And so “Empire’s” uneven second season comes to an action-packed end. Suicide attempts, weddings, subpoenas, slap fights, strangling. It’s all a blur. And despite Jussie Smollet’s tweet that he was leaving the show, Jamal is still alive! Even coming home from the hospital is a musical event for these people.
Also, bye, Laura. No one liked you anyway.
Was family drama at the center of the episode?
Basically. It’s hard not to have a lot of family drama with 1.5 weddings going on. The FBI investigation got a lot of attention, which was occasionally boring (it’s never really a great time when Lucious talks at length about past criminal activities that we aren’t invested in), but it eventually came full circle because the agent is Lucious’s half brother! What a twist.
Any scene between the three brothers is always cute, but the real drama of this episode came from two long-awaited confrontations: Anika and Rhonda, and Lucious and Cookie. Now that Rhonda has pieced the Anika thing together, she’s back in full bitch mode. I missed feisty, manipulative Rhonda. As for Cookie and Lucious, that betrayal felt earned because their romantic tension has been building all season.
Were there strong musical numbers?
I don’t know about strong. There were musical numbers. They were fine.
Did Cookie have some good one-liners?
This was an emotional episode for Cookie, so it was less about the snark. But “Jamal is grumpy because he’s tired and he’s never been shot before” was pretty priceless.
Was the fashion cracktastic?
The wedding was weirdly classy. But Cookie’s outfit when she went to see Shyne Johnson made up for it.
Bonus: Did someone die?
Maybe! Who knows? Seems unlikely that both Rhonda and Anika went over the edge of that balcony, but one of them could have. If it’s Boo Boo Kitty, that clears the way for Lucious and Cookie and also saves us all the headache of pretending to care about the baby that’s always “in the other room.”
‘Empire’
Season 2, Episode 18
3 out of 4 stars
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