‘Empire’ season 2, episode 7 review: Lucious Lyon’s dark inspiration

Let’s start this particular “Empire” review with a question: Is this show really better or worse when the characters are all mostly doing their own things? We had fun with most of this episode, but for the most part the stories were somewhat disjointed.

For Lucious, the main event came right in the middle of an almost-threesome when he had more flashbacks to his childhood, and he finally came up with the vision for the perfect collaboration. There’s nothing that gets this guy all riled up and in the mood for being creative quite like thinking about people nearly shooting themselves. It’s demented, but he is the child of trauma and therefore passes that along to most of those close to him. It certainly does not help that his children have plenty of their own problems to go along with all of their own emotional baggage.

Maybe the best news for the Lyon children in this episode is that, at least for the most part, Hakeem seems to be making some genuine progress when it comes to building up Laura. The guy has a goal and he tries to stick to it, which hopefully is going to keep him on the straight and narrow. At least his story and really all things Jamal help to make up for where we are right now with Cookie. For one reason or another, we just cannot get into the story with her and Adam Rodriguez. It’s not magnetic enough for us, we presume.

We do still wonder after this episode whether or not “Empire” has enough forward motion going at this point to make it into the TV show that it was during season 1 again. For example, when is the next step finally going to happen for Andre and Rhonda? Hasn’t it been long enough? Oh, and there’s still too much music. Episode Grade: B.

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