Sunday, March 25, 2018

Black Lightning: “The Book Of LIttle Black LIes”

THUNDER COSTUME!
Goddamn, this show is good.
What makes Black Lightning so great isn’t the plot, although the plot is solid. And it isn’t the twists, thought the twists are good. And it’s not the action, although the action is perfectly acceptable for superhero TV budgets.

No, it’s the way all those things wind their way around and through a set of really well-defined characters with naturalistic relationships who react to events in a way dictated by their charactes, and not the demands of the plot. The latter is so often the model on Flash, and, to a slightly lesser extent, on Arrow, that it’s weird seeing it so completely absent from this show.

Take, how Anissa and Jennifer react to getting superpowers. One of them is over-eager to help people, one of them wishes this had never happened to them. They’re both common tropes in the world of superhero drama, but they’re also both in character for the two daughters, and having the two reactions playing off each otehr on the same show in the same family is fantastic.

Anyway, a bunch of stuff happened in this episode, mostly centered on Anissa learning her father and sister are superheroes, plus the intersection of the Greenlight lab, which gets blowed up, and the Evil Government trying to kill Black Lightning, which does not work. Nothing at all about Tobias or zombies in this one.

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