In the beginning, Superman came from Krypton to rescue the planet daily.
At the movies, Marvel’s Black Panther rules a whole kingdom. On the CW, Supergirl undertakes interdimensional travel, Green Arrow grapples with
the threat of a city-shattering bomb, the Flash blurs around battling
swarms of mutants, and, in “Black Lightning,” a superhero struggles for
the peace of the streets he grew up on. Five episodes in, the hero,
played by Cress Williams, faces two opponents: a crime gang that
specializes in destroying black youth, and a police force of similar
disposition.
Black Lightning débuted, in 1977, as DC’s first black superhero in a
leading role. His entry in “The DC Comics Encyclopedia” says that his
“special powers/abilities” include Olympian athleticism, superlative
hand-to-hand-combat skills, and a talent for hurling bolts from his own
internal electromagnetic field. Back in the day, he was the alter ego of
Jefferson Pierce, an Olympic athlete who returned to Metropolis’s
Suicide Slum as a schoolteacher. On the show, he is Principal Pierce,
the head of a high school in the city of Freeland and a family man of a
certain age. As in an earlier comic-book incarnation, he has two
daughters; now the girls happen to give Black Lightning some additional
figurative oomph as the post-Obama black superhero whom the series
strives for him to be, as when introducing him as “hope personified.”
Slinging high voltage at lowlifes, he is the vessel of the public’s
faith in justice. Nine years before the series begins, Pierce had
retired from vigilantism because of the toll it took on his home life.
In the pilot, his dormant powers first flicker when, taking his two
daughters to a school fund-raiser, he is pulled over for driving while
black. Later that night, after learning that his precocious younger
daughter is in the hands of hoodlums, Pierce descends on a night club to
zap the baddies and gain her release. Leaving the scene, he is
confronted by two cops wielding Tasers and invective. “Get on the
ground,” they bellow. “You get your black ass on the . . .” He stuns
them, too. For retribution and catharsis, he gently blows up their squad
car—a compact scoff of an explosion—and swaggers off as his theme song
comes on.
Police abuse pervades the atmosphere. While the power of the state
generally ranks somewhere between a nuisance and a threat on “Black
Lightning,” the chief villain is a crime boss named Tobias Whale (played
by the rapper Krondon). Whale, who murdered Pierce’s
crusading-journalist father back in the boy’s origin-story youth,
manages an operation that specializes in forcing schoolgirls into
prostitution and pushing addictive pills with flamboyantly
self-destructive effects. Whale’s own boss—Lady Eve, an overlord played
by Jill Scott, with a glut of malicious grins—is a nightmare, and he
conveys her frustrations to underlings in succinct displays of torture.
The lackeys, pawns, and middle managers are strangled in holding cells,
fed to piranhas, and, in the course of performance reviews, subjected to
an imaginative variety of puncture wounds.
The violence does not rank as gratuitous because, as an action show,
“Black Lightning” very much needs it. The hero’s own fight scenes can
feel restrained, even cramped, perhaps because he devotes a lot of
energy to anguishing about violence begetting further violence, and also
to fretting that his return to duty will jeopardize a chance to
reconcile with his ex-wife. Still, there’s good theatre to his
psychedelic scuba suit of a costume, which was tailored by Peter Gambi
(James Remar), a mentor and ally who helps with logistics in the way of
Batman’s Alfred, or a tech-support desk. Also, Pierce, like any black
professional, has a skill for code-switching, and when he’s in character
the tone of his black-vernacular English deepens so that he speaks to
street toughs in their own language. Meanwhile, his internal
electromagnetic field (or what have you) adjusts his pitch in the
direction of a lordly electronic growl.
As a show about domestic life, “Black Lightning” doesn’t just risk
corniness but even actively courts it. Pierce tells a few dad jokes and
dispenses a lot of superdad aphorisms. He quotes civil-rights leaders
and Holocaust survivors to his daughters as if springing pop quizzes to
test their moral fibre. Watching a sequence in which the teen-age
daughter Jennifer (China Anne McClain) tells her parents that she and
her boyfriend are planning to become sexually active, I felt as if I’d
been handed a public-health brochure glossing the responsibilities of
all involved. The creators of the series are Mara Brock Akil, who
created “Girlfriends,” and her husband, Salim Akil, and they bring a
sitcom’s ease of touch to such very-special-episode moments. The
earnestness of the family-values messaging is often endearing, as
expressed in fleet lines and long pauses.
While Jennifer is discussing contraception, her older sister, Anissa
(Nafessa Williams), is simultaneously discovering her powers as Thunder
(“Special powers/abilities: Can control her body’s density”) and her
identity as a lesbian. On a recent episode, unwinding after a
self-directed training session of hurling a washing machine around a
scrap-metal yard, Anissa heads to a lesbian bar for a comic-book cosplay
party. She is clad in a Catwoman bodysuit as the televisions above the
back bar crackle with another grim newscast. The chyron reads “Unarmed
Black Youth Shot by Police.” The nice old lady in the man-on-the-street
interview describes Black Lightning as “a costumed answer to all our
prayers.” Anissa leaves the bar to change into an outfit appropriate to
meet a minister leading a protest against the gang and its enablers.
Will the minister survive the march? Will Black Lightning save the
night?
Don’t bother asking why every TV at a masquerade is blaring local news.
“Black Lightning,” a costume party in itself, relies heavily on this
species of voice-over. Using fictional newscasts to set scenes and to
state themes, it clothes deadly serious news stories in a sizzle of
melodramatic fancy.
Sourse: newyorker.com
