Black Lightning S03E06 Review: Picking Sides

Black Lightning, Season 3, Episode 6: Knocking on Heaven's Door

As we start off the "Book of Resistance" arc, it is an interesting opening as the events of the previous episode lays sort of a grim tone over the cast.... although most of this episode feels more of a setup as our main characters sort of grow into the mindset of resisting the ASA in one way or another.  Jefferson and Anissa are hit the hardest over their perceived failures of Tavon's death, and while they understand that it's the ASA that caused Tavon's death, there's still a huge part of themselves that blame their decisions. The resistance is brewing, although it's still kind of the B-plot -- we've got Henderson pretending to play bad cop with Jamillah Olsen before immediately recruiting her to be the new voice of the Resistance. 

Anissa, though, spends most of the episode struggling with Painkiller's toxic poison, which is slowly creeping up her body and there's like a part of her that accepts it or something? Basically it gives us some neat scenes between her and Gambi, and later on with Grace, but ultimately it's self-contained through this episode as they develop the antidote, albeit at the cost of Anissa being unable to do any superheroing for a while. Also, Gambi realizes that the venom in Anissa is identical to Khalil's poison, and he finds out that Khalil's grave is empty. 

Jefferson, meanwhile, goes ballistic, apparently taking out a bunch of ASA agents off-screen, earning him not just the ire of Agent Odell, but also Lynn, who's angry at Jefferson for putting their alliance and their stability with the ASA at risk. Lynn has a point, to some extent -- fighting the ASA and the Markovians would be a gigantic mess, the ASA hunting their family down would also be a gigantic mess, and the ASA is allowing her to cure the pod-kids, but at the same time the ASA is pretty evil so yeah, Lynn's not making the best decisions at the moment. We'll blame that obstinance on the drugs, though. She's also interacting a lot with the captive Tobias, who is certainly getting in her head, threatening to reveal Jefferson Pierce's secrets if Lynn doesn't supply him with a list of metas in ASA custody, something that she eventually relents, albeit giving Tobias an altered list.

Jennifer, meanwhile... continues to sort of bounce around? She interacts a fair bit with Brandon the mysterious energy-absorbing metahuman, sneaking into his house and eventually discovering that he snuck into occupied Freeland to find information on Dr. Jace, who killed his mother. Brandon can apparently manipulate the earth, and considering his connection to dr. Jace we may or may not have an analogue for Geo-Force in the show... but ultimately I don't find Brandon super-duper interesting in an already packed season. Nice to give Jen someone else to interact with other than Odell, though. 

And in the final act of this episode, we actually see the dang Markovians actually do something that sort of shows that they are actually serious about this whole war thing. The teleporting metahuman from the previous season, Instant, gets to kill a bunch of ASA soldiers in a cool sequence and hijack the vehicle, show up with Markovia's Colonel Mosin, and sneak into an ASA site to steal something... but then Agent Odell show up with a small army and teleportation disruptors, leading to a fun shoot-out. Instant and Mosin actually are good enough to take out the entire ASA unit and even seemingly mortally wounds Agent Odell, but Black Lightning show sup to prevent Mosin from delivering the killing blow. The Markovians manage to escape, while Odell mocks Black Lightning for being too weak to kill Colonel Mosin... and then dies anyway. Apparently. I don't think this is the last we'll see of Odell just yet, because that honestly is kind of a random sequence. Instant and Mosin meet up with Dr. Jace, who has been feeding Lynn clues so she can work on the metagene stabilization cure, and since Lynn's basically figured it out, Jace can now copy Lynn's work to stabilize Markovia's metahuman army. 

Anyway, it's interesting setup. The Markovians are making their move, the Resistance is building up, the Pierce family are all buckling under the pressure, Gambi found out about Khalil, there's the mystery about Brandon and the ASA has seemingly lost their leader. Presumably either Agent Gray or that one racist commando dude from the season premiere will take over, to aid with the escalating war? Also Tobias is planning something and may have access to the outside world? Kind of a slower episode and honestly the Markovia stuff felt a bit sudden, but still a neat watch.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Wendy "Windfall" Hernandez is among the metahumans whose name is recognizable in Lynn's list. I googled the others and they don't seem to be existing DC comics characters.