'Empire' Midseason Finale: Who Didn't Get Betrayed?

Empire came to a midseason finale with a wild hour filled with music, betrayal, prison melodrama, boardroom backstabbing, and the longest announcement of nominees for an awards show in the history of show business.
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for the midseason finale of Empire.

The hour was framed by the American Sound Awards nominations — the “54th Annual,” no less, making it only slightly younger than the real-life Grammys and older than the MTV and BET Awards combined. The idea was to show the Lyon family in anxious distress, as Lucious, Jamal, and Hakeem each vied for some of the same nominations.

In the time it took for all the nominations to be read during a supposedly live broadcast, Cookie visited her old prison; Marisa Tomei’s Mimi taped conversations with Lucious (with a pen!), and that led to an Empire corporation board meeting to oust him; Jamal debuted his Pepsi commercial; and somebody pushed pregnant Rhonda down a long flight of stairs. Oh, and Naomi Campbell came back in a big way: Also bending the laws of time and space, her Camilla, since we last saw her pried away from Hakeem, had managed to marry Mimi and see the latter through a battle with breast cancer.

It was crazy, but darned if the episode didn’t work some kind of magic. Absurd and over-the-top, Empire operates on its own wavelength of logic and dramatic momentum. No other network hit is going to make the kind of black-power pronouncements contained in both Jamal and Skye Summers’ song duet and in Cookie’s speech to her prison sisters. No other show is so frank about the homophobia of one of its key characters — Lucious’s “She fixed you” remark to Jamal regarding the son’s one-night-stand with Skye reverberated down Empire’s golden hallways.

The episode, titled “Et Tu, Brute?,” paid off on its quotation from Julius Caesar to Brutus, culminating in an awkwardly jerry-rigged scene in which Hakeem used Cookie’s proxy to cast the deciding vote to have Lucious removed as Empire CEO and chairman. (I have to admit, I too would have voted to get rid of Lucious at that point, just so I never had to hear him talk about that damn “Swiftstream” streaming service one more time.)

I loved Jamal’s Pepsi commercial: It was cheesy enough to pass as the real thing (oh wait, that’s a Coke slogan), and thus was suitable for that ultra-cheesy piece of music Lucious, Cookie, and Jamal created for it.

I loved the way Cookie and Hakeem just strolled through the general population of the prison as though that’s the way all visitors are allowed to do. I also loved the weirdly triumphant return of Camilla — Campbell came on to Hakeem like a predator. And I love what Empire has done to Alicia Keys, rendering her more intriguing and accessible than she frequently presents herself in concert; her Skye is the kind of pop star Keys would never deign to strive for, but is so much more interesting.

And even if you knew from previous weeks that Anika has gone soap-opera nutso, her Dynasty-worthy push of Rhonda down those stairs (does anyone doubt it’s Rhonda?) was delightful campiness.

There have been moments this season when I thought Empire has dragged a bit, but this finale was a loony, energetic pleasure: Was there a single main character who didn’t get betrayed by the end? And will Empire have to expand to two hours when they actually hold the American Sound Awards?

New episodes of Empire will return in March on Fox.