Are Geniuses but it is probably canon that all of his more improbable tricks are the result of hypnosis. The show seems to steer away from abilities that are explicitly superhuman or paranormal (i.e. teleportation).
 * This is true. For all the faults, the show does seem to make efforts to show that Vince isn't suppose to be special just well trained and to justify the things he does/that happen to him. For instance, before landing on the car, you can briefly see him flaring his cape, ostensibly to slow his fall. The several times he gets stabbed, it's always in places where he doesn't have armor and its debatable how much protection his chest plate actually allows since his circus training makes him more Fragile Speedster more than anything else - the fights with Rallo seemed mostly to tough him up and get him use to pain and punishment so that he can endure the contortions needed for whatever he does. Same for the villains; when the poisoner was first introduced, they lingered on his knife thingie for a while and showed him picking up the kitchen knife. Possibly as an attempt to show that he only has very few knifes he doesn't want to use often as opposed to a typical comic book villain like Bullseye who would effectively end up summoning things from his pockets.
 * [strike]The Cape isn't even very well trained, outside of stealth and sleight of hand cape skillz[/strike] never mind, he's former special ops. He was an amateur fighter, which is useful and gives him an edge, but combat does not seem to be a common occurrence for him. I thought the hypnosis was used to speed up his own training, like conditioning him to pain or stealth.
 * He is a former military grunt who did things "that you would not like,", then a experienced cop, all before he donned The Cape What do you mean "The Cape isn't even very well trained."
 * The hypnosis used for training was just for the Dice episode. The actual hypnosis training was for Vince to use himself as demostrated by him using hypnosis to get the hypnotist into a bra. At as far as fighting, at worse, we can say he's not used to fighting with a cape.

Chess is actually Peter Flemming's alternate personality.

 * The doctor in the most recent episode asked him "have there been any visits from our friend?" Not to mention at the end a chessboard magically appears in Peter's apartment, and he seems to know how it got there.
 * So he'd be a Corrupt Corporate Executive with an even more corrupt alter ego? That's kinda messed up.
 * Possibly the two sides are in conflict? One reason to fake Chess' death--so that the psychological victory would take hold and keep the Chess personality down?
 * This does make some sense. The two sides do seem to react to The Cape differently. Chess is openly hostile towards him while Flemming found him more amusing.
 * Confirmed, as of the episode nine official description.

The cape somehow makes Vince Immune to Fate.

 * Given the Maybe Magic Maybe Mundane aura surrounding the cape, it could be that Vince was in Dice's blind spot simply because the world thinks he's dead, or he uses tactics she didn't factor into her equations. On the other hand, it could be that the cape itself has the power to make its wearer unpredictable. It was highly coveted among thieves and murderers, after all.
 * Somehow, the Cape seems to be keeping a low profile, what with being lifted wholesale from a comic book and all. Dice just may not have known he existed at all. But magic implications were very strong and much cooler.
 * The mundane explanation would be that you can't predict what a dead man will do. Vince isn't dead, true, but he's not really acting in a consistant way as when he was 'alive' which means she'd at least need more data to figure him out.
 * If it's magic, then is it linked to the 'Grey Cowl of Nocturnal' from 'Oblivion'?

Max is planning something big and villainous, and Vince will leave the Circus when he finds out

 * There's already tension there. He's a cop living with criminals (although he does/did supply them with info out of necessity). Max appears to have many resources and lots of experience, as well as rich taste. Such a man may not be content with robbing banks and gathering wealth. Add to that the Circus of Crime's themed villainy is the natural prey of heroes like the Cape, and they will have irreconcilable differences leading to an epic enmity.

Chess killed Orwells mother
Chess is a different persona than Peter Fleming and in his first appearence killed the mother of his child (They were not married, if there were any obvious connection Vince would have found it by now). Flemming then pushed Orwell away, afraid he couldn't protect his daughter from Chess otherwise. But since he is a Corrupt Corporate Executive he also used Chess hunger for blood in his buissnes, thus protecting Orwell further by distracting Chess. Orwell found out and is now trying to stop her father, this is the reason she is so deeply afraid of being found out.

Flemming killed Orwells mother
Mostly as above, but Fleming killed Orwells mother because she wanted to leave him/found out about his crimes and wanted to report him. He couldn't deal with what he had done and created the Chess persona so he had someone to blame. He left Orwell out of shame.

Orwell also has a hidden personality, like chess.
At the end of Razer,  Either that or Summer's just playing another role where she's adorably nuts. WHATEVER

Peter Fleming wants to Rule The World, Chess wants to Destroy Everything.
Buying Palmcity police is the first step, Peter will slowly buy up everything until he owns the country outright then the position of president is a formality, Chess is his own psyche trying to stop him, by killing everything.

Somewhere, the series did run for six seasons and a movie.
Within Greendale's universe, it's entirely plausible that The Cape in all its camp goofily narmish glory would get that much mileage.