Black Lightning S02E05 Review: Totally Not Dead

Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 5: The Book of Blood, Chapter One: Requiem

It's a bit of a better episode than the previous, haphazardly-paced one, but it's certainly still a far cry from the far better-crafted first season of Black Lightning. At least this episode has a very solid idea of the story it wants to tell, even if the actual concept of Gambi's death is a bizarrely hard sell. The show's not going to kill off one of its main character literally randomly because of some punks at the beginning of a random episode with no buildup, and I'm going to make note about how stupid I find the whole affair. It's honestly kind of out of nowhere, the show is blatantly obvious that Gambi is still alive (no body? Yeah right) and from a pacing and storytelling standpoint, if Gambi is dead like this, even if they didn't dick around with the whole "no body" thing, it would be a genuinely piss-poor way to write out a character. And I'm genuinely not sure what this is meant to accomplish, narrative-wise, other than to throw in another dosage of "the world hates Jefferson Pierce's guts".

That said, though, the lack of build-up aside, the episode actually does an amazing job showcasing how the Pierce family deals with Gambi's death. Jefferson's staunch denial and anger at Lynn's even trying to give him Gambi's pocketwatch, and his later quiet scene of crying in Gambi's tailor shop; Lynn's attempt to move on; Jennifer's open mourning; Anissa looking for solace in sex and then throwing herself headlong into work... it's all genuinely well delivered, especially the quiet scene with Jefferson at the end of the episode. It's amazingly crafted, which is why I genuinely feel cheated that at no point in the episode does the episode make it remotely believable that Gambi is really dead.

Again, it's the same problem I had with episode 4, albeit on a far, far smaller scale since most of the sub-plots in this episode deal with the Gambi 'death'. I guess it's the sheer randomness and suddenness of the whole "GAMBISDEADLETSGO" prologue for this episode. Eh. I dunno. I really felt like it would've worked better if it had some time to build up. Again, at least the payoffs are pretty neat.

The other subplots of this episode... I remain genuinely uninvested in the Jennifer/Khalil romance. The Anissa/Grace one is a bit more interesting, what with Grace telling Anissa to not use her like a "handbag", but it's... it's not super interesting either. Grace developing powers is interesting, I suppose? There's a subplot with Lynn and Dr. Jace, and Lynn basically refuses to administer the cure until she can cure 100% of the patients, while Dr. Jace ends up making the "hard choice" and tricks Lynn into administering the cure with a faked simulation, curing half of the pod babies and killing the other half. It's... it's genuinely confusing, because I think that's just it for the pod babies? They're out of the picture? Dr. Jace herself has been more of a one-dimensional plot device more than an actual character, so I don't really know how I feel about this. There's also Khalil continuing to get verbal abuse from Tobias, which would get old if Krondon isn't such an entertaining actor.

There is a bit with Tobias Whale manipulating Councilman Kwame Parker and it's always entertaining to listen to Tobias's villain speeches, and Tobias basically got the councilman to move the community hospital to another location, supposedly under the reason of providing a safer location. Speaking of said hospital, Anissa finally gets a job there, and ends up encountering a bit of a next-episode hook (proper build-up, yay!) as she encounters a married couple who seem pretty jumpy, only to have the husband of the couple stumble into the clinic and drop dead, oozing some kind of metal Venom-esque oozing fluid from his wounds. This leads to the final scene of the episode, where Anissa goes off to South Freeland to investigate matters, and it seems that we may have some sort of "a whole town goes down with a virus" horror story thing.

Overall, it's an okay episode. The pacing aside, there's nothing that I would really call bad about this episode -- most of the subplots are solid, the writing for Jefferson Pierce is nothing short of fantastic, and the buildup for subsequent storylines is pretty neat. It's still not as strong as the first season, I reiterate, because the first season feels genuinely well-crafted to stand as a season of well-paced chapters. This season's pacing is just bizarrely all over the place.