‘Black Lightning’ Showrunner on the “Consequences” of Season 2

Black Lightning showrunner Salim Akil teases that, with a second season that picks up just a week after the end of season one, the series will kick into gear with the consequences from last season’s crazy finale taking center stage.

According to an interview with TVLine, the opening arc of the season, titled “The Book of Consequences: Rise of the Green Light Babies,” will not only introduce new metahumans but deal with the overall fallout from the discovery of the missing children in stasis pods.

“We’re going to deal with the consequences of having discovered the pod children; the consequences of Green Light hitting the streets; and the consequences of Jefferson’s daughters discovering they have powers,” Akil said.

One consequence of the rise of the Green Light babies is that not all of them will be good, and the ones who aren’t will put members of the Freeland community in fear and lead to some questions about Black Lightning and Thunder.

Speaking of Thunder, her new relationship with Grace Choi will begin to take shape and provide some drama for the series, while her sister Jennifer will struggle with her conflicted feelings about her longtime best friend and ex-boyfriend Khalil suddenly being a supervillain who almost succeeded in killing her father.

As for big bad Tobias Whale, Akil says that “in the first episode you’ll see exactly what motivates him to ‘burn the city down,’ as he says.”

“He struggles a lot with self love and love from outside sources,” Marvin Jones III, who plays Whale, said recently. “We saw who he loves, we saw what he loves and he lost what he loves. And that was his community, Joey Toledo and Tory his sister, that’s his community. He has a few cats that he know, he work through that he likes maybe. But those aren’t people that he really loves, the Syonide of course and now Syonide is the only one left and he pretty much raised her groomed her from baby. He’s a lonely guy, the character Tobias Whale is a lonely guy. He’s always by himself, he’s always drinking.”

The series just cast Sophia Vassilieva as Looker, a superhero who was name-dropped alongside Supergirl in the first season. Funny enough, Vassilieva actually had a minor role on Supergirl last year, although Black Lightning does not share a spot in The CW‘s “Arrowverse” and so the two will not be connected.

A new teaser trailer for the second season also hit today, using more new footage from upcoming episodes than the Comic Con trailer did, since Black Lightning had just gone back into production shortly before the event.

Black Lightning returns to The CW in October. The series airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT following episodes of The Flash.