'Empire' Final Season to End Early, Proper Series Finale Scrapped
Empire‘s proper series finale will never see the light of day.
Fox announced late Tuesday in an on-air promo that the show’s 20-episode sixth and final season will conclude on April 21, with Episode 18 now serving as the show’s swan song. As we previously reported, work on Empire ground to a halt last month while the show was in production on Episode 19. With the coronavirus pandemic showing no signs of slowing down, any hope there was of completing the final one-and-a-half episodes has been dashed.
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According to our sister site Deadline, producers are expected to weave some of the footage from the ill-fated Episode 19 into Episode 18 (aka the ersatz series finale) to “create a more seamless overall ending.” (For a complete list of rejiggered season and series finale dates, check out our cheat sheet here).
In the meantime, it appears next week’s antepenultimate episode — aka the series landmark 100th — will bring the Andre split personality storyline to a dramatic conclusion when Cookie and Lucious have their troubled eldest son committed to a psychiatric facility. He, of course, manages to escape and makes a beeline for his traumatized significant other in hiding Teri.
Check out the promo touting the series “final three episodes” below.
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