"The Book of the Apocalypse: Chapter Two: The Omega": Black Lightning S02E16 Review

And so season 2 of Black Lightning ends with "The Omega", and not with a bang, but a whimper.

I kept hoping things would improve. But the show seems to keep running on promising to deliver things that never happen. We get to the finale, and it tries to deliver. Really, it does. But the delivery failed in the end.

So the Masters of Disaster turned out to be a wet squib. Peter gets radiation poisoning but he's all better by the second commercial break. The teleporting bad guy (apparently named "Instant") finally showed up but he was a wet squib. Cutter was more impressive early on when she was fighting Jennifer and Khalil: here's she's a wet squib. Tobias uses a command word on Lala and he turns out to be a wet squib. Reverend Holt is not quite dead yet, so that whole thing was a wet squib. Heck, Black Lightning finally goes mano a mano with Tobias, but he beats him pretty readily and that's a wet squib.

The finale promises a major conflict in season 3 between Markovia and Freeland. But the show has been promising major conflicts all season. I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I'll relax and enjoy DC's Legends of Tomorrow when it comes back on April 1.

So why was everything such a wet squib tonight? Let's review and find out. Peter finds Jennifer and tries to pick her up using protective gloves. He doesn't wear protective anything else and gets radiation burns, but as noted earlier, don't worry: he'll be all better in 20 minutes of screen time. Jennifer goes into her "safe place", and her mental image of Perenna tells her to get the hell out. I have no idea why the creative team is so fascinated with Perenna, primarily because they don't share any reason with us. She's annoying and tonight yells at Jennifer to get out. Which is what I yell in my head at her. Perenna does tell Erika to practice using her "control muscles" to get control of her powers, and Jennifer does so.

Tobias is griping to Cutter about her getting him away from Lala last week. We'll find out later Tobias can handle Lala, so whether this is his griping about Cutter not giving him the chance, or making him run on general principles, isn't clear. Tobias spends a lot of time either griping or abusing his own people. It's a bit tiresome.

People are rioting because the police shot Cape Guy last week. This seems to be more about the police shooting a black man than a meta-human. Tobias decides to take advantage of the chaos to increase the violence and bring the city to its knees so he can take over. Which was also the plot of tonight's Arrow, although that involved bombs rather than riots.

Black Lightning and Thunder just patrol around until they find New Wave and Heatwave wandering around picking on some poor cops. The two sides fight, and Coldsnap and Shockwave are apparently wandering around, show up, and join the fight. Tobias has somehow realized Jeff needs the power from the city's power grid to power himself up, and has Coldsnap freeze the generator. This means Black Lightning ain't so lightning-ish, and Thunder is having her own problems. So four MoDs look to overpower them.

Peter and Jennifer restore the generator, and the heroes beat the bad guys. Now that Jennifer has a handle on her powers, she flies off to kill Tobias. Lala has also come for Tobias, but Tobias' control phrase on him doesn't work. Fortunately for Tobias, he has a second control phrase that makes Lala's dead-people tattoos burn. I see dead people... burning. Lala goes down, and Jennifer busts in and does the lightning-rein trick on Tobias. Black Lightning flies in and tries to stop her, and Jennifer drops her rein because maintaining it will kill her father. Once he's back to normal, Black Lightning lays the smackdown on Tobias and beats him in 30 seconds. So much for that climactic battle.

Earlier, Tobias had an argument with Cutter about activating the pod kids and she leaves. He activates the pods, the ASA arrive. The pod kids wander off, and Odell and his agents leave Lynn there. Near the end, we find out Odell has Wendy, Issa, and... Khalil? in pods of his own.

Jace cuts a deal with the Freeland police to tell Black Lightning something valuable but we never find out what, in return for police protection. Inspector Bill takes her into custody, but the teleporting guy, Instant, breaks her out and we find out he works for the Markovians.

Tobias is taken to a black site prison and locked up, and told he'll never escape. Yeah, right.

The best part of the episode is the end sequence. The Pierce women joke at Jeff's expense, and he admits he's glad he has them there and feels guilty about considering leaving Freeland with his family. Odell comes in on little cat's feet, reveals he knows they're meta-humans, says Freeland is ground zero in the coming war when Markovia tries to destroy it, and deputizes Black Lightning and Thunder as ASA agents. And thus endeth the season.

As I noted earlier, the whole finale turned out to be not that climactic. The whole battle between Our Heroes and the MoDs was poorly-lit and relied mostly on a "weakness" we never knew Black Lightning had and Tobias sussed out based on nothing that I recall.

I'm not sure why Lala was involved in this and the last two episodes. He puts a bullet in Heatwave during the climactic MoD battle, but that's his only contribution to the plot. Lala faces Tobias, Tobias speaks a new command phrase, and Lala goes down. So in the end, Lala contributes essentially nothing.

Instant also had pretty much nothing to do. He got Jace out of jail and that was it.

The MoDs get no characterization and only seem to hold their own because they outnumber the heroes two to one. And even then, they get their asses kicked when Black Lightning gets charged back up to full power.

Tobias is relatively cool, because Tobias is always relatively cool thanks to the actor playing him. But Black Lightning takes him down way too easily for what should be a major season-finaleish climax where BL gets revenge on the man who killed his father. They even show us Tobias killing Jeff's father using some flashbacks. I don’t expect BL to kill Tobias but he just hits him a few times and electrifies him, and Tobias goes down. He gets thrown into a cell, but either he'll escape and undermine the ASA by demonstrating how lousy their security systems are. Or Odell will let him out to fight the Markovians because trusting Tobias is obviously a good idea. Not. Which will undermine Odell as a presumably cagey government spook.

The best parts of the episode are still those with the Pierce family and Peter. I like Peter and Jennifer together, and I even like Cress Williams when he's out of costume and interacting with his character's wife and daughter.

What happened at Garfield, who knows? Most of the rioting we see second-hand, and the only sense we get of community is when Reverend Holt gives his speech at the end about the heroes being gifts from God. The rioters are presumably mostly black since that's the majority of the Freeland population. But Black Lightning and Thunder don't display any problems attacking blacks. The Freeland community feels less like a community and more like a bunch of props that do what the writers need them to do.

Overall, "The Omega" wrapped up most of the open plot threads. Tobias is in jail, Odell has revealed he knows the Pierces are meta-humans, Jennifer has finally gotten control of her powers. Lala, and Looker, and Instant, and Jace, and Cutter, and Lowry... not so much. I'd say we'll see next year, but I thought much the same last year.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?