Black Lightning‘s freshman season was a beautiful example of the socially-aware stories superhero dramas are capable of telling.
When Black Lightning was first teased, we heard that it would be the story of a retired superhero putting his suit back on to protect his community. It would be a series that delved into the issues that face African Americans today. And it would be a family story.
All of these promises are true — and yet Black Lightning‘s freshman season was so much more.
A strong superhero series
On one level, Black Lightning is a very good superhero series. It is set apart from the other shows on The CW because it features an older hero who comes out of retirement. Jefferson Pierce goes nearly a decade between uses of his powers because he believes in the power of the work he is doing as an educator and a mentor.
As principal of Garfield High School, Jefferson instills his students with a mantra:
“Whose life is this?”
“Mine.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Live it by any means necessary.”
Jefferson recognizes the importance of providing young people education and opportunity. By doing so, he hopes to break the cycle of poverty and pain that leads to far too many young men joining the local gang, The 100. In doing so, he also connects even more deeply with the community he seeks to protect and knows it better than just about anyone.
Yet Jefferson also realizes that there are immediate problems that also need solving. The city of Freeland is overrun by The 100, the police force is corrupt and innocent people — including his own daughters — are constantly under threat. So he puts the suit back on and goes to work.
While the series initially seems to be focused on Jefferson taking down the man who killed his father, Tobias Whale (played by standout Marvin “Krondon” Jones III), it quickly becomes apparent that the story is much deeper than that. A government organization, the ASA, is introduced. And Jefferson’s surrogate father, Peter Gambi, is revealed to be tied up in both the ASA and the death of Jefferson’s father.
Along with the power of Jefferson’s story as an unretired superhero, Black Lightning‘s first seasons serves as an origin stories for his superpowered daughters, Anissa and Jennifer.
Anissa manifests the ability to control the density of her body, giving her super strength and making her essentially invulnerable. As a socially-active figure, Anissa is thrilled with her new powers because they give her the opportunity to make greater change in the world. She quickly takes to the vigilante lifestyle and becomes Black Lightning’s partner in the field, Thunder.
Where Anissa’s story feels fairly typical in that she gladly accepts the opportunity to become a hero with her powers, her sister’s story is the opposite. Later in the season, Jennifer manifests the ability to create energy (whereas Jefferson conducts it).
But unlike Anissa, Jennifer wants nothing to do with the family business. She just wants to be normal. While she comes to embrace her abilities by the end of the season, it’s refreshing to see the two sisters have completely different reactions to being metahumans.
While exploring both what it means to return to the vigilante fold or to enter it for the first time, Black Lightning‘s first season also grapples with common superhero ideas like what it would mean for Jefferson to kill Tobias and Jefferson having to hide his alter ego from the police.
For all that Black Lightning is a superhero series, however, the abilities and struggles of its powered characters serve to tell more grounded, human stories.
A moving family story
Black Lightning‘s first season revolves around the dynamics of the Pierce family. When the season opens, Jefferson is working toward reconciling with his ex-wife, Lynn, who divorced him after his time as Black Lightning simply became too much for her to bear. Besides having her husband come home bruised and bloody, she worried about the effects it would have on Anissa and Jennifer, especially if they saw him in such a condition.
Jefferson and Lynn’s dynamic is messy, honest and loving. It’s clear from the outset that a lack of love was never the problem for the couple. Over the course of the season, we watch Lynn deal with Jefferson becoming Black Lighting, at first resenting him and his mission before eventually coming around and desiring to reconcile.
We see them at their lows and highs, but at no time does the drama feel fake or forced. Jefferson and Lynn are allowed to be human and work out their problems like adults. It makes their reunion by the end of the season all the more satisfying.
Moreover, we see Jefferson and Lynn having to deal with having powered children. Rarely in superhero stories do parents play a pivotal role, other than in their deaths, so watching the entire Pierce family work through what it means for most of them to have abilities is a new frontier. Jefferson has to learn that applying one standard to himself and another to his children makes him a hypocrite. And that’s not easy.
And we see Anissa and Jennifer be sisters. There is so much love between the two, yet they endlessly frustrate and annoy one another as well. It’s a realistic and lovely relationship filled with ups and downs.
Gambi, the man who raised Jefferson after his father’s murder, also must find a new dynamic with this family that he loves so much. It takes time for Jefferson to accept the truth of Gambi’s past, but watching the two men come to a new understanding about their relationship works so well. And seeing how much Lynn, Anissa and Jennifer mean to him proves that he is as much a part of the Pierce family as anyone.
An unapologetically black story
Black Lightning is a story about a black superhero fighting to protect a black community. It addresses issues central to the black community, like racial profiling and police violence. The soundtrack that enhances the show is full of black musicians.
The ASA’s work in Freeland, initially trying to pacify a black community through a vaccine and later through an addictive drug called Green Light, has haunting echoes of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
And while Martin Proctor, the head of the ASA work in Freeland, is something of a caricature — he doesn’t have the depth of a Tobias, and he even sprouts the MAGA tagline a couple of times — his presence is less important than what he represents.
“We approach our stories from a black perspective because that’s who we are, and when we decided to take the show on, we wanted to do it in a way that people could identify with and recognize themselves, from the Tuskegee experiments in ‘Green Light’ to also in the form of just raising your children and those challenges that you have,” executive producer Salim Akil tells EW.
He adds, “Often, black people are accused of being paranoid, but our paranoia is only paranoia until it becomes real, right? So the Flint water crisis, Tuskegee experiments, Green Light flooding the black communities with drugs and guns, we wanted to show that in the show and sort of explore it in a reality and not in a way most people would approach it — as though this is just some kind of conspiracy theory.”
While the Arrowverse is doing better with diversifying its casts — just look at Legends of Tomorrow — these shows still feature predominately white heroes who cannot fully understand the struggles of a person of color.
Black Lightning, like Black Panther, proves that not only is telling these stories is important, it can also be entertaining.
Thankfully, Black Lightning has been renewed for a second season, so we can look forward to more adventures with the Pierce family.
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