Black Lightning exits The CW’s superhero lineup with a busy, unremarkable finale
Image: Photo: Boris Martin/The CW TV Reviews Lightning
After its intimate, personal first season, Black Lightning faced a bit of a conundrum. Where the first season was able to focus mostly on Jefferson’s conflicted feelings about donning the Black Lightning costume again, and what his role in vigilante justice should be, the story couldn’t stop there. It couldn’t be contained. Of course Jefferson would become a superhero again, and therefore the story and this world must build and expand.
In that expansion, something was lost. The first season of Black Lightning worked so well because of the lack of world building. Rather than sending the story out in a bunch of different directions, the show kept things simple, and delivered a season propelled by well thought out character motivations. It didn’t reinvent the superhero wheel, but it did offer up a refreshing perspective.
As the world built out and evil governments (both foreign and domestic), undead villains, and mentions of Civil War raised the stakes to something closer to the grandiose, city-destroying ones we’re used to when we go to the theater, Black Lightning lost its character-focused touch. The show had to grow out of necessity, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t acknowledge the loss.
The show had its moments across seasons two and three, but the foundation was cracking under the pressure, and the fourth and final season has seen some of the shakiest, and least consequential, storytelling yet. There have been “Moments,” ones meant to convey moral dilemma and inner struggle. There have been mysteries and cliffhangers and political intrigue. But none of it has ever really coalesced into something meaningful or impactful.
That’s especially clear throughout the series finale, which is largely made up of endless exposition and not much else. The first half of this episode is nearly all setup and talking, with scene after scene of characters explaining what’s happening and what they need to do rather than, you know, actually doing those things. We listen to Lynn dump information about needing to find Tobias but also needing to get to the emitter to get meta powers back all while everyone debates how best to move on now that Jefferson is “dead.”
It’s rather maddening to watch unfold. I know this show was dealt a tough hand with cancellation (and The CW choosing not to move forward with the Painkiller spin-off), but still, there’s just no urgency here. There’s no stakes, or at least none that feel more than your average, generic “we need to save our city” type of stuff. Every bit of action here is predictable, and it feels like the show is just going through the motions without really trying to engage us in any way.
It’s really a shame, because Black Lightning has had more than its fair share of great moments and story arcs, and it probably deserved more time to tell more stories, but external circumstances doesn’t stop the series finale from feeling like a dud. I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to connect with here? Jennifer coming back is a neat moment, as is the way the show tied Jefferson’s killing of Tobias to the very first time he used his powers to kill someone when he was younger, but otherwise this all feels very anticlimactic. The raid to destroy the emitter is executed with little flair, everything involving Lopez and Shakur is a waste of airtime, and keeping your protagonist locked underground in a coffin for most of the episode is certainly a strange choice.
With that said, more strange choices might have been preferable to what this series finale ended up offering. This is one of the tidiest, conflict-free endings to a show I’ve ever seen. I don’t even mind some of the stale elements, like Lynn and Jefferson deciding to get remarried, or the “passing of the torch” moment at the end of the episode, but I wish everything that came before that final family scene was more compelling, more adventurous and complicated, like the show has been in the past.
Ultimately, I think Black Lightning simply got to a point where there wasn’t much left to tell in any interesting way. Sure, the show could have kept going—oddly enough, Lala gets the final line of the series, coming back from the dead (again) to laugh at the impaled body of Tobias—but this whole season has been defined by the show struggling to find new ways to capture the energy it used to have. As Jefferson now knows, you have to let go of the past in order to keep moving forward. It’s just a shame that while letting go of the past Black Lightning couldn’t find another a more meaningful path for itself.
32 Comments
Clearly the answer is that Grace and Anissa belong with all of the other lesbian superheroes on Batwoman, and Jennifer can come over for some sister frustration bonding with Mary. OR …. Jennifer probably would have some decent bonding with Alice after that whole “my family didn’t realize it wasn’t me” arc.
In my dreams, there’s a Mary, Jen, Thea show, maybe Alex could guest, but Sarah Lance is too good for them. Berlanti et. al. can’t write love interests for love nor money, but their sisters are consistently awesome.Jen would be better off joining Iris’s support group for people replaced by the mirror people. Somewhat healthier than hanging with Alice.
Hmmm, and here I was thinking that they could head over to Legends and make that show even gayer. But your addition of sister bonding puts Batgirl over the top here.
Yeah, Lala popping out of the cement at the end left me scratching my head. It’s fine I suppose it’s just a really weird beat to end on.
Aw. Wayne Brady did not come back to choke a bih!
Also, gotta dub Black Lightning Orca because he loves killing Whales!
Poor Painkiller, maybe become a Legend? Just remember, Beebo is God. Same applies for Lightning (doubtful), Thunder and Wylde.TL;DR – Show was dope imo, grades go brrr in shredder.
Anyways, since this season in particular had its challenges (China Anne McClain, give us the tea), I’m not mad at it. Few minority superheroes that get the spotlight actually address the issues they face, not just the villainous and extraordinary, so props to the CW because on the small screen they have and are highlighting real world ills in their story arcs (Supergirl, Batwoman, Superman and Lois).While this review argues Black Lightning’s world building hurt its core, I didn’t dislike the direction. The threats Jefferson Pierce and his kin faced did not seem forced; Family drama, kids caught up in gang violence, a government who, when at its best, neglects disenfranchised folks and, at its worst, actively harasses, exploits, and murders them, even the Markovian invasion being orchestrated in part by a justifiably disloyal and radicalized Gravedigger, all this was thrilling and made sense for me.
I loved the show, praise to everyone involved, even Krondon, who played a villain I love to hate!
Interesting choice to end with a conflicted Jen still figuring out how to deal with what she went through and the fact that only Jeff noticed that something was wrong.Also dealing with China Anne McClain’s departure by having a Lightning II take her place when she died only to have Lightning I return from the dead and retake the mantle is SUCH a comic book way to handle the character.
I’ll give it one thing, it was better than season 3. But yeah you could tell they didn’t know that this was going to be the final season with how rushed everything was.I’m surprised that Gambi managed to survive the whole thing. He was prime dead meat material all series long.For a show that was about family they sure spent a lot of time apart. Especially Anissa, she spent so much time off by herself. Which didn’t really help sell her relationship with Grace when Grace kind of only existed in Anissa’s orbit.I do not care that Painkiller didn’t get picked up, the backdoor pilot did nothing for me. I guess Khalil can go off and have fun not remembering anything that happened on this show.Who knows, maybe they’ll do an Outsiders show someday with Anissa & Grace. Then again probably not.
Painkiller was such a weird choice anyway. Why would you cancel a lower rated show and spin off a character with less name recognition? The only thing I can think is that he would have been a younger lead, which is more on brand for the CW, but that really doesn’t seem like enough to carry a whole series by itself.
Even if he was younger, nothing about the spinoff was playing up his youth. He was basically going to be an assassin operating in Futuristic Macaw.
For a show that was about family they sure spent a lot of time apart.
For me, that’s when it started sliding off the rails a little bit. Even in the second season, they split up the Pierce family so completely that it was basically four separate shows.
Also, even though it makes for easy (and somewhat realistic) conflict, I’m desperately sick of “the wife” character constantly railing against anybody being a superhero in a superhero show. Also, Dad railing against his daughter/s being a superhero in a superhero show. It’s never particularly interesting or dramatic because anyone fighting against the premise of the thing we’re watching is never going to come across as anything more than a killjoy scold. They’re never going to be proven to be correct, the other characters can’t heed their advice (because “The Adventures of Assistant Principal Jefferson Pierce and his two Totally Normal Daughters” isn’t the name of the show) so it’s all a matter of waiting around for the killjoy character to either come around or do something monumentally stupid and dangerous that will then make them come around.
What gets me about the girls superheroing is, they never ever took good advice. I get the cockiness of youth, but come on, at a certain point you’ve got to start noticing how you keep doing the opposite of what your dad advises and then things go sour.I like shows where there is plausible conflict between characters, but I don’t like when the conflict is rooted in stupidity.One thing I did like was when Jen met her multiverse counterparts, and kind of realized that the middle ground her dad treads makes sense. In particular, she noted that refusing to kill comes with some drawbacks, but it also keeps a hero from becoming a monster, so it’s the better path, drawbacks and all. That was good writing.
According to five minutes of Internet research, filming began in late October and the announcement that this was the last season came on November 20th so they probably knew around episode six or so that it was over. It’s hard to end a show without more lead time. I wonder how much rewriting they had to do.
My guess would be the entire Jenn plot since China Ann McClain was planning to leave the show, and then they canceled it so that didn’t matter.
I want to highlight that “JJ’s” “I thought I killed you” was a well-executed surprise, since there was (I’m pretty sure) no foreshadowing that the switch was anything besides “actress leaves show”. Although now I’m wondering if they just pulled it out of their ass because they were able to get China McClain back for the last ep, in which case, not so much clever as lucky.
(I was hoping that the last line would be “Dad, if I’m Black, and Lightning, why am I just called Lightning? Also, how long has Grace been known as Wylde [in captions at least]? I’m confused, Dad”.)
I would assume the latter because as it is JJ’s story line makes no sense with the twist. Especially if she was supposed to be evil this whole time.
They actually started selling me on Painkiller last week. But that’s because I have spent the last six months or so realizing and codifying what I like best in drama, and it’s being able to root for a villain without worrying some annoying goody-two-shoes hero will take them out. Once it hit me that Painkiller was going to be like that, I was on board with making it my new guilty pleasure. Oh well, gives me more time to watch Chinese costume revenge dramas.
I agree. Black Lightning, season one, made insularity work. It served double duty as commentary for the black American experience. Finally, somebody had a halfway decent answer to the perennial question of “well why not just call Superman [or whoever] and knock this shit out in an afternoon?” It’s not an answer that reflects very well on Superman [or whoever,] granted, but that’s got some energy to it too, right?It’s one hell of a balancing act to expand the scope (and creep the power) in a show that starts there, and, no, Black Lightning didn’t really manage it.Here’s my hot take to spur conversation: artistically speaking, Tobias Whale needed to be unceremoniously killed by some third party. It would’ve brought everything back around again, serving to reinforce the idea of insularity from the show’s first season by way of counterexample. Whale got too big for his britches, started thinking globally, and, boom, just like that, the actual powers-that-be decided he needed to go and so he was gone. All of his many victims in Freeland are left to accept incidental off-brand McJustice, while being sent a grim reminder about their own place in the world. In a shot of grim irony, Jefferson ends up not having to struggle with his code, but only because whitey has once again asserted that he and his code are too small to matter.
If they wanted to get really cheeky with it, they could’ve had some smug asshole say something like “Mr. Whale, when, in all of human history, has any white man ever thought that albinism was a loophole?” right before the hammer came down.
That was definitely something that season 2 Black Lightning would’ve contemplated. By Season 4, they’d been cast too far adrift, and started clinging to traditional tropes and arcs out of reflex.It certainly didn’t help the series finale that it was coming off a bunch of abortive backdoor piloting for Painkiller, and somehow managed to turn its last five minutes into what sounded like a pitch for a sequel series… which, well, is very hard to distinguish from ‘next season, but with some cast changes.’I get it, man. You want a world to feel lived-in. You want the audience to believe that the world is going to keep spinning even though their window into it is closing. And, yes, Beebo luv crossover, so why not keep all the doors open on your way out of the building? All of that is valid, and the former is even a legitimate artistic motivation and choice. But this particular episode did not handle it well.
This was a bad finale. Tobias looked ridiculous during his death. Khalil couldn’t get a good haircut to save his life and none of the Pierce women could hear good advise until it was too late.Sucks it got cancelled for being too expensive, i.e. needing more black people than Vancouver could provide.
The character can be brought back for a television reunion movie. give it 2 years. it will happen.
Love this show, but this finale was a huge snooze. Holding out hope that Anissa & Grace end up on Batwoman to form some version of The Outsiders, but now that they are Freeland’s heroes, I’m not sure how to make that make sense.
Something tells me that of this show were one of those with white leads, this review would be far less critical of the show’s failures and excuse all of its shortcomings as “But wasn’t it So Much Fun??”See: every Legends of Tomorrow review.
This whole finale was bizarre and it seemed like it was written not knowing that this would be the finale.Khalil, the best part of this season for me, was absent for most of this episode up until the end. There was almost no reaction to Jefferson’s “death” aside for like 30 seconds. The JJ/Jenn twist was COMPLETELY out of left field. The final fight between Tobias and BL was anticlimatic. The police chief sucked and her whole character and plotline was a waste of time. And what the hell was up with Lala returning?!What a shame for BL to get a finale like this. It was definitely the only Arrowverse show that I enjoyed all of its seasons on air, so to get this type of finale is brutal.
For me Black Lightning would have remained excellent if they could have kept Jill Scott for more episodes. Her villain turn was the highlight of the first season and I was so happy to have her back last year that I forgave that season quite a bit of nonsense.I also think taking Jefferson out of the school over and over was a mistake. All these Arrowverse shows seem very frustrated by the pretense of a day job and a secret identity so they get rid of it as soon as they can to focus on the superheroics. Jefferson’s work as a teacher and a principal was such an integral part of who he was as a person that it never felt right for him to be away from it. The show and the character suffered when they lost that grounding.Still, with all it’s faults I’ll miss it.
My favorite shot from the 1st season. Due to the drop in quality I never finished the second season. It’s a shame because I really liked the show.I could have sworn I have seen that exact same mural in Atlanta. It depicts local hero civil rights activist John Lewis. On January 15, 2017, Lewis said he didn’t believe Trump was a “legitimate president” He wasn’t wrong. Lewis endorsed Joe Biden for president on April 7, 2020, a day before Biden effectively secured the Democratic nomination. He recommended Biden pick a woman of color as his running mate. Unfortunately he passed away in July 2020 and never saw the day that Biden selected Kamilla Harris as his running mate in August. On January 21, 2021 Trump’s reign of terror finally ended. This was one year and a day after the first case of Covid 19 was reported in the US. The end of the pandemic could finally be in sight. The caveat being that the majority of the US population still isn’t vaccinated. As long as there are lots of people who choose not to vaccinate, you leave the door open for Covid to come back with a vengeance after the summer. Almost one in five people is still in wait-and-see mode with the vaccines. They are proven to be very effective and safe. Please i beg you.GET THAT SHOT NOW.I’m so tired. This is no way to live.
I’m a bunch of episodes behind (once I heard the series was over I decided to save the final run for a binge-watch) but I have to say one of the things I’ll miss most about Black Lightning is the fantastic soundtrack. As with Luke Cage over on Netflix, music cues is one of the elements that the show really had down right from the beginning, and it added a lot.
All of the old “Arrowverse” shows are either ending or being shown the door. It is a shame but the CW has now partnered with HBO and they are developing shows that will be only on HBO. The budget differences between Superman/Stargirl and the old shows is a chasm. Netflix is no longer giving them money to offset the costs so all of these shows I think are done after next year, like when the Marvel shows all ended on Netflix. Supergirl is going, Black Lightening is now gone, they killed the spinoff and the green arrow spin off. Frankly, the Flash is having its worst season ever and looks like it is limping to a finish. I would be shocked if Legends is also not cancelled next year. They like the critics liking it, but no Netflix money means no production money and it does not get good enough ratings.After all that work of doing the “Crisis” story and having finally a shared Earth, it all came to a rather ignominious end.
The final season of Black Lightning fizzled out. It’s not bad per se, but it doesn’t rise to electrifying heights either. While season three might’ve had too much going on, this felt like it
didn’t have enough. Some viewers may appreciate a back to basics
approach, but it didn’t have a dynamic hook to balance the lowered
ambitions.
It turns out that JJ was actually an energy alien that had stolen Jen’s
DNA & memories. WHAT? The series finale is not the time to be
dropping retcons like that!
So much of the series stressed how important it was not to sink to
Whale’s level by murdering him, yet that’s how the Whale problem was
ultimately resolved. Seems like a whole lot of grief could’ve been
avoided had it happened sooner. There is shockingly no follow-up to the impaled mummy mayor.
I expected to witness the inception of Pierce’s School For Gifted Youngsters this season.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2021/05/25/the-cw-shorts-out-black-lightning/
I still haven’t caught up totally (maybe only halfway-ish through this season), but it’s been so irritating how the show started fairly well and then almost immediately after the first season seemed to decide it wanted to cram what felt like to me several seasons worth of plots into one season, and for a show that I think tended to have the shortest season length of all the Arrowverse stuff too. It’d usually end up doing enough right for me to be fine with it, but stuff like “it’s a superhero show but with a somewhat grounded social issues approach” immediately giving in to “the city is now occupied by a shady government agency and also there’s a foreign country attempting to invade” was just… weird.
This season was certainly full of false starts and events that went nowhere, while new plot points parachuted in. But that feels more like network problems than the showrunners.I also feel like the scripts needed a bit more fine-tuning, and that too sounds like it has something to do with having to do about-faces with the scripts.All in all, though, I loved this show and will miss it. When given a chance to tell its tale, it was solid. And it addressed themes you won’t find in any other superhero series, such as, what do you do when you can’t trust your government.
I quit this show after S3, much of which I half-watched while doing other things. Felt like after S1, almost every scene was in high-octane action-movie mode, but in a way that just felt numbing and boring. (Not to mention the constant Khalil/Painkiller stuff, which was infuriating.) It’s a shame considering how good and character-driven that first season was.
This season felt rather perfunctory – maybe the cancellation messed up their plans, but what we ended up with was less of a valedictory run (a la Arrow’s final season) and more of an attempt to throw as much at the wall as possible and see what stuck. Painkiller spin-off? Check. “Passing the torch” to the kids (who had largely become the focus of the show anyway) – check. Wrapping up dangling plot threads in the most expedient way possible – check. Bringing China Anne McClain back to reunite the original cast for a proper farewell scene? Check.It ended up being a jumbled mess with no direction. Jefferson spending half the episode in a coffin is actually the perfect representation for how his character’s been treated this season – spending the first arc moping around, the second barely getting to do any heroics, and this last one without his powers! Sidelining your protagonist like this is not a good look for a superhero show.“JJ” actually being an evil space alien, when there’s been little or no foreshadowing in her characterisation at all since her debut, just felt cheap and did a disservice to Laura Kariuki’s work over the past few episodes. And what’s worse, instead of a positive resolution – a “we can exist peacefully together” step, where Jen and JJ reconcile and share the mantle of Lightning – we get an overblown fight scene where JJ has to die because she’s just evil. Boo.Finally, because they had to wrap up the Jefferson vs. Tobias grudge match at some point, we get their awkward final confrontation where Jefferson flies in, clearly intending to kill Tobias, only to pretend that he didn’t want to do that at all when he “accidentally” blasts him out of a window “in self-defense”. That’s a problem with superhero series in general – I get that “heroes” don’t kill their villains, but in BL’s case, the cast have had many long conversations about how irredeemable and untouchable Tobias is, and how the only solution is to kill him because they’ve tried literally everything else and nothing’s worked. Oh, and for added literacy bonus points, Tobias goes out reciting Moby Dick, because his name is Whale! Get it?! The only thing that would have made it sillier would have been Jeff asking him why he’s quoting Star Trek II….
I thought this show was really good in the first season and felt different to the other Arrowverse shows…despite still having plenty of cringeworthy moments like they all do. I liked all the characters early on except Gambi, who I never liked and was an annoying mix of providing exposition, always coming up with a ridiculously complicated tech upgrade to save the heroes or discover information, and was great in combat too of course (who also tortured multiple people, one as a revenge for trying to kill him and another where he cut out the guy’s eye to send a message. Yay heroes!).Show started to waver a bit at the end of Season 1 when after setting up Tobias all season suddenly shifted to random “Donald Trump” villain for the last couple episodes. In season 2, Anissa started to become insufferable always trying to overrule Black Lightning, ya know the guy who has been doing this for a decade. It also was frustrating that the first credible threat to Black Lightning (he had mostly been fighting the 100 who are just people with guns) was Looker who appeared halfway through the second season. The Masters of Disaster were a joke.Tobias seemed like a real threat after dispatching Painkiller and Lala and then goes down so easily to Jen who has almost the same powers as her dad. Tobias didn’t come up with any plan to beat a lightning super hero after all this time???I mentally checked out by Season 3 although Odell was an interesting villain for a while and Gravedigger was cool. Markovia and the ASA were overall wastes of time as just people with guns…..again.Season 4 was a mess. Again with the relationship strife between Jefferson and Lynn? Oh but they still get back together like always so don’t worry. Black Lightning barely felt like he was in the dang show and then you also had the backdoor pilot Painkiller episode (which would have been a terrible show by the way) he isn’t really in . How many times do I need to see Khalil have a fight scene with himself let alone an argument?) The DEG guns had no impact on the show. The Kobra Cartel was pointless. The police chief arc was so unbelievably pointless. I am actually going to give the “new Jen is actually a bad guy” story a pass because I liked them bringing back China Anne McClain and I assume that was only planned after finding out about cancellation.I only continued watching this now boring show because I felt I already invested too much time in it to not see it through.