Black Lightning, Season 1, Episode 12: The Resurrection and the Light: The Book of Pain
This is not that impressive of an episode, to be honest. It's mostly just setup, and the reintroduction of multiple villains that were kept out of sight for the better part of the season. Tobias Whale returns, apparently recovered from his wounds, to quickly take charge. He's in bed with the ASA, but clearly has no love for them... and instead, found his new protege-slash-personal-hitman, Khalil, now transformed into kind of a cyborg with dreadlocks. It's... it's expected, but the relatively tepid buildup we've got for this character makes it nowhere as impressive as it probably should be.
Likewise, Khalil's confrontation with Principal Jefferson Pierce and his ex Jennifer ends up feeling just rushed and without much emotion, just to establish that, hey, Khalil's completely run in with a bad crowd. A pair of rather rushed and unnatural scenes, in this case, feels rather rigid and doesn't really explain why Khalil is so dead-set on, well, essentially being a terrorist. Khalil shows up at the school in the climactic act of the episode, ignoring Jennifer's pleadings, in order to draw out Black Lightning and Thunder. Khalil apparently has super-strength... and... he shoots weird-looking darts at the students? Yeeaaah, that's actually not very impressive, and I'm someone who gives these superhero shows a large amount of leeway. He could do like, I dunno, throw around some lockers or slam the ground to knock students out non-lethally, but the darts just look ridiculously silly.
The rest of the episode doesn't really have much in terms of content that we haven't already seen, really. We've got a brief bit of drama between Lynn and Jefferson having a fight over Lynn wanting to 'explore all options' with Jennifer, which Jennifer takes to 'mom's working on a cure to my condition'... which, of course, ends up cleanly coming up at the end of the episode as she zaps her dad back to life with one of those cinematic-defibrillation-always-works deal.
Although admittedly, I was really pleased by the final battle, with Syonide and Tobias Whale showing up at the school as well. Syonide's fight with Thunder was well-scripted, the panic Jennifer is seeing when she realizes how real everything just got, and the rage that Black Lightning exhibits in his one-on-two battle with Tobias and Khalil are all executed competently... but the episode just felt kind of dry as all it ends up doing is setting up the finale. We've got Khalil working under Tobias, we've got Tobias apparently behind La-La's resurrection and has some kind of keyword to bring him under his control ('the Devil deals the cards') and... and it's not bad. It's just kind of dry.
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