Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 11: Prodigal Son
So this episode's... huh. It's weird. It sort of acts as a coda to the pretty drawn-out and honestly quite disappointing "Book of Rebellion" part of Black Lightning -- something that was built up to relatively well in the preceding episodes, but was executed poorly. Thankfully, though, this episode sort of does manage to redeem that whole subplot somewhat by giving it an emotional gut-punch of a conclusion. Unfortunately, it also unexpectedly results in the death of one of the main characters of "Book of Rebellion", Khalil.
And... I've not really been the biggest fan of Khalil on this show, honestly, but he's a relatively solid character with solid motivations, a tragic backstory and I guess a couple of decent scenes with Jennifer. This episode has his death be basically a drawn-out affair that tries its best to tug at the viewers' heartstrings and give as many "will they/won't they" false hopes at possible healing. We've got Jennifer's new powers of electrical-impulse-X-Ray vision thing, we've got Jennifer bringing up the potential of putting Khalil into a pod, we've got Lynn coming in with the full force of the ASA (and being unreasonably dickish to that well-meaning doctor, to be honest)... but, nope, at the end of the episode, Khalil just straight-up dies.
And he dies with a couple of interesting scenes. More relevant to the plot as a whole and less to the characters is him asking Black Lightning to kill Tobias, that they can't trust the system that Tobias has beaten. We've later got Jennifer asking convenient plot-device-friend Perenna to make one last illusion of Khalil and Jennifer having a farewell while at a mindscape of a high school prom before Khalil dies, which is pretty sad.
Not to be a cynic about the pretty well-done death scene... but Perenna the empath is basically just a walking plot device, huh? How she shows up and what connection she has to Jeff and Lynn is never explained, she quite literally appears whenever someone needs a pep talk, and disappears without really having much personality beyond being generically mysterious. She also shows up quite literally out of nowhere earlier in the episode to help Jennifer calm down, and I am not sure if this is just bad writing, or if we're getting something more with the character.
It's also not the only death of the episode, because the episode opens with recurring character Reverend Holt dying during a sermon about taking back the streets and condemning all the violence, but then collapses courtesy of a poisoned hankerchief by Giselle. Although it honestly didn't register that Holt straight-up died instead of him just fainting until around halfway through the episode when they talk about a wake for him. Makes you wonder why Tobias didn't just get Giselle as his go-to assassin from the get-go, but eh.
Speaking of Tobias, we've got an interesting B-plot of Black Lightning finally bringing Hendersen into the superhero operation, which is definitely a nice, fun scene of Hendersen being this charming mix of confusion and amusement as he enters the secret lair, finds Gambi alive, and cracks jokes about how cheap Jefferson is for giving him a cheap-ass burner phone when he has access to so much fancy tech. We get a fun, well-acted scene where Hendersen arrives at Tobias's crib with a camera glued to his tie to allow Gambi to basically scan the room, and we get Tobias's pretty hammy declaration of how he totally isn't affiliated with The 100, and that he cut ties with Khalil once he found out about the criminal ties. This sort of goes nowhere because the mystery safe in Tobias's house doesn't contain the ASA briefcase at all.
Tobias, meanwhile, in addition to using Giselle to finally get rid of Reverend Holt, sends Todd off to break Helga Jace out of prison. We get the revelation that Tobias and Jace have history of working together, with Jace being responsible for the anti-aging serum that kept both of them young, and Jace basically shows Tobias where to go in order to presumably get to the mysterious Masters of Disaster pods. S'neat.
There are some smaller B-plots going on that... that are nice to have in a pretty slow episode. We've got the possibly-irrelevant reveal that Tobias and Giselle apparently used to date or something (I'm frankly surprised Giselle stayed on for so long), we've got the pretty eye-rolling scene of Jennifer blowing up a racist bitch's car with lightning (which, while fun, felt out of place in this episode), and the revelation that Jennifer can generate too much energy for even Jeff to siphon when she's freaking out.
Overall, it's a strong 'event' episode. With the Khalil/Jennifer doomed-romance story being put to an end with some finality, I really hope this could be the start of some course correction for this season.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Helga Jace, who I probably completely missed was the scientist that turned Brion Markov into Geo-Force in the comics (something that I didn't realize until I watched Young Justice's fantastic third season recently), is mentioned to have been the head of Markovia's meta-human program.
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