#let's see if we can avoid getting weirdly and vehemently racial with it this time!

[absentlyabbie]

taking my life into my hands to resurrect this godawful hellpoll and let it run for a week this time

[frasier-crane-style]

Black Lightning 1x01

Well, it’s a CW superhero show about black people. So at least you can’t accuse it of false advertising.

-Just in case you thought this was, like, TNT or something, the first ten minutes hint at a love triangle and feature a bangin’ club scene. But they do hold off on a gratuitous six-pack shirtless scene until late in the episode.

-Whenever someone says that a series is mature or adult, it’s code for having a lot of scenes where someone pours themselves a glass of whiskey or bourbon or something, then drinks it soulfully. If you added a lot of scenes like that to Tiny Toons, it would count as prestige television. (I kid, I kid. There’s also a scene where someone smokes reefer.)

-Black Lightning has his own I’m Gonna Git You Sucka theme rap that plays when he does something cool, which walks the line between fun and cheesy. I can’t help but think it’s gonna get dated soon if this is one of those CW shows that runs for twelve seasons. “Black Lightning’s back!” Yes, we know, it’s been a decade. He wasn’t here in the first place for that long!

-I get that they’re trying to be topical with political protests and police brutality, but a protest march against a specific gang? I’ve heard of general anti-crime/stop the violence type marches, but this seems a bit over-the-top for a pretty ‘real world’ show. 

-Why do we need a bratty teenager in this? They’re always just there to do stupid bullshit that causes conflict. Like, not only is Vanessa dumb enough to go to a club literally named after a crime syndicate, but while there, she is abducted at gunpoint and nearly forced into prostitution. Her response? “Why are you making such a big deal about this?” Yeah, no teenager in history is that vapid (and no, show, I’m not gonna count you saying that she was traumatized off-screen).

-And it’s not like this is such a lighthearted show that characters just shrug off this kind of thing, because we see Anissa at the very end traumatized by her experience. So I guess Jennifer is just weirdly shallow as a person?

(-Maybe it’s some karmic balance for Jefferson’s ex-wife being understanding and supportive of him going back into action when their daughters are in danger instead of making a big to-do about it. Someone gotta hold the ball.)

-Although I did think the whole plot about BL having to rescue his daughters was pretty contrived (is this guy determined to prostitute Jennifer because he’s still under orders to or does he just feel slighted? If we have to put his daughters in danger to get BL into action, why not do something with Anissa being so political and vehemently anti-100?) and unoriginal (again, is having to rescue your kids from the bad guys really any different from having to rescue your girlfriend?). Hopefully now that the whole thing has served the purpose of getting BL back into costume, we can move on to something better.

-Was I following things wrong, or did Black Lightning say he’d killed Tobias Whale while Tobias Whale said he’d killed Black Lightning? Because that’s got to be a wacky chains of events that would lead to them believing that of each other.

-I doubt ‘Harriet Tubman’ is the kind of nickname a modern teenager would come up with. “Yeah, Bill over there is a total poonhound, so we call him Benjamin Franklin!”

-I probably owe the old comics a read, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, so not much to say about canon--other than that it’s a bit unfortunate that one of the themes here is, obviously, the evils of judging people based on skin color and then the big villain is the five thousandth evil albino in pop culture. Like, there’s never a sassy gay albino friend, they’re always preternaturally determined assassins and shit. Well, there was a wacky comic relief albino in The Princess Bride, but he was evil comic relief. He helped torture Wesley!

-This is more of a nitpick, but casting James Remar as Jefferson’s fatherly crime-fighting mentor, when he played pretty much the exact same role in the hugely popular Dexter within recent memory, kinda takes me right out of the story (although I get why they’d cast him, he’s fine actor, probably a lot of fun to work with, not complaining about Remar as a performer). I kept expecting him to say something about Jefferson’s dark passenger.

(Black Lightning: Say WHAT, honky?)

-For a guy who’s characterized as pretty consistently peaceable and thoughtful in his civilian life, Black Lightning has a pretty ‘shoot first, ask questions never’ mentality when he suits up. He seems to have a ‘shit happens’ approach to his no-kill policy (surely, when you’re wearing bulletproof armor, there’s no need to use someone as a human shield!), blasts an unarmed john (albeit one who is visiting a brothel with unwilling sex workers), and blows up a police car for no reason. Yeah, I get that it’s supposed to be cathartic after the racial profiling in the pre-credits, but in the second instance, the (different) cops are after anyone who was involved in the Club 100 shootout and he was involved (to put it mildly). I know, I know, it’s standard superhero procedure to avoid getting arrested by knocking out cops, but going the extra step of blowing up their car for doing their job seems petty. Imagine if in The Dark Knight, Batman disabled the SWAT team trying to arrest him and then said “HOW DARE YOU COME AFTER ME!?” and broke all their cell phones or something.

-So, maybe Pierce’s characterization just is that he’s a pacifist by day, unleashed rage monster by night, but that seems pretty far afield of the character and a little cliched to boot. Haven’t we seen the put-upon goody-two-shoes who lets it all out as his alter-ego enough times?

-It’s weird that the old ‘lame’ suit looks actually pretty good, while the new one looks overdesigned and clunky, with cheesy light-up bits. Also, the Kingsman are not going to be happy to find out what James Remar is doing with their secret hide-out when they’re not there.