Well, I predicted one thing correctly: The new white principal of Garfield High is simply awful. His name is Major Lowry, and the slave-master connotations of this episode’s title (“Master Lowry”) are barely an exaggeration. I’ll admit I was always a little suspicious of the show’s attitude towards Garfield High considering that it’s a charter school, and real-life charter schools are notoriously racially segregated to the detriment of their students. It was one thing when Jefferson Pierce was in charge and Garfield could boast the appealing “cultural homogeneity” described in a December 2017 Associated Press report. But now that we’ve seen that the school board is mostly white people, and now that they’ve installed a white yes-man at the top, Garfield might start to feel more like apartheid South Africa than Freeland’s singular safe space.
As befitting the typical security paranoia of an apartheid regime, the first thing Jefferson sees when he arrives at Garfield on his first day as non-principal is a bunch of metal detectors being installed. When he goes to ask Lowry about it, he finds his replacement on the phone. Literally, our first experience of this yes-man is seeing him say, “Yes, we absolutely can do that” over the phone. Even after he hangs up, Lowry can barely be bothered to look Jefferson in the eye, let alone shake his hand. He explains the metal detectors with a hand wave: If they weren’t necessary, then you’d still have this job, right? This is actually our only scene with Lowry in the episode named after him (he tells Jefferson to meet with him one-on-one later, but we never see it), but I suspect he will only get more racist and uncomfortable the farther we get into the season.
Henderson clearly still resents Jefferson for lying to him about the whole Black Lightning thing, but he nevertheless finds himself in need of the vigilante’s services after Detective Summers’ burned-out car is discovered (you may remember this detective as the guy who leaked information to Tobias last episode and got two bullets in the head for his troubles). Henderson knows that there are only three arsonists in the city who could have pulled off such a job so quickly, and two of them are in jail. He wants Black Lightning to find the other one. But besides discussing crime-fighting business, he’s not ready to talk things through yet — nor is he ready to divulge a critically important piece of Tobias-related information to his old friend.
While Black Lightning is busy hunting down this arsonist, his daughters are trying to figure out their lives. Jennifer’s problems have escalated to the point that her parents have decided to assign her a superpowered therapist to talk things through. Unfortunately, they don’t tell her first! Perenna approaches Jennifer when she’s walking through the park and transports her to a telepathic safe space, which has the predictable result of completely freaking her out. Over time, though, Jennifer sees the upside of getting help and starts talking with Perenna for real. Her desire to stuff her feelings away is extremely relatable, but unfortunately, Perenna tells her that they have to actually talk through those feelings before she can stuff them away.
from Viral Trendy Update https://ift.tt/2yYjufP
via IFTTT
0 Comments