Things get personal for Jefferson Pierce as the shady government agency collecting powered people in Freeland now wants him, and someone close to Pierce suffers for it.
Previously, on BLACK LIGHTNING…
The ASA – the secret agency that poisoned people in Freeland, inadvertently gave them powers and spent the last 30 years rounding those people up – has a black site in the city where they’ve been storing decades worth of metahumans. Why? We have no idea, but it’s obviously not good.
We know that Black Lightning has been a target of theirs since his first stint as a hero, but they weren’t able to tag him before he went into hiding. Now that he’s back, they’ve come looking for him again and agency head Martin Proctor goes after the one man he believes knows the answer. Fortunately, for Jefferson Pierce, Peter Gambi won’t give him up. Unfortunately for Gambi, Proctor and his agents have no qualms about torturing an old man to get their information. Also problematic is that Proctor knows enough about what Gambi’s been doing since he left the agency to go after Pierce to get Black Lightning’s civilian identity.
While Gambi is busy being kidnapped and tortured, Pierce continues to deal with the growing number of superheroes in his family, more kids being kidnapped and his students still selling drugs for The 100. When his daughter Anissa – Thunder – finds the ASA black site and tells her dad about it, the pair go off to investigate. The site has been emptied, but they get ambushed in the empty warehouse, though they manage to escape. Jefferson puts the family in hiding, but that doesn’t save him from being approached at school by Proctor’s men, who bring Jefferson to Gambi and threaten to kill the hero to coerce Gambi to tell Black Lightning’s secret. Pierce stealthily causes a blackout and Gambi kills the two agents as he and Pierce escape.
Proctor, though, is not a dumb man, and he manages to figure out that Pierce is Black Lightning and orders his seeker – the person keeping an eye out for powered people – to take Pierce out. Proctor’s seeker? The vice principal at Garfield High School.
The ASA apparently has deeper ties into the community than anyone expected.
On the other side of town, Lala continues his power grab over the criminal element in Freeland through a combination of ripping ears off, shooting people and freaking the rest out by talking to himself. Since Black Lightning and Thunder destroyed the production of Green Light, he wants his dealers to go back to selling everything else. His meeting with a dealer looking for product produces the best exchange of the episode.
“I heard you were dead.”
“I was.”
“Cool.”
BLACK LIGHTNING continues to roll with another great episode that has me wanting to see where all of this is leading and how big the battle between the various factions is going to end up. Next week’s episode seems like it’s going to be a doozy and fulfill a CW DC Comics character rite of passage: arresting the hero.