Red Stewart reviews the twelfth episode of Black Lightning…
“The Book of Pain” was the direction I feared Black Lightning would go after the fourth episode “Black Jesus.” At the time it seemed unlikely given how solid the first four entries were, but considering all the ups and downs the series has faced in the weeks since, it was unfortunately at least partially expected at this point.
Still, as a great critic once said, expecting and desiring are two different things. With only two episodes left, I hoped Black Lightning would pull a complete return to form and return to the grounded nature of its debut episodes, and with Tobias Whale returning to the picture, my hopes were floating through the roof.
Alas, once again Black Lightning fell to disappointment, and it all began with Whale. Whale’s return was something that should have injected fear and tension into the Freeland atmosphere. With Krondon’s menacing portrayal, Whale’s reappearance would have not only felt natural, but helped him regain lost ground since his untimely departure in “Equinox: The Book of Fate.” The writers had set up so many plot threads with him, from wanting to take over Lady Eve’s business to manipulating Khalil to wanting to murder Black Lightning, that it felt strange at the time to abandon all of it in favor of some weird sci-fi/religion hybrid involving resurrections.
All those plot points come back into the picture again, but they needed time and space to develop: time and space that a single episode cannot provide. But even if I were to accept that it was possible, the writers butchered any chance of it being entertaining.
For starters, Whale’s intimidation factor is thrown out the window after he is once again relegated to being someone’s lapdog, in this case ASA director Martin Proctor’s. Proctor wants him to bring Black Lightning in alive so they can use his DNA to stabilize the rest of the experimental subjects in stasis. I might have believed that Whale was willing to be subservient were it not for two things: one, he lost Tory, who was the catalyst for his decision to claim power from Lady Eve in the first place. With Tory dead, one would think that he would be even more motivated to pursue this course of action, but alas, Tory’s death (especially at the indirect hands of Black Lightning) doesn’t even seem to bother him. We get one scene of him having a henchman killed who didn’t go back to rescue her, but outside of that he completely forgets about her death. And two, Proctor’s actor, Gregg Henry, is absolutely terrible. I didn’t bother analyzing his performance before since he was barely in previous episodes, but here Proctor is given the spotlight and Henry fails to rise to the occasion. He squints his eyes and grinds his teeth as though he’s on some wannabe western serial, and it was painful to watch. I don’t buy for one second that this guy can hold together an organization like the ASA through fear, much less someone who grew up on the harsh streets of Freeland like Whale.
The worst decision, however, has to be what the series does with Khalil. In “Equinox” it felt like Whale was going to turn him into a poster child for his anti-Black Lightning propaganda by displaying him as a victim of the hero’s violence. Instead, Whale cures his paralysis through some magic science, gives him super strength and power gauntlets, and tells him to go trash up Garfield High to lure Black Lightning out. How does any of this make sense? Not only could Black Lightning have been lured out through any criminal action, but Whale could have prepared a trap in a less public space that would have allowed him to capture the superhero more easily.
Not only is this cliche garbage, but it turns Khalil into a generic supervillain underling over the well-developed character he initially was. Seriously, ask yourselves this: how much better would the show have been if they had Whale turn the media and people of Freeland against Black Lightning through displaying this broken kid who lost his dreams? We already had the precedent set in place following Lady Eve’s murder where various citizens revealed their disgust towards Black Lightning’s alleged actions, so it is not like it would have been out of place.
But okay, even I could let all of this go and simply enjoy the new plot development on a pure entertainment level, right? Well, unfortunately even there the series falters through poor choreography. Anissa goes off to fight Syonide while Jefferson and Whale finally duke it out, and both brawls were just embarrassing to watch. With the former, Syonide empties two clips into Anissa, or “Thunder,” before realizing that she’s bulletproof. When you see someone who can deflect bullets, the reasonable course of action would be to run away: but no, Whale’s Girl Friday decides that if bullets won’t kill Thunder, metal sticks will! And when those break, she somehow reasons that hand-to-hand combat will. And the stupidest part is Anissa entertains her. When there are kids in danger, the writers apparently thought that Anissa would be better off fighting Syonide with her fists rather than simply holding her breath and letting the latter break her hands trying to hurt her. And the actual fight isn’t even enjoyable to watch: it’s sloppy, poorly shot, and brought back painful memories of the final fight between Oliver and Damien Darhk in Arrow season 4.
However, the Black Lightning/Tobias Whale fight managed to usurp it in disappointment. While not as badly choreographed, it lacked any tension because the writers have failed to build-up their confrontation. Look at how past serials have handled the growing conflict between the main hero and main antagonist: Oliver and Slade in Arrow season 2; Murdock and Fisk in Daredevil season 1. Not only were their final battles a blast to watch, but they also earned emotional investment from viewers because they had gained that over the course of the season. Black Lightning did not do any such thing: the revelation of Whale killing Jefferson’s father was so haphazardly injected into the series that I even remarked so in my review of episode six.
I could go on about my disappointments with “The Book of Pain,” from the coincidental situation that makes Jennifer’s powers useful to the writers ruining Jefferson’s relationship with Lynn, but to do so would turn this review into a rant. With the season finale airing next, the series really couldn’t afford to botch the penultimate episode this badly. Yet they did, and in doing so made me lower my expectations tremendously for next week.
Notes:
-Khalil’s wig, which serves no plot purpose whatsoever other than to make him look like a stereotypical bad boy, looked painfully fake.
Rating: 3/10
Red Stewart
