Black Lightning, Season 1, Episode 10: Sins of the Father - The Book of Redemption
To those who're waiting -- I'm still going to do Agents of SHIELD and Jessica Jones. (And Gotham, and the Tick) It's just going to take some time as I get caught up with the CW shows.
Another pretty well-executed episode of Black Lightning, actually. It's an episode that's more obviously just setting up the confrontation with the unseen-for-two-episodes Tobias Whale and the build-up-for-two-episodes La-La, and serves to mend the relationship between Jefferson and Gambi that's been broken for a while now, and it works pretty well. There's a theme of facing the ghosts of your past -- with some being more literal than others since La-La spends the entire episode conversing with the ghost of his dead cousin Will. Will ends up, like LaWanda, imprinted as a weird ghostly tattoo on La-La's chest as he ends up ramping up drug sales to fill in the void left by the destruction of Green Light, ready to take the fight to Tobias Whale if he has to. There's a bit where he shows that he's genuinely not afraid of death at all (welcomes it, maybe?) but the gun that one of his buyers ends up misfiring when put to La-La's head. It's all neat buildup, even if it doesn't really play into the far more interesting ASA storyline. Still, La-La gets to rip off someone's ear this episode! That's hardcore.
And while Black Lightning and Thunder go off to investigate the bunker filled with bodies in tubes, they find the location empty and filled with ASA operatives led by Proctor. The superheroes escape... but not Gambi, who gets confronted by his old ASA partners. Gambi gets tortured and water-boarded, with the ASA thinking that he's been assisting Black Lightning, but of course Gambi refuses to give up the name of Black Lightning's identity.
The ASA ended up shooting themselves in the foot when they kidnap Jefferson Pierce, Gambi's adoptive son, not aware of his true identity as Black Lightning. Jeff ends up rescuing Gambi from the ASA, and, impressed with how Gambi refused to break and hand him over to the ASA, ends up patching things up with Gambi. This leads to Proctor, unfortunately, knowing about Black Lightning's real identity, and reveals Gambi's successor as the ASA's "spotter", the vice principal in Jefferson's school. I guess it's the sort of Scooby-Doo style of foreshadowing where this character that shows up earlier in the story ends up being shuffled backwards out of sight until the big revelation comes. It's an okay reveal, I think.
Speaking of powerful scenes, Jefferson plays a bit of a neat role in trying to 'redeem' Marik as a teacher. Marik is the kid that shot his daughter with red paint in the earlier episodes, who Jeff meets in La-La's territory, but Jefferson ends up giving Marik the chance to redeem himself and do something better, waiting for Marik for an entire day to show up at a special class to get his life on track. He's going to give Marik "not lectures, but solutions", and all Marik has to do is to grab it. It's a neat little moment that shows that Jefferson Pierce's status as a figure in his community that is really willing to make a change in a small scale, something that we've been sorely missing as the show moves more to Black Lightning and Thunder kicking ass.
Also great is the opening scene with Two-Bits, a criminal that Black Lightning beat up and forcibly threatens to change. And while he isn't making a particularly successful life for himself, selling DVD's at the edge of the street, it's at least an honest living -- an honest living that causes him to be able to witness the ASA kidnap a young student from Jefferson's school that bought Green Light and combusts into flame. Two-Bits then goes off to inform Jefferson Pierce about it, because he's the only one who can do anything, and I thought that's a particularly neat scene. Redemption and second chances is the theme throughout all of this episode, and making use of minor characters like Marik and Two-Bits is definitely a great way to showcase this alongside the bigger Gambi and La-La scenes.
Overall, despite being mostly a table-setting episode, it's still a very satisfying self-contained episode with a running theme that isn't particularly shoehorned into our face. Decent stuff, and I'm definitely looking forward to the conclusion of this season.
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