TV REVIEWS: FTN Reviews Black Lightning Season 3 Episode 10: Blessings and Curses Reborn

The fallout from “Crisis On Infinite Earths” continues to unfold, and now it’s Black Lightning’s turn to get the spotlight. This show handled its business in an interesting way, but, “Blessings and Curses Reborn” also had some familiar issues. Mainly, two many spinning plots, and random political issues coming out of nowhere.

First up, I appreciate how they brought Black Lightning “into the fold” of new “Multiverse”. Mainly, he remembers everything that happened in Crisis, and Jennifer at least knows about the alternate dimensions. But everyone else? Not so much. On this version of their world, the ASA is still around and doing everything that happened in the first 9 episodes…except, episode 9 didn’t happen for the cast outside of Jennifer and Jefferson, no one remembers, and that might not be the only changes as Supergirl and Batwoman have shown us.

Anyway, with potential paradigm shifts everywhere, Jefferson and Jennifer had to figure out what was going on with the others, and this is where things got weird, random, and disturbing.

First off, they’re handling Lynn’s addiction much more aggressively now. She’s in full blown addict withdrawal though, and her blow-ups at both Jennifer and Jefferson were very well acted, and hard to watch (in the good way that it felt real). Props to Lynn’s actress because she did everything right from denying the problem, trying to act like she was fine, passing the blame, getting violent, everything, and seeing Jefferson try to deal with it without getting violent himself was something to behold. As well as being pulled in numerous directions of course by all the people that needed him and Black Lightning.

Meanwhile, Jennifer is now bent on killing Odell to end this madness, which really makes me question what she learned from “Earth Crisis” because one of her other Earth doppelgangers went on a violent path and it didn’t go well…and yet she thinks violence is the answer here? And since when did the earthquake meta lose control of his powers? That NEVER happened before. Like I said, random.

Which brings me to Anissa. Since “Earth Crisis” didn’t happen, she’s continuing her role as Blackbird, which is fine, and leading The Resistance with Henderson, which is great, but she gets ignored ONCE by Henderson when Black Lightning appears and she goes off on him saying, “You walked in their with your male privilege…” and I seriously should sue for whiplash. Where the HECK did that come from? I mean, really? Then it devolved into the “Blackbird persona is evil” and “you need to have trust in me” and I could’ve sworn that we had done this a few episodes ago. Did Crisis make it so we had to go through all of this again?

Finally the return of TC was cool for the most part, and his powers were nice to see visually. And I dig how he’s connecting with Gambi and can help find his attempted killers (which may be a Crisis reborn Lady Eve?), but the whole, “you need to unplug from technology” speech was way too heavy handed.

In the end, “Blessings and Curses Reborn” was a fair enough start to everything, and because of the shortened season that they have compared to some of the other DC/CW shows, it’s fair that they hit the ground running. But there’s a difference between doing that, and tripping over ones feet.