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In tonight’s Scandalous episode of Empire we see that Andre is becoming the most like his dad out of all the Lyon sons—and definitely not for the better.
In the beginning of the episode, we see that Cookie and Angelo are still going strong, and Mama Dubois is in the mix since Cookie won her approval. Cookie is showing The Duboises around her world. In this scene, Tiana is rehearsing for her upcoming performance at the HVW Fashion show, and that’s when Jamal popped up. Mama Dubois loves Jamal’s music and wants him to write a song for Angelo’s campaign and perform it at an upcoming charity event for him. Cookie tried to shut that down because she knows Jamal isn’t ready, with all that PTSD going on, but her attempts to squash it don’t matter. Mama Dubois and Jamal are super into it and that’s that.
Dre apologized to Cookie for missing the dinner with Angelo’s mom. Cookie couldn’t stay mad at Dre for long, and even softens up when he reveals that he’s so serious about Nessa that the reason he missed Cookie’s engagement is so that he could meet Nessa’s family. He also asks if Nessa could spend some time shadowing Tiana since she wants to achieve that level of stardom. This can’t possibly be as innocent as it seams.
Lucious decides to take his mom and Annika to dinner to discuss how they can live together without killing each other. It’s not a productive meeting because Mama Lucious ends up yelling at Lucious about how he locked her in a dungeon with Andre and starved them. Lucious doesn’t take the bait, though. He keeps calm, but then we cut to the next scene where we see Tariq in the car with his partner. They’re spying on them the whole time (someone in the restaurant near Lucious was bugged) and even discuss trying to use Lucious’ mom as a pawn. Tariq is hesitant at first because she’s mentally ill, but we know that’s not gonna stop him. Later on we discover that hee moved forward with getting her on board the sabotage, but is she going to crack that easily?
Let’s get back to Nessa shadowing Tiana. That situation goes south quickly. Basically, Nessa was “helping” Tiana during a dress fitting and then Tiana took the dress off and gave it to Nessa to put away. Nessa laid the dress on top of a hot curler.
You know what happened, right? That white couture dress burst into flames. Nessa claimed it was an accident, be we know what was up. Later on, video surfaced of Tiana’s epic rant when she was going off on Nessa about how stupid she was for destroying the dress, and how the designer of the fashion show is racist anyway and ridiculous for throwing an African-inspired fashion show without black models. Tiana is embarrassed by the whole thing and to the public she looks like a difficult diva. For some reason, no one seems to connect the leak of that footage with Nessa, but whatever. Dre goes into crisis mode to try to fix the situation. The designer decided to break ties with Tiana, but Dre’s idea is to have a more urban artist like Nessa so that she doesn’t look racist (even though she actually is). This designer is not moved at first and talks greasy about how she’s gonna go for Ellie Goulding, since she “has class” and fits the “true aesthetic” she’s looking for (read white, white, whitey, white and white). These comments come on top of comments she made earlier about how Tiana’s hair needed to be straight for the show.
Basically, Tiana’s rant wasn’t wrong. But anyway, it was looking like the designer was done with Empire period. Dre left peacefully, despite being seemingly defeated, but not before telling the designer that he loved her daughter’s hair.
That seemed random, but fast forward to the scene where the designer’s little girl wake’s up with her hair cut off. You already know what that was. We also discover that Dre is the one who set up the camera that recorded Tiana. In the end, his plann worked. Nessa headlined the HVW fashion show and killed it. Tiana was pissed, but Hakeem had her back. He even offered to work with her to get back at Dre and Nessa because you know he’s still salty about the fact that Dre bagged Nessa in the first place. After all was said and done with this situation, it turns out that Cookie what Dre did and let him know that he wasn’t right. This is only the beginning, though. Lemme find out, Drecious is on the loose.
Meanwhile, Lucious knew what Tariq was up to so he set up a plan with his mother to pretend that she was going along with Tariq. They planned what she would tell Tariq if asked, and she actually got Tariq to open up about the past. The goal was to find Tariq’s weakness. So far it seems like his childhood is what trouble’s him—being Lucious’ half-brother and all. You know that whole scandal about how they have the same dad.
The episode concludes with Jamal playing a shady song he wrote about Lucious for his family. This leads to a Jamal telling his brothers how Cookie’s father died of a heart attack and that her sisters blame Lucious (Dre and Hakeem didn’t know any of this). Jamal basically said Lucious ruined their mom’s life, and then tried to get his family to stand with him against Lucious. They all got quiet (because going against Lucious never really works out) and then Lucous put Cookie on blast. He revealed that he called in the hit of Frank Gathers because of “a mess his mom made” (the whole snitching incident) and that he refuses to apologize for loving her. Lucious left Jamal and company stuck on stupid. They were stunned, looking like:
And we end on that note. Next week is the Winter finale, so you know it’s about to get real.
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