Black Lightning is back for its fourth and final season on The CW and even though we’re just a few episodes into the season, there have been major status quo changes for every member of the Pierce family thanks to the fallout from the Markovian war as well as the clash with the corrupt A.S.A. in Season 3. For Anissa Pierce/Thunder, however, that status quo might be the most challenging as her girlfriend Grace Choi (Chantal Thuy) remains in a coma after sustaining serious injuries in the season finale. Things may not look particularly promising for the couple at the moment, but series star Nafessa Williams says there are exciting things to come before Black Lightning ends its run.
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Speaking with Hello Giggles, Williams didn’t give anything away but said people would be excited for what’s coming up regarding her character’s love life.
“[Fans] are going to be excited for what’s to come with [Thunder’s] love life,” Williams said.
One thing that fans are hopeful for in Black Lightning‘s final season is the wedding between Anissa and Grace. At the end of Season 3, Anissa and Grace got engaged and invited their loved ones over to celebrate with what would have been a surprise wedding. However, the nuptials were interrupted when Gravedigger arrived at the Freeland perimeter, prompting the pair along with Anissa’s father Jefferson/Black Lightning (Cress Williams) to head off to deal with him. By the time the battle — and the season — was over, Grace was in a coma thus putting any wedding plans on hold.
Should the final season of Black Lightning see an on-screen wedding for the pair, it will be a first for the Arrowverse. While there have been other married LGTBQ+ couples — specifically, Arrow‘s Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum) and The Flash‘s Captain Singh (Patrick Sabongui) were both married and their spouses mentioned on their respective series — there’s never been an actual wedding. Before the series can get to that groundbreaking moment, however, the whole Pierce family will have a lot to deal with in terms of the trauma they’ve experienced according to series showrunner Salim Akil.
“I think I just wanted to go back to dealing with the family. We had ended on such a broad note of ending the Markovian war,” Akil told Entertainment Weekly. “I wanted to then go back to the family and see what trauma looks like and how do you go about healing yourself. If you remember, Jefferson is depressed because his daughters have killed people, his wife has killed in people in this war, and he feels like he’s let them down and it’s his responsibility.”
Akil continued, “Trauma changes people. So I wanted to explore the idea of trauma, especially in African American families, because not all of us but far too many of us live in areas where gun violence and crime is prevalent on a daily basis, and nobody is really doing anything to try and solve it or report it anymore. So there’s a lot of trauma out there, and I just wanted to say to the people watching, ‘Hey, in order to heal, you have to talk about things. You have to deal with them and you have to seek help.’ I think if there’s a theme this year, someone said that ‘trauma is sort of the big bad this season.’”
Black Lightning airs Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on The CW.
