It's a good old-fashioned romance story and that needs to be soaped out over an X amount of episodes
Yeah.
Cookie prepares a family dinner for Angelo and his high society mother and Angelo wants her three sons to be there. A lovely but very optimistic idea.
Not surprisingly, everything goes terribly wrong in a way that has all the tropes of sitcom TV and it's really only saved by the Duboises who refuse to react to the bizarre situation.
Jamal performs his new "Mama" song (all in falsetto, it doesn't sound too great) but at least there's the relevance of three mothers being in that room.
Oh yes, Lucious and Anika also crash her dinner party.
At the end no real harm is done and Mrs. Dubois makes and friendly and dignified exit.
It's all very obvious and corny but it could have been so, so, so much worse.
Lucious has been trying to bring out the warrior in Hakeem in previous episodes, but now he literally teaches him that it's good to be mad & bad because that makes people survivors and winners.
It's not uncharacteristic for Lucious to think and behave that way but when it's being literally cited it feels too much like a Disney villain embracing his villainy.
A soap villain needs to feel justified, at least to some extent, in order to make me buy into that very villainy.
Without doubt there's no mystique and subtlety.
Of course it's all about getting Hakeem to do more powerful dishing-the-dirt performances and I understand how important music is in Empire, but it doesn't feel particularly important to
me.
I'm not getting a whole lot of satisfaction out of it.
Andre plots a cyber attack on Empire and then saves the day, which prompts Lucious to make him president of Empire XStream.
It's great that he's giving Lucious a taste of his own medicine but, as I've mentioned before, a prestigious position within a music company just doesn't feel exciting enough. Unless it's about a total and hostile takeover.
We also get to know more about Cookie's past and it's nice but not really necessary although the flashback scenes - this time on video - are truly lovely.
Candace and Carol make a guest appearance without the obligatory screaming/insult match.
There's something about low-key aunt & nephew scenes in soaps that always works for me because without any strong soaptastic connections it feels like a mini alternative universe within the soap.
Abby was cool with Sid's kids, Alexis was cool with Jeff and Caress and Steven really had no reason to do a scene together at all, but they did it anyway.
One could argue that THE COLBYS spin-off was unintentionally based on that idea.
Speaking of which, Nessa reminds me of Kim Morgan Greene aka Channing Carter.
Tariq's vendetta has been put on hold because of all this but it's still going on in the background and I expect good things to come from it.