Black Lightning has never shied away from politics and social issues. In the CW superhero drama’s first season, it used the Flint water crisis, the crack epidemic, and more to craft a story about the problems facing Freeland, the hometown of Black Lightning/Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams).
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Most importantly, there’s the issue of the drug Green Light, which was created by a rogue government organization and continues to spread through the community, leaving many Green Light babies in its wake. Meanwhile, Lynn (Christine Adams) tries to help the kidnapped children in the pods, and Jefferson works through the guilt he feels for drawing his family into this dangerous life.
Let’s start at the beginning. Where do we pick we up in season 2?
SALIM AKIL: We basically pick up with them a week later, after having exposed Green Light and fought off this rogue faction of the ASA. Something that we’re doing that I wanted to do was lean a little bit more into tipping my hat to the comic book world. Although we’ll stay in our reality, what I’m doing this season is books. For instance, the first four episodes are called “The Book of Consequences: The Rise of the Green Light Baby.” What we’re talking about when we pick up is dealing with the consequences of the drug Green Light being introduced into this community. So that’s where we pick up at.
In season 1, we saw that Green Light made people aggressive and gave them super-strength, among other things. In these first four episodes, will see Black Lightning basically tackling one case each episode?
It’s not a case per episode, no. It is an overarching community-based effort to tackle this. The interesting thing is that not everyone manifests super-strength as a result of taking Green Light. There are other ways we’re going to show that the drug has affected people. But it’s not going to be a villain-of-the-week sort of thing.
In season 1, you drew on a lot of real-world history. In addition to crack epidemic, what other real-world events inspired this season’s story?
…But anyway… it’s interesting that you see these young parents trying to flee countries for various reasons, and what’s interesting to me is that we’re repeating history where we’re snatching children from their parents. We’re snatching them away for a different reason, but we’re still snatching kids from their parents. We’ve gotten to a point in some of our thinking, not everyone’s, where this is okay. To me, that is ridiculous. That is so unbelievable to me that it almost seems like you were reading a comic book. You have a leader who had pre-knowledge of what the result of doing this would result in, and they did it anyway because they say the person is breaking the law. …To your point, I take a lot of inspiration from the pain and the absurdity of what a lot of people in this world have to go through. It’s just ridiculous. The same with the absurdity of trying to roll back on gay and lesbian rights. “Now you’ve pricked my imagination, and now I’m going to probably talk about it in the show, and show Anissa having an interest in a much fuller romantic life.” I react to things that way.
In the first season, like you said, she discovered her powers, so that took a lot of her time, and the family issues took a lot of her time. We’ll still deal with those, but I think Anissa is a grown woman, and I think what you’ll see is her developing her own ideas about who she is and wanting to have a fuller life, not just her family. I think that’s important to see.
Chantal Thuy tweeted that she was back on set recently. What brings Grace Choi back into the picture?
What brings Grace Choi back is Anissa’s need to have a fuller life, and that’s kind of what brings her back.
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How is Lynn dealing with the aftermath of the finale? Is she feeling guilty too?
Yeah, I would say so, but not as much as Jefferson. I would say what I’m excited about this season is Lynn is going to be a lot more involved. She’s going to move past telling Jefferson, “You shouldn’t be Black Lightning,” and start to find a way to live a fuller life. We’re excited about the idea of her living a fuller life as a character and being a more activated [character] and not just reacting to her daughters or Jefferson.
The first season of “Black Lightning” on the CW tackled topical storytelling around gang and gun violence, and drugs in inner cities. With that foundation under its feet, the second season will dive even deeper into tales of police brutality and family separation.
“We’re at a critical point where artists, if they so choose — if it’s on their heart or their mind — have to express what they’re thinking,” says show runner Salim Akil.“It’s on my mind and it’s on my heart, and it seems like it’s not stopping.”
Picking up in the immediate aftermath of the events of the first season finale, “Black Lightning’s” sophomore year finds police in Freeland responding to calls that young African-American men are under the influence of green light — a drug that creates powers ranging from super strength to projecting a truth serum making those in your range unable to lie — and using that as “an excuse to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“If you remember back in the ’80s, Hillary Clinton called us ‘super predators,’ and it gave the police a reason to come in communities all over the country and just start putting bullets in people’s asses. That’s what I wanted to deal with in terms of Freeland,” Akil says.
Akil shares that he has also been deeply affected by the family separations at the border, which have influenced the way in which he tells the story of the discovery that missing children from decades ago were actually held in stasis pods and experimented on by a government agency because of the powers they were starting to exhibit.
Although the truth about where those missing kids have been came out at the end of the first season, now their families will have to fight to be reunited with them, Akil says.
“The idea was basically what the American government is telling the so-called aliens or people crossing the border is that ‘at this point we own your children and we decide what we want to do with them.’ And then they say, ‘It’s the law, it’s the law,’ and I remind people, ‘Well it was the law not too long ago that I couldn’t drink from a fountain,‘” he explains. “The laws aren’t infallible, so the idea that the government says that they own these people, to me, was directly related to that idea. … I can’t watch TV and not talk about that. I’m too sensitive of a person.”
But, he notes, these issues will “pop up in the lives of our characters the same way it pops up in our lives,” meaning he doesn’t plan to tell a highly-charged political story every week. Instead, he also wants to focus heavily on the family issues now that both of Pierce daughters have come into their powers.
“We’re doing books now — this is book one of four. This book is the ‘Book of Consequences,’ and what you’re seeing are the consequences from what this family went through last season,” he says. “I didn’t want to just stop and then start some whole new story. I wanted to see what the consequences were for the city of Freeland as well as the family.”
Since the show is jumping right back into the action, Akil admits they haven’t had an opportunity for Jefferson (Cress Williams) and Gambi (James Remar) to work out emotions after Gambi killed Martin Proctor (Gregg Henry). While the move allowed Lynn (Christine Adams) to expose the experiments on the pod kids, it still fractured a “father-son” relationship.
“The way we’re moving the storylines is there is no time [to work through it],” Akil says. “[They] either got to work together or not. … We’re moving. We’re playing rock-and-roll. Last year I think we played a little jazz.”
While Anissa (Nafessa Williams) took to her new abilities swiftly in the first season, Jennifer (China Anne McClain) struggled to gain control of them, and also struggled to accept them emotionally. Akil says that will continue in the second season.
“She’s afraid of what it means for her future,” he says, noting that in the first season she wondered if she could have kids, but this season she’ll wonder, “If I have sex, will I hurt somebody?”
And now that the secret is out that powers are possible, Jennifer will also be plagued by thoughts of “Am I hunted? Am I a monster? What am I?” Akil continues.
“It’s hard enough just being a young woman, then being a young black woman, and now having these powers that everybody’s afraid of.”
One way the show may approach Jennifer coping is through therapy, which Akil feels the African-American community doesn’t talk about enough.
“We don’t believe in that s—, but we’re the No. 1 people who need it. After slavery and Jim Crow, they should have sent an army of therapists into the black communities to heal people,” he says. “All of the s— you see in our communities is because we haven’t healed properly from the amount of abuse and oppression, and if you can say that being raised by a bad parent f—s your brain up and you pass it onto your children, than what do you think years and years and years and years of oppression has done to a whole group of people? And so I wanted to at least mention it — at least say, ‘Maybe we could get a little help.‘”
And just because Anissa is comfortable with herself and her abilities, doesn’t mean she will have an easy time this season, either. Not only does she have to figure out the line of what being a hero actually means, according to Akil, but sometimes her idea of it won’t be in line with her father’s, which will create new conflict. “They’ve always had different points of view, but now it’s becoming more extreme because the situation is more extreme,” Akil says. “[But] I think the conversation is what’s important.”
“Black Lightning” Season 2 premieres Oct. 9 on the CW.
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