Red Stewart reviews the twelfth episode of Black Lightning season 2…
Contrary to my hopes from last week, the penultimate episode of Black Lightning’s second season lacked the fire and brimstone I felt a post-Khalil entry would have. I know, I know, it’s dumb to project your own personal wishes upon another writer, but can you honestly blame me? Everyone was angered by what happened to the former track star from Garfield High – heck, Khalil even asked Jefferson to murder Tobias as a dying wish! Combine that with the crime-fighting trio founded by Jefferson, Henderson, and Gambi, and you had all the makings for an action-packed ride.
Alas, perhaps the creators are waiting until the finale to go full-budget on a confrontation between Black Lightning and Tobias. Given how disappointing their fight was last time though, I don’t have much in the way of expectations there.
What is presented here is adequate enough, but it’s one of those episodes of Black Lightning that is overstuffed, with many potentially interesting subplots squeezed together into a single narrative that doesn’t give any of them enough time to breathe. The first season was chock-full of these, which led to it being a massive disappointment in my eyes, and that remains the case here. This is because the worst stories of any medium are those that had promise. We’ve all seen movies and TV shows that were bad from a conceptual level, but we’ve also witnessed plenty of others that could’ve been good had there been a different writer or director or producer behind the project.
That is the case here. In addition to the impoverished nature of black families, as represented by Khalil’s mother being unable to afford her son’s funeral, you also have topics like domestic abuse, Black Lives Matter, and white privilege mixed in with revenge vs. justice, Anissas’s existential crisis, Lynn and Jefferson fighting over whether they made good parental choices, and even elements of a geopolitical thriller as a foreign country begins covert operations in Freeland.
It’s a lot to take in, and while the pacing was decent the plotting was all over the place. Storylines are intersected into each other without pause, constricting character development and turning core structures into haphazard messes. Take, for example, Jennifer’s conflict with Principal Lowry- Lowry wants a memorial to Khalil taken down because he attacked the school. It’s a fair argument that’s turned into a pointless discourse about racism that doesn’t even have enough power behind it to reach the heights of a Saturday After School Special. It’s a lame discussion between an emotional girl and a Caucasian caricature.
To the writing team’s credit, they do attempt to build upon Lowry later on in the episode by having him disclose his destitute past, but P.J. Byrne’s delivery of his character’s history feels unbelievable and borderline pathetic. For a character that is supposed to be grounded in reality, he comes across more often as a stereotypical white nerd with power.
Other subplots, like Jefferson and Lynn’s argument, don’t have any weight to them because the writers haven’t spent enough time planting the seeds for these emotive eruptions the way they brilliantly did with Khalil and Jennifer running away.
In addition to all of this, there is more development on the outset- Grace Choi’s powers start to get more unstable, and Tobias and Todd realize they will need to permanently enlist Helga Jace to help with opening the Masters of Disasters’ pods. These are, as you can expect, poorly integrated too.
For a show that has the benefit of a smaller season count that other CW serials don’t, Black Lightning could ironically use more episodes to tell the many stories that the writers apparently want to tell.
Rating – 5/10
Red Stewart
