Black Lightning S02E06 Review: Romeo and Juliet Vampires

Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 6: The Book of Blood, Pt. 2: The Perdi

We're back to Black Lightning and... and it's an episode where I kind of understand form an intellectual level what the show's trying to do, but the execution, the pacing and the buildup have all been so haphazardly handled that I really can't get invested in any of the storylines that happen in this episode. Khalil and Lynn probably get the best storylines out of everyone in this episode, but that's faint praise because everything just feels so sequestered from each other, and so oddly paced.

Let's start with the storyline in South Freeland, which is quite literally sequestered from everything happening in regular Freeland. The storyline involves this... this poorly-done introdump of two communities, the white metahumans known as the Sange and the forest-dwelling black community known as the Perdi, and apparently we're getting a ripoff of Romeo and Juliet's plot with the interracial couple from the previous episode. It's... it's not poorly done, but the way Anissa discovers this society genuinely feels utterly haphazard and shoehorned in. I have seen Saturday morning cartoons with villains of the week that are introduced in better ways than this.

The Sange are apparently led by this powerful metahuman called the Looker, who, unlike her far more heroic comic-book counterpart, controls... silver... parasitic, mind-controlling goop? That grants her 'thralls' super-speed and super-strength? It's an attempt at modernizing comic-book Looker's vampire powers, I guess. And... and it's all just so underwhelming. The whole Sange/Perdi storyline just feels like it is dropped in our lap without any real rhyme, reason or buildup, and is such a huge departure from how close-knit everything in season one of Black Lightning is. We get a decent action scene, sure, but I really find it so hard to be invested in this bland, emotionally flat segment. Throw in some obvious, subtlety-of-a-brick season-one-Supergirl moral lessons about racism, and the whole storyline just feels kind of messy.

Oh, and Gambi is alive, to the absolute surprise of no one, and I'm not even more convinced that the showmakers is just wasting our time with that one whole mourning episode. I get that they wanted to subvert the "no mourning" trope, but jeez, was that really necessary? Anyway, Gambi's torturing the assassin, trying to find out who hired the hit on him, helping out Black Lightning and Thunder with a drone, and also not really having a good reason not to have contacted the Pierce family.

The Lynn storyline is... it's moving kind of as expected, I guess, and led to a pretty great moment with Jennifer basically telling Lynn that while it's not her fault, it's her responsibility. It's a neat bit of maturity from Jennifer, and I can totally buy that Lynn's basically broken down with her ultra-idealistic worldview. It's just that, well, it's not particularly interesting to watch, and, again, dr. Jace is such a flat character and the whole tube-babies-vaccine storyline was never all that interesting to begin with. We did get a couple of pretty great dramatic scenes, but that's about it.

The Khalil storyline's probably the best part of this episode, I guess, but that's because Khalil and Tobias's abusive relationship has been adequately built up, especially in this season. Tobias basically wants Reverend Holt dead, and for Khalil to do it. During his ranting, Tobias basically lets slip that he's responsible for the original attack on the church march. We get some pretty great moments of Khalil confiding to Jennifer about everything that's going on -- it's not the most interesting storyline, but it really gives the character development and internal turmoil within Khalil time to brew, without going too over-the-top until we actually get the confrontation where Khalil chokes Reverend Holt, but is unable to go through with it. This ends up leading to a confrontation between Khalil and Tobias, in which Tobias beats the shit out of Khalil while talking some pretty horrific shit like "the fact that I'm fond of you has kept me from disciplining you". One cracked aquarium and one beatdown later, and Khalil seems to be... broken? I'm not sure what he's planning to do, but it's definitely far more well-written.

Shame that practically everything else in this episode seems genuinely confused at the direction that they're going. The main cast manages to stumble through the episode and deliver decent performances, but practically everything else feels like the writer team just tried to shoehorn as many sub-plots and storylines into the episode. The fact that the episode titles tell me that we're closing another "Book" next episode probably means that we're going to get another "WAAAA BIG EVENT" arc-ending episode, and I honestly am not sure I care all that much about the vampire race-war or the fake-dead Gambi or the Lynn storyline to be excited for the end of "The Book of Blood".

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Looker, a.k.a. Emily "Lia" Briggs, was once a normal woman living in Gotham City, but was kidnapped by a group of underground vampires from Abyssia. The superhero team, the Outsiders, arrived and rescued Looker, and it's discovered that Looker has psionic abilities. Later on in the Outsiders' run, Looker would be transformed into a vampire.
• King Victor of Markovia is briefly mentioned to have died on Gambi's radio. King Victor Markov is the father of two of DC's superheroes -- the Teen Titan known as Terra, and the Outsider known as Geo-Force.