Red Stewart reviews the fourteenth episode of Black Lightning season 2…
Black Lightning returned from its second season break to a surprising twist: Lala is back from the dead and he is looking for questions. I was admittedly mixed on this decision by the showrunners. Part of me was upset that the last season had spent so much time investing in Lala’s resurrection, only to then have him unceremoniously killed off by Tobias during a suicide run in the final episodes, but another part of me was admittedly happy that the second season was moving on from that strange plot thread wherein people were coming back to life without explanation.
Regardless, Lala’s appearance here works three-fold: it provides closure to his previous appearances, explains how his revival even came to be, and sets him up on a new journey. Now of course, was it wise for the creators to start yet another character arc when we only have three episodes left in the season? The answer is no, but if there’s one thing I’ve come to expect from the writers of Black Lightning, it’s that they appear to have some strange fear of being cancelled at any minute and, as such, have consistently committed to flooding every season with as many story beats as possible. So it is what it is.
Most of the episode is divided between three sections: Lala confronting Jefferson over the death of a childhood friend from his past, Anissa looking for Grace, and Lynn dealing with Agent Odell’s draconian tests for the ASA’s sole remaining metahuman Wendy. Lala and Jefferson’s part takes up the bulk of “Original Sin,” and that ends up having both good and bad aspects. On the one hand, it makes the narrative more streamlined by giving enough time for both characters to truly communicate without their dialogue coming off has hackneyed; however, on the other, it forces the writers to wring an emotional truth out of a plot development that was never talked about until this very episode, that being the aforementioned death of Lala’s friend Earl.
Now, it’s not impossible to pull off this kind of heartstabbing-shock value: the television series M*A*S*H used to do it all the time. In Black Lightning’s case, though, the writers were unfortunately just unable to make it work. In addition to this, the cinematography/editing used to depict Lala conversing with his hallucinations was outright average: there’s nothing more than hard cuts between the scenes with the other deceased characters and the scenes without them, a tactic that any person with a basic understanding of filmmaking could have done. Still, there’s enough solid acting from William Catlett and Cress Williams to make the whole thing enjoyable enough, and it was nice to, as I said, finally get some answers on the whole Lala/tattoo situation.
Anissa’s quest to find Grace helped offset the emotional turbulence of the Lala/Jefferson diatribe by providing some genre thrills through the episode’s only action beat wherein Thunder is assaulted by an elderly Asian men in an apartment where Anissa thinks Choi is. The relationship between the two women has admittedly been a mixed bag in terms of development, but I can’t say that the writers haven’t at least tried to make us care, which gives Anissa’s drive to find her girlfriend some weight.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for Wendy, who readers will remember as the girl with the ability to generate gusts of wind. She has been seen in this series so sporadically that I haven’t been able to form a connection with her, preventing her from being anything more than a plot device the writers pull out of their bag of tools whenever they need to create some sort of pseudo-tension. It’s a shame, because she is someone who could have been a pivotal part of Lynn’s ethical dilemmas in choosing to work with the ASA had she been better integrated. Alas, the only thing she serves to advance is the existing confirmation that Agent Odell is a deceptively evil person.
Overall though, “Original Sin” managed to be consistently entertaining, whether it was hearing Jefferson reflect on his past mistakes or Gambi helping Anissa find solace in Choi’s vanishing. And considering this was one of the few episodes to not have Tobias in it, I’d say that was a significant feat on the end of the writers.
Rating – 7/10
Red Stewart
