Things start to come together and secrets are revealed as Black Lightning prepares to cross a line and go after his father’s killer.
Previously, on BLACK LIGHTNING…
Through the first half of this episode, it felt like the momentum BLACK LIGHTNING had in its first few episodes had completely disappeared. I’ve noted how I felt there were too many subplots and separate (lightning) arcs spreading the show too thin. And all the history that we need to catch up on was derailing the show in the same way that the flashbacks on ARROW were hurting things in its third and fourth seasons.
But the cast turned it around on me, and I actually enjoyed this episode overall compared to the last couple. Jefferson Pierce’s obsession with stopping the Green Light drug plaguing Freeland, combined with his desire to catch the man who killed his father, drives Black Lightning beyond reason, especially since the culprits for the two crimes are the same. When Gambi can’t talk Jefferson down from going to kill Joey Toledo, he calls in Lynn, who isn’t exactly pleased at the whole situation.
Even she can’t talk her ex-husband down, but an attack on her office snaps Jefferson back to reality and he goes to save her, but he’s only the second hero on the scene. His daughter Anissa, who has taken on her own superhero identity after discovering her own powers, gets there first, having decided to come clean to her mom about what she’s been dealing with. After Anissa – Thunder – deals with the thugs who tied up her mom, Jefferson shows up. Not knowing what happened, he and his daughter engage in a superhero smackdown, with Anissa coming up on the short end of the boom stick.
Of course, that’s when he realizes what’s happening.
The show has been building to this for a few episodes now, and it should be interesting to see where they go from here. Obviously, we’re going to have some sort of family discussion between Jefferson and Anissa, but how they handle the aftermath of that will be even more important. Will Thunder and Lightning team up to take down Tobias Whale? Or will they go down the path of most resistance for the sake of drama and have them at odds because Jefferson wants to protect his daughter?
We also have some more intrigue with Gambi and the deals he made with Tobias and Lady Eve. Here, we discover he made a deal that the Pierce family was off-limits, calling Lady Eve out for her thugs attacking Lynn. Eve shrugs it off, saying Lynn was doing research into something that, in itself, was also off-limits. I’m sure his dealings with the people Jefferson is hunting down won’t go over well once it becomes public knowledge.
I’m sure we’ll have some more sparks coming our way next week. Here’s the promo: