Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 7: The Sange
Slowly catching up to superhero shows... but part two of Black Lightning's "Book of Blood" arc is... it's pretty disappointing, isn't it? The past couple of episodes of Black Lightning has had severe issues with juggling its cast and pacing, and the problems just mount in this episode.The laughably simplistic Sange-vs-Perdi racist fight has the subtlety of a brick thrown at your face, and while we do get some cool action scenes of Black Lightning and Thunder fighting against Looker's army of superspeed metal-goop-empowered metahumans, the world-building given in the previous episode turns out to just be an info-dump that doesn't really go anywhere, and Looker herself is basically reduced to a simple, flat "oh, so you stand up for your race and it's good, and I stand up for my race and it's bad, and by the way I'm also a psychopathic vampire" straw-woman. Honestly, after Black Lightning handling its racist character relatively realistically, Looker is such a flat plot device that I genuinely feel no emotion when our supposed heroes basically shrug her off and condemn her to get experimented on by the ASA.
Also, Black Lightning's suit has camouflage abilities... for... since when? I could think of many places where that could've been useful. I did at least get a laugh at the sheer stupidity of Looker's cabal for trying to kill a superhero called Black Lightning by... electrocuting him. That's.. that's kinda funny. Black Lightning interacting with the baby is also pretty fun.
What's not quite as funny, though, is the sheer bizarre handling of Gambi's character, who just gets a couple of shots of him being mysterious as he looks at the situation through the drone or something. Basically at the end of the episode Jefferson meets up with Gambi and is both relieved and angry that Gambi hasn't contacted them. Keep the assassins off his trail? Fair enough, but it's one thing to lie low, and it's another thing to not even drop something like an encrypted message of "hey, I'm alive, I'll contact you when it's save". Was there any real reason other than to fabricate drama? As great as Cress Williams' acting in that episode where Gambi died, the emotional payoff is pretty dull and poorly done. The sole redeeming feature in the execution of this plotline is that it's at least over.
The other subplot of this episode is basically Jennifer slowly finding the guts to elope with Khalil. She gets to talk with her mind-reading therapist (who is less of a character than Looker, honestly, and exists just for Jen to bounce dialogue off of), try and convince Khalil to run away from Tobias... and Khalil finally decides that enough is enough, but his abuser, Tobias, ends up having a tighter leash on him that he thought. Jennifer finally ends up having to use her powers to help Khalil escape from Tobias's assassins. And then the two elope, much to the shock of the rest of the cast.At least these two have a valid reason and I can buy into why they did this pretty stupid thing of not telling the rest of their family -- Khalil is a villain in the Pierce family's eyes, and also Jennifer's a teenager. But Gambi? No excuses there. Oh, and we also have some minimal-effort foreshadowing of Grace having powers, and Jennifer apparently having super-special-awesome powers that can really fuck shit up.
Overall, though, the episode's pretty messy. I'm very glad that the bizarre Sange/Perdi subplot that seems to just exist to provide a villain-of-the-week for a two-parter is over. Honestly, it's kind of a shame to see how quickly the show ended up being kind of a trainwreck after how solid the first season is.
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