Black Lightning returned Monday night, giving fans their first look at The CW series now that it is officially part of not just the Arrowverse but Jefferson Pierce’s whole reality has become part of the new Earth-Prime. As we’ve seen on both Batwoman and Supergirl, which returned on Sunday, while most things remained the same there were some changes each of the heroes discovered about their world. Here’s how things changed for Black Lightning.
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Spoilers for “The Book of Markovia Chapter One: Blessings and Curses Reborn,” below.
As it turns out there were strikingly few differences between Black Lightning‘s reality pre-Crisis and post-Crisis – at least thus far. The episode opened with Black Lightning/Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) flying back to Freeland, still marveling at the things he experienced during “Crisis”. Lightning/Jennifer Pierce (China Anne McClain) was revealed to be briefly trapped in some sort of white space outside of reality which is likely where she rode out “Crisis”. Both of them return to things at Anissa’s (Nafessa Williams) apartment, but no one is there. The events of “Earth Crisis” are like they never happened.
And that’s something that Gambi (James Remar) largely confirms. He tells Jefferson that it’s like he never left at all as he has no memory of any of the things the hero describes. Gambi does believe him, though, as he picks up traces of anti-matter on both Jefferson and Jennifer and suggests that it’s their powers that allowed them to survive. Beyond that, nothing else appears to have changed. The keyword there, however, is appears. The focus of the episode is largely on Jennifer’s continued troubles with the ASA as well as a rescue mission that is carried out by the Resistance to prevent the nefarious organization from taking a group of metahuman children and turning them into weapons. With those high-stakes situations at hand, there really isn’t much time to stop and chat about Superman being real, though Jefferson clearly was very excited about the prospect of a comic book hero being real.
With this midseason premiere being rather light on differences in Black Lightning‘s world as compared to Supergirl and Batwoman which both had some surprising reveals in their midseason premieres, it’s entirely possible that we’ll see more changes pop up as the season progresses. For now, though, Black Lightning seems to have been ported into Earth-Prime largely intact.
Black Lightning airs Mondays at 9/8c on The CW.
