Hello everyone and welcome to a brand new catchup series looking at the American Super Hero show Black Lightning. This is a show that I have been meaning to watch for a while and as I am currently benching Supergirl until I catch up with Arrow and Legends to align the shows for the Infinite Earths crossover, I thought now is the time to slot in at least season 1 of Black Lightning. The first episode highlighted the dark and dangerous acts that is going on in Freeland but is not filmed too dark and gritty. This was one of my problems with the Marvel Netflix shows: you couldn’t see what was going on! So obviously I enjoyed the lighter cinematography and I also mostly liked the suit design. I’m just not completely sold on the lightning bolts on the front that are rather chunky and also part pure electricity. They don’t look great but he still looks like an absolute bad ass.

I really do love the initial premise and its subversion of the regular super hero story. This is not an origin story; in fact his super hero career has already been and gone. This is a coming back out of retirement story which I don’t think has really been done in a live action series of this genre. He understands his powers and how to use them. He is in complete control and that is what put him over as a dominant force in the instances we saw of him. He is very calm and doesn’t panic. This is nothing new to him. We got the tease that his daughter now has powers too right at the end of the episode so I imagine that that will be the learning curve for him as he teaches his daughter to use her powers. This could come after her hiding them from him and then him disapproving of her choice but we shall see. Surely they wouldn’t have them team up as heroes but not know each other’s identities? I don’t know if that would be stupid or not.

The 100 gang has been set up as the villain which already features multiple tiers of bad guys. At the bottom we have that idiot who kept trying to drag girls out of school all while waving a gun around. I’m glad that other villains called him out on how stupid that was too. We have the middle tier villain of Lala. You have to imagine that he will be the villain that Jefferson deals with for the first part of the season and luckily the two already demonstrated good chemistry in the scene together. We then had the presumed big bad, Tobias Wade who looks like a very dangerous, physical threat.

Overall this was a very solid pilot episode and I look forward to seeing what happens next.

DD Rating: 8/10