Black Lightning S03E09 Review: Red Skies Beware

Black Lightning, Season 3, Episode 9: Earth Crisis

Okay, so this is an interesting way to incorporate Black Lightning into the Crisis crossover event. I genuinely thought that we were just going to do the traditional Supergirl thing -- have something happen that ties into the huge crossover near the end of the episode, and teleport the main character to Earth-1. Instead, we actually... have a full episode that sort of ties into the Multiverse theme? Obviously, in an ideal world, we'd have more of a crossover, and we might have someone from the Earth-1 Arrowverse shows show up and, oh, I dunno, actually tie in with Black Lightning and get them to train Jennifer in superheroing or whatever. Or maybe we could have the Monitor appear with a "you are needed for the upcoming Crisis, Black Lightning!" bit. But thanks to the shows being filmed in wildly far-away places, it's a miracle Black Lightning's slated to appear in the main Crisis episodes at all. Ah, the difficulties of live-action crossovers!

Instead, it's an interesting thing that the concept of the red skies and multiversal Earths bleeding into each other that ends up being the focus of this episode. There's a bit of questionable logic leaps that Gambi and Jenn quickly jump to "oh, parallel Earths, duh" as the reason for the funky things going on, but okay. Thanks to her powers, Jennifer goes into a bit of a strange coma where she starts to vibrate and 'bleed' into other Earths, meeing Earth-1 Jennifer "Gen" and Earth-2 Jennifer "Jinn". Apparently the conflict between metahumans, Freeland and the A.S.A. have been consistent in at least three Earths, and whereas our Jennifer is just starting to mull over the choices of supporting Odell (at least partially, and her reasoning is that Lynn's working with them so there's some merit, right?) or throwing her lot in with the rest of her superhero family (where she really feels she belongs), we get to see Gen and Jinn, both of whom represent the worst extremes of what Jennifer could've chosen.

Earth-1's Gen is stuck with an A.S.A. collar, stuck as a prisoner of the Pit because she tampered with Freeland's water supply, removing the metahuman powers of everyone who drank it. This leads to peace of a sort, and Jefferson is proud of Gen's choice even though it leaves him powerless... but then we get the pretty harsh scene of Jeffesron Pierce being confronted by Odell and his cronies while preparing thanksgiving dinner, who found out that Jeff is helping running the meta underground railroad, and then coldly executes Jefferson in front of his daughters. I know it's an alternate Earth, but damn. In this scenario, Gen gets to lose her powers, gets to bring peace of a sort to Freeland and stop a lot of metahumans from joining the A.S.A. army, but she gets locked up in prison, is estranged from her family and her dad's dead.

Earth-2's Jinn, like most Earth-2 versions of familiar characters, is the more evil one, basically joining up with Odell to end the war quickly, eventually going so crazy with power and being addicted to her powers that she attacks her own family. She also goes around killing metahumans in Freeland to deny Odell and the A.S.A. the chance to weaponize them, too. China McClain has a lot of fun playing both the tragic hero Gen and Order-66 Jinn, and notably, both of these outcomes stem from the respective Jennifers picking a side other than her family. It's a bit too on-the-nose, but it's par the course for the genre, I suppose.

Both are extreme versions of what Jennifer could be, and in a different setting these might be shown as alternate futures or whatever. Of course, there's a neat bit of poignancy of Jennifer realizing that these are alternate versions of her, who have gone through the desperate measures that they all have.

Of course, the red skies quickly turn into the white wall of anti-matter that consumes Black Lightning's Earth (Earth... BL, I guess? Did we ever get a number?) kills everyone dead, first Jennifer's doppelgangers and later the entirety of Earth-BL itself... at least temporarily until the Crisis of Infinite Earths gets resolved. Black Lightning, meanwhile, seems to get warped away by some mysterious force, undoubtedly something that's about to allow Jefferson Pierce to show up in the Crisis.

Anyway, the main Black Lightning storyline gets put on the backburner for a while. There's some talk about how the Resistance's message out of Freeland is intercepted and interrupted, and something about Odell and Gray trying to put mind-control devices and Lynn making Green Light in her basement lab or whatever, but ultimately it's all put on the backburner in favour of this whole world-ending stuff. It's a neat way to incorporate the alternate-Earths concept, I suppose. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Attempting to tie in the scenes of the anti-matter wave wiping out Earth-1 and Earth-2 with the other Arrowverse shows is nearly impossible (Earth-2 is wiped out early on in Arrow's first season, whereas Earth-1 is still around as of the pre-Crisis episodes), so it's either the fact that what the show calls "Earth One" and "Earth Two" aren't the literal Earth-1 and Earth-2 from Arrow, Flash et al, or we can just attribute it to the mysterious powers of Jennifer accessing like the multiverse's vibrations or whatever causes all Jennifers to appear near the end of their respective Earth's lives.