Hello Black Lightning friends, I’m here to say first and foremost that I called it last week re: Gambi not being dead.
Turns out he escaped through a hole in the bottom of his SUV as it rolled away, and he exploded it himself via remote control! He is now in hiding,eating Chinese takeout and cutting the fingers off of at least one of the hitmen sent to kill him. He’s also playing with drones in his attempt to aid Black Lightning and Anissa (not in her Thunder suit), who are involved in a battle in the woods where Black folks live a farming life (aka South Freeland).
Another thing of note about South Freeland is that a white woman named Looker has white slaves who were formerly addicted to opioids. She put a silver substance in their bodies to cure them of addiction but it also controls them. The white people are called ‘Sanjay’ and the Black folks who farm there are called ‘Perdi’ and honestly, it feels a little strange that this is still Freeland but that’s not the point.
The point is, remember Anaya, the pregnant Black girl with the skittish white boyfriend named Deacon who were in the clinic seeing Anissa last week? Well, Anissa finds her and tells her that Deacon is dead, which apparently is the doing of a dude that wanted Anaya to choose him instead. The shock is too much and she goes into labor right then and there with her parents and family all around. She gives birth to twins (prompting the hilarious line from Anissa that the second baby is “stuck in the back of the uterus”). One twin is Black, the other white, making it painfully obvious to Anaya’s family that Deacon was white and they’re not exactly happy about it. Neither the Sanjays nor the Perdi want anything to do with the other, or Other, and now, as Anaya’s mother puts it, Deacon’s death has, “started a war.”
Anaya recounts the whole Perdi/Sanjay thing to Anissa and then the babies’ eyes turn silver, so they decide they all need to go to Freeland proper to be safe from the Sanjay. But the Sanjay, whose silver-ness makes them insanely fast and powerful, attack them. Black Lightning shows up and so does Gambi’s drone because everyone’s tracking Anissa. There’s a big fight which ends with Anissa, Anaya, and a few other Perdi plus the white baby safe-ish and on their way to Freeland. Black Lightning tracks the silver goo from a Sanjay corpse back to Looker (who Jefferson and Anissa conclude is probably another Meta who escaped the ASA, like Jefferson). Meanwhile, the Black baby is delivered into the arms of Looker, who, through silver-communication, realizes there’s a white baby out there too and they need to find it. Cool! None of this is horrifying at all!
Meanwhile, Lynn is literally sick about what happened with the 14 pod kids who died on her watch, and Jen, despite trying to help, makes Lynn feel worse. Jen seems to be gaining a little traction in her own life and is also hanging out regularly with Kahlil on her roof.
While Lynn can’t physically or emotionally escape the parents of the pod kids who died, Kahlil can’t escape Tobias, who now wants Kahlil to kill Reverend Holt. Councilman Parker has failed to get Reverend Holt to agree to re-locating the clinic because Reverend Holt knows exactly what’s going on, namely that the anonymous person Councilman Parker is ‘representing’ is Tobias Whale. Kahlil can’t bring himself to kill the reverend, so Tobias of course brutally beats him up and tells him that now he has to kill both the reverend and his own mother. Kahlil ends up on Jen’s roof *again,* only this time he’s at the end of his rope. She hugs him but there’s no resolution, yet.
Will Gambi contact the Pierce family at some point soon? What is Kahlil going to do? Can Tobias die already? Can Lynn catch a break for once? What’s the deal with Looker and how much more of her do we have to endure? How can Anissa be the most empathetic person ever yet still treat Grace terribly? IS GRACE A SANJAY?? Come back next week, maybe we’ll have an answer or two!
