The fourth and final season of Black Lightning resumed last night with a backdoor pilot for the Painkiller spin-off, which saw Anissa and Grace encounter Khalil while on their honeymoon in the futuristic city of Akashic Valley. After Grace was kidnapped and Khalil accidentally poisoned Anissa, he was forced to rescue her himself.
1. Night City 2021
It’s easy to forget until you watch them, but the budgets of pilots are so much larger than most episodes of TV that it’s amazing: you expect you’re in for another episode of Black Lightning, but right from the start, this throws an enormous amount of CGI at you with the introduction of Akashic Valley, a Vegas-esque location heavily influenced by Tokyo and Seoul. It really felt like one of the cities of the DC Animated Universe, with the fusion of futuristic and anachronistic elements like video phone booths, holographic performers, and flashbulb cameras. There’s a subtle Afrofuturistic feel as well, with characters wearing distinctive ear rings: Anissa, who’s dressed to the nines in this episode, wears ones bearing the image of Nefertiti. If nothing else, it was a refreshing change of scenery from the familiar Freeland.
2. Hello New Characters
The episode did a solid job introducing Khalil’s new pals, former ASA tech guy Philky (Alexander Hodge), and veteran military medic Donald (James Roch), establishing what we needed to know about them while making it clear they’ve been working together out of Philky’s night club for a year. That wasn’t so much the case with Wo (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, who seems like she’ll become Khalil’s new love interest), as her apparent arcane knowledge didn’t really factor into the plot. She was right about one thing: the Theranos-esque Ms. Maya (Sibongile Mlambo) is bad news — did anyone expect her to be Odell’s daughter?
3. The Strange Case of Mr. Payne and P.K.
Khalil has developed the full blown, Hollywood version of dissociative identity disorder, with the Painkiller persona now speaking with a much deeper, artificial sounding voice. It was visually interesting to see Khalil and Painkiller in their shared mental mindscape speaking to each other, especially when the Marvel Cinematic Universe has done away with the comic book depiction of Bruce Banner/Hulk’s psyche as literally separate souls, but I’m curious how folks with DID actually feel about this take on a popular TV show.
4. One and Done
I liked knowing going into this episode that any major conflicts would be resolved, in contrast to the show’s generally glacial pacing: I get Black Lightning‘s creators have avoided the villain-of-the-week format to explore the characters, and overcome the lack of source material, but it was just nice that most of what happened in this episode was relevant to it, instead of setting up next week, or (god forbid) the week after. Now that Black Lightning is ending, I can safely say I wish the show had balanced serialization with standalone stories a lot better. (Remember how Game of Thrones‘ best episodes would hone in on one or two locations, instead of checking in with all of them? Now you do.)
5. Black Lightning‘s End Makes Sense Now
I now understand why the CW would end Black Lightning in favor of Painkiller, because on the one hand, you want to refresh the show and permanently conclude the conflict with Whale in favor of other threads, but you can’t have Jeff go off flying to another city on the regular, because he has a school to run. If Painkiller is greenlit, I expect it to carry over many of the characters and storylines from Black Lightning for guest appearances, just as it has reintroduced Odell, albeit without the expectation of it being the Black Lightning show.
Bonus Thoughts:
– It’s weird seeing China McClain’s Jennifer in the recap; in fact it’s weird how her dramatic transformation is not brought up at all.
– I like how calm Khalil has become, asking an injured mook who he works for like he’s a child with a question for you.
– Anissa’s necklace is huge.
All right folks, see you all next week for when we resume “The Book of Ruin.”
