Pulp with a purpose
Black Lightning a different sort of superhero
What stands out about Black Lightning are not the scenes in which the title hero zaps a gajillion volts of justice t hrough murder- minded gang members. You can already see that sort of thing on CW — home to The Flash, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow — and the rest of superhero TV.
What you don’t see so often is what happens after. Jefferson Pierce ( Cress Williams), the hero’s middleaged alter ego, lies in bed, sore and moaning from the exertion. “Black Lightning is getting too old for these streets,” he says.
The other distinctive part, of course, the Black in the title. Black Lightning is immersively, not incidentally, black: The good guys and bad guys, teachers and students, victims and criminals and reporters are mainly African-American.
The series was developed by Salim Akil, who produces with his wife, Mara Brock Akil. Producers also include Greg Berlanti, of CW’s other comics franchises, but this show has a different sensibility. It’s pulpy entertainment with a sense of purpose.
Black Lightning, coming to Netflix in Canada Jan. 23, is the reluctant comeback story of a hero grappling with heroism’s limits.
By day, Jefferson is a high school principal. Until nine years ago, though, he patrolled the fictional city of Freeland, wearing a spaceage electro- suit that one observer likens to a Parliament-Funkadelic outfit.
Targeted by the police for vigilantism, he wearily gave it up. But he’s drawn back as the city is overrun by a brutal gang, the One Hundred, which ends up threatening his two daughters: Anissa ( Nafessa Williams) and Jennifer (China Anne McClain).
In the first two episodes, Black Lightning is suffused with the ideas of Black Lives Matter, though it comes at them from an angle. The pilot, for instance, involves street protests, not against police brutality but against gang violence. But the parallel images are unmistakable.
In a key early scene, Jefferson is driving and arguing with Anissa, whom he just bailed out after her arrest at a protest. He quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence.” She answers with Fannie Lou Hamer: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Suddenly, they’re pulled over by police officers — one of them white — who suspect Jefferson in a robbery, though he’s in a suit and driving a Volvo wagon. For a moment, his eyes flare with the glow of his suppressed power, but he reins it in.
The superhero who must hide his nature from the authorities is old hat. So are arguments over vigilantism and the limits of nonviolence. But the context of Black Lightning is everything. Here, the image — a powerful black man quelling his emotion and struggling to present as calm, smaller, nonthreatening — has the strength of parable.
The weakest part of the show so far is the superheroism. The One Hundred’s members are thinly sketched, and paltry competition. Their leader is a more intriguing, ruthless presence: Tobias Whale (Marvin Jones III), an African- American with albinism who denigrates other black people as “darkies.”
But the arch- villain gets little screen time early on. Williams has to carry most of the story. Fortunately, he’s up to it, inhabiting his character’s strength, his burden and his sense of humour in a series that’s picked an opportune moment to strike.