Black Lightning:
The Complete Fourth and Final Season review by Bobby Blakey
“Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this Blog Post. The opinions I share are my own.”
DC has been dominating the animated features and TV series for years now. The CW Arrowverse as it was referred prior to Arrow ending, has had 6 to 7 shows at any given time that all connect together. In 2018 Black Lightning joined in on the fun but wasn’t until the series wider crossover in 2019/2020 that it actually crossed into the other shows. Now the series has come to an end, but you can bring home the final chapter with Black Lightning: The Complete Fourth and Final Season.
Black Lightning follows Jefferson Pierce, a man wrestling with a secret. As the father of two daughters and principal of a charter high school that also serves as a safe haven for young people in a neighborhood overrun by gang violence, he is a hero to his community. Nine years ago, Pierce was a hero of a different sort. Gifted with the superhuman power to harness and control electricity, he used those powers to keep his hometown streets safe as the masked vigilante Black Lightning. Almost a decade later, Pierce’s crime-fighting days are long behind him, but with crime and corruption spreading like wildfire, and those he cares about in the crosshairs of the menacing local gang The One Hundred, Black Lightning returns to save not only his family, but also the soul of his community.
This season, Jefferson Pierce returns as Black Lightning, the superpowered protector of Freeland with the ability to harness electricity. Jefferson isn’t the only one with powers, His older daughter, Anissa is able to drastically increase her density, giving her invulnerability and super strength. His younger daughter, Jennifer, is a fiery teen whose body generates pure electrical energy, giving her the potential to be more powerful than either Anissa or Jefferson. Lynn, Jefferson’s ex-wife, is an expert in metahuman medicine. Together the Pierce family, along with covert superspy Peter Gambi and the metahuman Painkillerer, faces the challenges of the eroded urban community that is Freeland, including a war between a criminal cartel backed by the infamous gangster Tobias Whale and a menacing gang that calls itself The 100.
The first couple of seasons to this show I was all in, but then they started
giving all the family members powers and changed very little in regards to the villains hence it just started feeling like it was just repeating itself over and over. I still decided to stick with it but alas it never really recovered from its own confusion. The impact of the black culture and struggles that it was using for the back drop were put to the back burner to focus on the meta-human stuff which I get being a superhero show, but its also what made it stand out to begin with.
This final season was really just more of the family arguing with each other, the same struggles with their powers and an overall dull arc to bring it tall home. I will give them props for doing something interesting with the changing of a cast member that left the show, but would have been better and more impactful had they just killed them off instead and used it as the catalyst to bring the family back to the fight. The even bigger issue here is the action. There are some fun moments, but also some really badly executed moments by people that should have clearly had stunt doubles instead.
I am sad the show went off the rails this season as it was really good when it started and he had finally made his way into the bigger universe with the other shows, but after this season glad they took the opportunity to wrap it all up and move. I hope we get to see th return of Black Lightning himself in some of the other crossovers in the future but would be fine forgetting the rest of them existed moving forward because they just never fully worked.
If you are a fan or like me and just need to complete the set then grab your copy of Black Lightning: the Fourth and Final Season on Blu-ray and DVD on October 12th from Warner Bros Home Entertainment.