Black Lightning star on how Jefferson will react to [SPOILER]'s powers

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Tuesday night’s series premiere of Black Lightning on The CW. Read at your own risk.

Black Lightning is back!

In the series premiere of The CW’s Black Lightning, the electricity-powered Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) returned to the superhero game after the notorious One Hundred Gang, which has been terrorizing his community, abducted his daughters, Anissa (Nafeesa Williams) and Jennifer (China Anne McClain) (Read our full recap here). However, that wasn’t the only major development of the evening.

In the final scene of the pilot, Anissa wakes up from a nightmare and accidentally breaks her bathroom sink as she relives that night’s frightful events in her mind. Clearly, Jefferson isn’t the only member of the Pierce family with superpowers (which we knew thanks to a recent first look image at Nafeesa Williams as Thunder). When EW spoke to Cress Williams and EP Salim Akil, they said Jefferson — who still hasn’t told his daughters about his alter ego — would have conflicting feelings about his daughters developing metahuman abilities.

“It’s kind of a messy mixture of pride, that these are his genes and his offspring are having these abilities,” said Williams, “but there’s also this healthy dose of fear because he’s been where he’s been and it’s taken a toll. It has torn up his family to a certain degree. He’s seen people lose their lives by having these abilities. There’s that fear of not wanting his daughters to travel down the same road as him, but also over the course of the series before those things come to light, the whole family goes on a journey that informs how each of us are affected when those abilities come to light.”

As both of his daughters start developing powers, Jefferson will need to get over that initial fear. Adds Akil: “You gotta pick yourself up and you gotta do what you think is best for those girls, and the best thing for them at that point would be to embrace them and try to teach them everything you possibly can about that world, if that’s the path they’re going to choose.”

Black Lightning airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.