Why 'Black Lightning' Had the Perfect Reveal in "Sins of the Father: The Book of Redemption"

Spoilers ahead for tongiht's episode of Black Lightning, titled 'Sins of the Father: The Book of [...]

By Russ Burlingame

Spoilers ahead for tongiht's episode of Black Lightning, titled "Sins of the Father: The Book of Redemption."

Tonight on Black Lightning, an ASA sleeper agent was revealed and it was a near-perfect reveal from a technical standpoint, raising a lot of questions about what the last few weeks of the show's first season will have in store.

After Peter Gambi was kidnapped by his former ASA handlers and tortured for information about Black Lightning, his rescue at Jefferson's hands served a few purposes.

First of all, the ASA now knows who Black Lightning is, which will complicate matters for Jeff and his family going forward.

Second, Gambi told Jefferson that there has to be a spy -- someone embedded in the Freeland community -- who has been keeping an eye on things for quite some time. Find that spy, he told Jefferson, and you will find the children who have been missing for thirty years.

What Jefferson and Gambi don't know -- but the audience does, thanks to a revelation in the last few minutes of the episode -- is that the ASA plant is Kara Fowdy, the vice principal at Freeland who has been working with Jefferson for quite some time.

This was some beautiful work by the writers and filmmakers on Black Lightning.

Fowdy seemed on the face of her to be a fairly minor character with potentially larger implications further down the line -- just interesting enough that audiences would take note of her, but not so much so that it would become clear she was a threat right away.

And she did it all in accordance with some long-standing dramatic principles to boot.

While Fowdy has appeared in numerous episodes, she had basically two key appearances -- the pilot, and a later sequence a few weeks later where she was the harried go-between dealing with Jefferson's squabbles with the school board. The dismissive way he treated her, and her assertive reaction to it, were included in this week's "previously on Black Lightning" sequence at the start of the episode.

In the pilot, Fowdy was introduced and made memorable primarily because body language, the episode's shot selection, and even some of the dialogue implied she had a romantic interest in Jefferson. This was essentially planting her character in the minds of the audience.

In accordance with the concept of setup (planting) and payoff, we now know what she was being planted there for. But as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas pointed out in a video criticizing the Suicide Squad movie, the way her character is handled here was doubly satisfying because she conformed at least loosely to the rule of three, a narrative theory that says repeating a planted concept before paying it off makes it more satisfying.

The next audiences really noticed Fowdy was in "Black Jesus," after Jefferson began to reconcile with Lynn, and her frustration at Jefferson's disrespect came across as the typical TV trope of a woman scorned. He was clearly in the wrong, but would she have been so upset if she didn't have feelings for him? Or if she did have feelings for him and he was not trying to fix his marriage? Either way, once she stormed out of his office, she became someone to potentially watch for trouble, again reminding the audience that this rarely-seen character was someone who "mattered."

This third major appearance (again, as noted above and as Olson notes in his video, the rule of three is not a law of three, and storytelling takes dominance over rules of thumb, so her appearances in other episodes do exist but were less memorable) was in tonight's episode, when she was seen talking with Martin Proctor, the head of the ASA, who chastises her for missing the obvious truth that her direct supervisor at her cover job was in fact Black Lightning.

Besides being a gut-punch of a reveal, the reason that it was so effective is that it managed to follow effective dramatic conventions without telegraphing that it was doing so. That's some good TV.

Black Lightning airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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