Outside of the one twist in "Keep Your Friends Close", which was legitimately good, this show's biggest problem is that the surprises weren't surprising! And there's, like, five of them in this episode alone and they all end the same way!
Naomi's parents are evil? Well, yeah, through process of elimination is was either them or Akira, and they weren't gonna do it with Akira again since the whole point of her subplot in "Fallout" was to absolve her of being an antagonist. Dee didn't betray the team? Well, yeah, we've seen him have to grieve Q'ala multiple times already, and I recall him getting her necklace back in "Homecoming" which I thought was supposed to put him at peace with her death. Brutus sees what he's doing as good? Well, yeah, the dude's clearly a not-so-subtle MCU Thanos stand-in. Meanwhile, the only twist I wanted to see was the one where the CW cared about this show and gave them a bigger budget so they might've had the chance to capitalize on that great Pilot episode and get a second season.
This episode... Existed. As a season finale, it doesn't execute on what I thought the season was setting up, so that was kinda disappointing. They didn't even bother answering the "Who Am I?" question that the episode is titled after. Honestly, if you look back at my review of the Pilot "Don't Believe Everything You Think", pretty much everything I praised the Pilot for is completely missing from this episode.
The unique feel of the show is completely gone with a pretty boring "chosen one" plotline covering up the character study feel the show was setting up. Throw in the bland cheap-looking action scenes (that mostly happen off-screen because of the show's abysmally small cgi budget), and you've got yourself whatever Black Lightning season 4 was trying to be. They've even got their own Jennifer Pierce in Annabelle. If this show did nothing else, it showed that Mary-Charles Jones is legitimately funny and can make bad dialogue seem great almost effortlessly, so I hopes she doesn't have any trouble finding another role after this.
Zumbado went from intimidating bad guy to supportive father figure, and while I think that worked for the show, I believe that Zumbado was actually a villain in the Naomi comics. Meanwhile, the show turns him into a dude that has an entire closet full of colored suits that gets to say the line "I Am Not a Used Car Salesman", which I found to be pretty funny.
Port Oswego doesn't feel like an entity on the level of Smallville or Freeland, and exists as nothing more than a backdrop like Central City or National City.
While the teenage characters stick around, the school is completely forgotten after prom when there really should've been a Black Lightning season 1 level school invasion where Brutus's soldiers tried to kidnap Naomi's friends from inside their classrooms (see Black Lightning's "The Resurrection and the Light: The Book of Pain" for more information on how that could've worked).
Naomi's "naïve girl that needs to make a choice" characterization is *mostly* sidelined outside of her going to face Brutus alone (though she spends the entire episode ditching her friends, so the "choice" for her to face Brutus alone doesn't really feel like a choice since it just follows the pattern of what she was already doing).
In place of everything that was good about the show, we get Brutus who I'll admit is fun in a "Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster" or a "Legends of Tomorrow's Bishop" kind of way. There isn't much to him, but the performance from Ray Porter was fun enough to keep me engaged. I think we would've gotten to see more of Brutus in the next season had the show not been cancelled, and it definitely *seems* like there's more to him than what we get (or at least that there *should* be more to him than what we get), but I guess we'll never know if there was or not.
Outside of "Enigma", this show's action scenes have been incredibly underwhelming. Dee's fight against that bounty hunter (who I thought was named "Enigma" since that's what the episode he was introduced in was called, but I guess he just doesn't have a name) was legitimately great, but the rest of the action in the show was very lacking, most of them happening at weird angles to disguise the show's abysmal cgi.
Also, did nobody tell Kaci Walfall that superheroes fire blasts with their fingers towards the sky? Every single time that Naomi used her powers it looked extremely unconvincing because of the position of her hands. You never, and I repeat, *never* see a superhero firing a blast underhand, and the reason is that it doesn't look good on-screen or on the comics page.
Look, that's all I've got. I tried liking this show, but with the exception of a few standout episodes here and there, the notable ones being "Keep Your Friends Close" and "Worst Prom Ever" (minus the super speed part), this show was overall pretty mediocre. All in all, I think I'm glad that I gave it a chance, but it definitely fell victim to the Flash curse of being an absolute chore to watch every week towards the end.
5 / 10.
Naomi's parents are evil? Well, yeah, through process of elimination is was either them or Akira, and they weren't gonna do it with Akira again since the whole point of her subplot in "Fallout" was to absolve her of being an antagonist. Dee didn't betray the team? Well, yeah, we've seen him have to grieve Q'ala multiple times already, and I recall him getting her necklace back in "Homecoming" which I thought was supposed to put him at peace with her death. Brutus sees what he's doing as good? Well, yeah, the dude's clearly a not-so-subtle MCU Thanos stand-in. Meanwhile, the only twist I wanted to see was the one where the CW cared about this show and gave them a bigger budget so they might've had the chance to capitalize on that great Pilot episode and get a second season.
This episode... Existed. As a season finale, it doesn't execute on what I thought the season was setting up, so that was kinda disappointing. They didn't even bother answering the "Who Am I?" question that the episode is titled after. Honestly, if you look back at my review of the Pilot "Don't Believe Everything You Think", pretty much everything I praised the Pilot for is completely missing from this episode.
The unique feel of the show is completely gone with a pretty boring "chosen one" plotline covering up the character study feel the show was setting up. Throw in the bland cheap-looking action scenes (that mostly happen off-screen because of the show's abysmally small cgi budget), and you've got yourself whatever Black Lightning season 4 was trying to be. They've even got their own Jennifer Pierce in Annabelle. If this show did nothing else, it showed that Mary-Charles Jones is legitimately funny and can make bad dialogue seem great almost effortlessly, so I hopes she doesn't have any trouble finding another role after this.
Zumbado went from intimidating bad guy to supportive father figure, and while I think that worked for the show, I believe that Zumbado was actually a villain in the Naomi comics. Meanwhile, the show turns him into a dude that has an entire closet full of colored suits that gets to say the line "I Am Not a Used Car Salesman", which I found to be pretty funny.
Port Oswego doesn't feel like an entity on the level of Smallville or Freeland, and exists as nothing more than a backdrop like Central City or National City.
While the teenage characters stick around, the school is completely forgotten after prom when there really should've been a Black Lightning season 1 level school invasion where Brutus's soldiers tried to kidnap Naomi's friends from inside their classrooms (see Black Lightning's "The Resurrection and the Light: The Book of Pain" for more information on how that could've worked).
Naomi's "naïve girl that needs to make a choice" characterization is *mostly* sidelined outside of her going to face Brutus alone (though she spends the entire episode ditching her friends, so the "choice" for her to face Brutus alone doesn't really feel like a choice since it just follows the pattern of what she was already doing).
In place of everything that was good about the show, we get Brutus who I'll admit is fun in a "Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster" or a "Legends of Tomorrow's Bishop" kind of way. There isn't much to him, but the performance from Ray Porter was fun enough to keep me engaged. I think we would've gotten to see more of Brutus in the next season had the show not been cancelled, and it definitely *seems* like there's more to him than what we get (or at least that there *should* be more to him than what we get), but I guess we'll never know if there was or not.
Outside of "Enigma", this show's action scenes have been incredibly underwhelming. Dee's fight against that bounty hunter (who I thought was named "Enigma" since that's what the episode he was introduced in was called, but I guess he just doesn't have a name) was legitimately great, but the rest of the action in the show was very lacking, most of them happening at weird angles to disguise the show's abysmal cgi.
Also, did nobody tell Kaci Walfall that superheroes fire blasts with their fingers towards the sky? Every single time that Naomi used her powers it looked extremely unconvincing because of the position of her hands. You never, and I repeat, *never* see a superhero firing a blast underhand, and the reason is that it doesn't look good on-screen or on the comics page.
Look, that's all I've got. I tried liking this show, but with the exception of a few standout episodes here and there, the notable ones being "Keep Your Friends Close" and "Worst Prom Ever" (minus the super speed part), this show was overall pretty mediocre. All in all, I think I'm glad that I gave it a chance, but it definitely fell victim to the Flash curse of being an absolute chore to watch every week towards the end.
5 / 10.
