Some interesting twists and turns for BLACK LIGHTNING, as he continues his search for Tobias Whale.
Previously, on BLACK LIGHTNING…
As if Jefferson Pierce hasn’t been dealing with enough lately, his quest to eliminate The 100 got a new wrinkle this week, as he now has to process his daughter Anissa having powers. A good chunk of the episode is devoted to the Pierce family dealing with the revelation – except for youngest daughter Jennifer who can sense something is off but doesn’t know what. Jefferson and his ex-wife go back and forth on whether they should support Anissa becoming a hero, but events in this episode and in prior weeks finally leads Jefferson to agree to train his eldest daughter.
The Pierce family drama should be a selling point of the show, but I really feel like it’s dragging everything down. Almost everything Jefferson does week-in and week-out has to go through a couple of different filters: how his ex-wife feels about it; how it will affect his daughters; whether that should be important weighted against the needs of Freeland. It continues to mess up the pacing of the show and it feels like we’re behind where we should be in the first season’s story arc because of how much extraneous stuff they have to deal with.
Seeing Black Lightning in action and interacting with Inspector Henderson and his tech man Gambi are much better parts of the show. His relationship with Gambi and Gambi’s relationship with both Tobias Whale – the man who killed Jefferson’s father – and with Lady Eve, the woman Whale answers to, are the most interesting parts of the show, because we don’t know where it’s going. After talking with Lady Eve this week, Gambi dons an outfit reminiscent of The Shadow and shoots Johnny Toledo, who Black Lightning was tracking as a means to find Whale.
Knowing that Eve was behind Toledo’s death, Whale sends some men, armed with Lightning guns, to kill Eve, making it look like Black Lightning is now a murderer, as Lightning was off taking down members of The 100 at Whale’s new club.
The action this week sets up a lot for future episodes, and I’m more primed for what comes next than I have been for a few episodes now. The show really hit a lull quickly after the first few episodes dropped, but it seems like we should be getting some more advancement in the coming weeks, especially since Lala was mysteriously resurrected at the end of the episode. That should add an interesting wrinkle to things.
Next week, on BLACK LIGHTNING…