Warning: The following feature contains SPOILERS for Black Lightning season 4, episode 5, "The Book of Ruin: Chapter One: Picking Up The Pieces."
The Arrowverse is repeating a major mistake with its villains, with gang boss Lala proving better at keeping the peace as an anti-hero in Freeland than Black Lightning. This trend started earlier in 2021 with Alice, the chief villain of Batwoman, being more sympathetic and heroic than many of the series' so-called heroes. The story of Batwoman season 2 has centered around the abduction of Kate Kane by a mysterious pirate queen known as Safiyah, who had past dealings with both super-spy Julia Pennyworth and Beth Kane before she assumed her Alice identity and returned to Gotham to form the Wonderland Gang.
Despite supposedly being mad as a hatter and utterly devoted to killing her twin sister, it was Alice who was the most reasonable in the face of a shared enemy. Alice repeatedly offered to form an alliance with her sister's allies, pointing out that Safiyah was a far greater danger to Gotham's peace than she was, only to be met with treachery from "heroes" like Sophie Moore.
Latavious "Lala" Johnson has come to assume a similar role over the course of Black Lighting season 4. A former student of Jefferson Pierce, Lala never escaped the life of a gangster, but still harbored great respect for Pierce and what he did for Freeland. Lala fell victim to the machinations of Tobias Whale and was literally cursed for his trouble, given a superhuman healing factor at the cost of being haunted by the ghosts of every person he had ever killed, directly or indirectly, in the form of a series of magical tattoos. This left Lala as the one person in Freeland who hated Tobias more than Pierce and wildly determined to get revenge on his former boss, taking over Tobias' gang, The 100, after his abduction by the ASA. Under Lala's guidance, The 100 helped to take back the city during the Battle of Freeland.
In the year that followed, The 100 continued to profit off the chaos in Freeland, but Lala was shown to have taken an interest in the community and mitigating the damage his gang was doing. He agreed to a mutual truce with his rivals, declaring one particular park as a safe space for Freeland's homeless population. When Lala learned a young boy had been killed by one of his men who failed to respect his rules about risking the lives of civilians, Lala tracked down the killer and took care of the problem, even as it painfully added another tattoo to his collection.
Black Lightning commented upon Lala's apparent reformation in "The Book of Ruin: Chapter One: Picking Up The Pieces," saying he'd hoped Lala might have turned the corner, before accusing him of killing Freeland's mayor while he and Tobias Whale were overseeing a gun buy-back event. Lala denied the charge, saying he and his men had been trying to kill Whale because he knew his former boss would be coming after him, The 100 and Black Lightning sooner or later and he wanted to stop whatever he was planned. "Freeland is my house," asserted Lala. "I don't kill nobody in it unless they got it coming." He went on to add it was good to see Black Lightning back in action, because "Freeland's been needing someone to look up to."
There is some irony in both Alice and Lala becoming anti-heroes in the Arrowverse. While she started as a villain in the Batwoman comics, Alice eventually reformed and adopted the moniker Red Alice, becoming a violent vigilante who worked to protect Gotham. While Lala doesn't have a direct comic counterpart, his abilities are similar to those of Mark Richards; a DC Comics anti-hero known as the Tattooed Man, who acquired a new tattoo every time he killed a wicked person. It remains to be seen if Lala will find a way to redeem himself before the end of Black Lightning season 4.
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