Black Lightning S02E16 Review: Bad Pacing

Black Lightning, Season 2, Episode 16: The Omega

Oh, wow, this season has been... a horrifyingly messily-paced one, huh? Not that the other CW shows are anything to talk about, and I have certainly seen worse seasons of superhero material, but I walked out of this season feeling mostly disappointed. Partly because it is such a huge drop in quality compared to the first season, and a huge part of it is the fact that the writers seem to really have no idea what story they wanted to tell, saving everything up until the final two episodes and then scrambling to get through it all. The episode at least ignores the utterly uninteresting clusterfuck that is the Grace/Anissa storyline. Thank god this already jam-packed finale doesn't try to fit that dead horse plot into its runtime.

But honestly, the season has been loafing around and genuinely wasting its time and its sixteen-episode run on genuinely pointless 'sidequests' that really made me wonder why none of the things that felt extremely rushed this episode hasn't been explored better instead of spending so much time doing the Looker subplot, or building up so much stuff that end up not really amounting to anything.

The actual climax and resolution of the Jennifer storyline is... it's all right, I suppose, but that's all that I really expect of it. It wasn't anywhere as emotional as I hoped it would, the confrontation was fast, and just honestly felt more like checking out a list of "what we need for this character to feel complete". And arguably... it still felt pretty off? We get the even-more-ridiculous walking plot device Perenna show up in Jennifer's head for a pep talk (someday, I hope she gets an actual personality beyond just being the embodiment of a video game tutorial), we get the obligatory "oh no, Uncle Gambi risked himself to save me" moment that gets brushed over quickly, her taking control over her super-duper-awesome powers (which also gets brushed over quickly) and she goes off to try and murder Tobias in the climax only to be stopped by Jefferson. It's... it's an okay arc, but with how much the series has stalled to get to this point, it felt more cathartic than actually a huge character moment. Considering how much we spent with Jennifer in this season, this felt more like a quick rush-down of character development that probably could've used a proper focus episode... but, nope, instead we got that Tattoo-Man focused episode.

Speaking of plot points that really felt awkwardly paced... Lala. His return took an episode, last episode he was mostly in the background, and this one has him... get a bit of a brief "we ain't got no beef" conversation when he rescues Black Lightning from one of the Masters of Disasters, before showing up in front of Tobias, all ready to kill him... and then Tobias activates another failsafe and burns Lala up with his tattoos. Sure, the confrontation was great with Krondon hamming it up, but from a narrative standpoint... what? This whole 'tattoo' thing being tied to ghosts or whatever is never adequately explained, and I'm not sure what happened with Lala at the end. Is he dead? Is he incapacitated? Is he arrested? Did Odell get him? Lala genuinely just feels like a character they brought back because they liked the actor, but genuinely feels like a character re-introduced too late, and without any real significant impact to the plot to justify his return.

Speaking of which, Tobias's grand plan... ends up unraveling due to a classic case of him going nuts-o. And while the actor is definitely competent enough to make Tobias Whale entertaining throughout his breakdown, it's also pretty silly that after this whole "Masters of Disaster" thing being mostly a background plot throughout this season, we end up with all four thrown at Black Lightning and Thunder in a completely unremarkable fight, and all of them are dispatched pretty quickly. Oh, and he sets up a riot and releases all the metahumans in the pod basically as knee-jerk reactions, being basically the complete antithesis of the slow, deliberate planner that he has been in the previous season. I can definitely see someone as emotional as Tobias jumping the gun on making decisions, but the way everything happens in this episode just feels so abrupt like they're going through two episodes' worth of big bad season finale schemes in a single episode, and then have Black Lightning fight him in a slugfest before dropping him into the Pit. Again, the essential parts of the confrontation is still there, but it feels anticlimactic for sure.

Speaking of the riot and the Masters of Disaster... did they run out of budget? It's not a particularly huge complaint since I'm perfectly willing to watch a series with a good story and characters even if they don't have movie-quality CGI or whatever (though new Wave locking the policemen's feet does look pretty bad), but the Masters of Disasters' fight against Black Lightning and Thunder happen mostly off-screen, with some cuts to give the impression of a fight going on in the background, but other than a single shot of the Masters trapping our heroes in a water bubble and ice cube for a couple of seconds, it's mostly just regular punchy-punch. It's also hard to take the whole "riots breaking out in Freeland" seriously when all we get to see are news report and Anissa snarking about someone stealing a TV.

And the rest of the storyline honestly do feel like they're just trying to cram more things to make the finale even busier, when I would probably be perfectly happy with the episode exploring the actual things I'm interested about -- like Jennifer's eventual realization about how killing is wrong, or maybe even give Lala some actual closure beyond "lol you fail". Like, the whole bit of Coldsnap freezing the city's generator to shut of Black Lightning's powers felt utterly redundant, so is the Cape Guy death storyline, and so are the scenes where Tobias is just talking to a picture and eventually driving Cutter away. Among the many stories in Black Lightning, Tobias and Cutter's relationship is definitely nowhere in the list of plotlines I care about.

Speaking of other stuff going on in the background... we've got dr. Jace getting beaten up by Lynn before Jace surrenders herself to the police, but then gets kidnapped by the teleporting dude (credited as "Instant", apparently), who is a bounty hunter from Markovia. We've got Reverend Holt quite literally showing up apparently having risen from the dead (Lazarus Prime, or just bad communication in a previous episode?) to give a supposedly-poignant speech about the community gathering together, something that honestly fell flat on its face because that particular plot point seemed to be shoehorned into the episode without them actually exploring it.

Lynn and Odell are... interesting, with Odell quite literally disappearing halfway through the episode to gather the confused, dazed metahumans Tobias Whale let loose from their pods. Odell later shows up at the end apparently having captured Windfall and the body of Khalil (which is going to lead into a whole mess of a storyline in the third season, I'm sure) and shows up in the stinger interrupting Jefferson's speech about cobbler to draft the three Pierce members to fight the Markovians in the third season.


It's... I don't know. The best I could compare this to is the similarly messy second season finale of The Flash, I think, but the buildup for Flash's second-season finale was fairly better, and that episode at least had the budget and foresight to make the final confrontations far more entertaining. Mostly the problem is that the show really wants to have so many storylines intertwine, but also wants to have the typical main villain / main hero battle, so it just feels utterly silly that Lala's whole story in this season ends up being completely irrelevant, and that Jennifer's transition into Lightning ends up sort of muted by the fact that she ended up basically being a cheerleader for the main battle. Throw in some really poor B-plot handling, and this season finale honestly feels more messy. It definitely could be worse, though.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Anissa and Jennifer compares Gambi to Batman when talking about his toughness.