'Empire' Recap: Cookie and the Case of the Missing Corpse

Probably the most annoying thing about accidentally murdering your snitch uncle and leaving his body in an unmarked grave is when you have to suddenly exhume him several months later under the cover of darkness. But near which tree did you bury him? Has his face been eaten by raccoons? How much Febreze will you have to spray in your trunk afterward? Exhuming desiccated corpses is the kind of situation that could only be described as DRAMA, so it was about time Empire finally got into it. And just in time for Halloween! Because Uncle Vernon sure looks disgusting now.

Good news, everyone: After two episodes that felt slightly same-y, “Poor Yorick” freshened things up a bit! Starting with the fact that both Empire Records and Lyon Dynasty were forced into a truce by a joint FBI raid, plus the increasingly fun D.A. plotline, and obviously the whole corpse incident… This week’s episode opened up new settings and possibilities for Empire. Yes, the family is still splintered and arbitrarily battling over whatever, but it’s always more fun when there’s a third-party enemy that brings them all together.

Let’s talk about it!

Things started off with a bang. And by bang I mean specifically a DOUBLE RAID by the FBI!

They came for Empire. They came for Lyon Dynasty. And now Becky has a phone full of video footage of men in nylon windbreakers slashing apart throw pillows. It was not a great day for either record company, but things only got more awkward when the aspiring D.A. and her goons showed up at Lucious’ house with a warrant only to find him wearing any emperor’s favorite outfit!

Even though the terms of Lucious’ bail were that he could not set foot in Empire, here he was, cheering up the team. Court orders be damned!

His (actually very sound logic) was that this FBI raid would generate tons of great publicity for his company, as well as confirm to the public that Lucious was an “O.G.” As Mimi Whiteman so poetically put it, “This is how playas play to win!” (Relax, Mimi.)

But one thing that would have to happen if Empire and Lyon Dynasty were going to survive all this legal harassment (which, it should be noted, was DESERVED, as Lucious truly had murdered Bunky) was that the family was going to have to present a united front. This meant a tenuous truce was formed, hinging on the joint music video that Jamal and Hakeem were set to film. But I loved when Cookie and Lucious met up to go over the terms of their deal and it all devolved into them making fun of each other for being grandparents soon even though they’re both still hot AF. Can you imagine having Cookie for a grandmother? I mean honestly, just sit back and close your eyes and imagine it. Ugh, some babies have all the luck.

Meanwhile Andre couldn’t sleep because he was feeling very guilty about being an accomplice to murder. See, Lucious had decided that the main reason why the prosecutor lady was coming for him so hard was because Uncle Vernon had disappeared, so Lucious’ new strategy was to track down Vernon before she could. Except, as we all know, Rhonda had cracked Uncle Vernon’s skull with a trophy and she and Andre had buried his body in the woods. Anyway, Rhonda was sleeping fine, if weirdly, in the bed and Andre’s conscience was screaming at him to wake up. Or maybe it was God? Either way.

Now, in my opinion, this was not a great set-up for Jamal’s Rolling Stone cover shoot. But it was definitely better than what they ended up going with:

In art criticism terms, this image of Jamal looked “horrible.” What was especially bizarre was that the pretentious photographer dude who took it had been merely snapping photos, and then one of them suddenly turned into a silkscreen painting? What kind of photo filter did he use?? But yeah, sorry, that image is not going on the cover of Rolling Stone, guys. Get real.

Mimi Whiteman (or, as Cookie later addressed her, Mimi Whitebitch) explained to Lucious that she recently became very YOLO after beating cancer. Finally, some good backstory for Mimi Whiteman! Anyway, the gang had assembled this day to observe the video shoot for Jamal and Hakeem’s duet. And, you guessed it, it was basically like if the Black Panthers had taken over Biosphere II.

Between this and last week’s Aunty Entity homage, Empire will just not stop reminding me of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome! I am the opposite of mad about this. It ended up being a pretty cool video, basically “California Love” but with a more confusing message about police brutality. I think?

Then Cookie got arrested for some reason! As she was being dragged into the car she screamed, “If I die in police custody, I did not commit suicide!” Which would be funny if it weren’t so devastatingly unfunny these days.

The reason she’d been incarcerated was because, as it turned out, Porsha had jumped a turnstile and then given them Cookie’s info instead of her own. (Oh, Porsha.) But for the record, I would really like to have a framed copy of this security camera image. Diane Arbus WISHED she could get as real as this.

Then Hakeem saw the dumb painting of Jamal that was going to be on Rolling Stone magazine and presented a very reasonable critique of the image by plunging a knife directly into it. This did not go over well and, later, tensions came to a head during the video shoot when a fight broke out between the two brothers and Hakeem nearly beat Jamal with a baseball bat! So much for the truce. (Team Hakeem though.)

After a series of flashbacks to her 17 years in prison without access to animal prints of any kind, Cookie melted down and finally agreed to play ball with the prosecutor lady, despite having told her “you need to kill yourself and that wack weave you got up top of your head.“ But Cookie being Cookie, she didn’t technically snitch… She merely lied about Bunky’s death being related to Lucious’ recent purchase of Apex Satellite Radio, which effectively ruined the deal. Which meant she would finally be able to get her artists played on urban radio. (Well, satellite radio, which in the world of Empire is a thing that’s considered important.)

Then Andre decided that he’d be able to get in good with Lucious again if he could make the Uncle Vernon issue “go away.” This meant that he’d decided to dig up the body for whatever reason (for a Weekend at Bernie’s routine, perhaps?) and Rhonda insisted on helping. She might have been a sad, guilty-stricken pregnant lady, but she was also BORED.

Unfortunately, wouldn’t you know it? They couldn’t remember where they’d buried the corpse! After spending hours laboring over a single spot, Rhonda suddenly noticed that the tree-with-a-hole-in-it marker was just one of hundreds of similar trees-with-holes-in-them. A classic shallow grave misunderstanding!

I don’t expect you to believe that Hakeem sometimes hangs out in jazz bars when he’s sad, but you WILL believe that within seconds of sitting down on his bar stool, an impossibly attractive first-time singer got on the microphone and stole everybody’s hearts.

Looks like SOMEONE’S girl group might be back on!

Andre and Rhonda’s grave-digging shenanigans were suddenly interrupted when Lucious and Thirsty showed up! They had tracked Andre’s car but the good news was they seemed more than willing to help deal with the Uncle Vernon situation. In one of the straight-up weirdest moments on an already very weird show, Thirsty got out a machine that he referred to as “your basic corpse detection system” and started firing sonar into the ground in order to find Uncle Vernon. Rhonda even asked if he ALWAYS carried this device around with him and he replied, “Only for the holidays.” I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS MEANS, and I don’t need to because I’m still laughing. Needless to say they did find Uncle Vernon’s corpse and threw it in Thirsty’s trunk. Andre said a few words of eulogy for his poor uncle, and Lucious added in a few poignant words of his own: “Rot in hell, you snitch.”

In one of the bigger bummers of the episode, Cookie had promised Anika that she could join Lyon Dynasty if she signed a difficult rapper to their roster… Only to later renege on the plan for no good reason. Aw come on, ladies, be friends already!

As a sort of final eff-you to the two closest friends he’d had in his life, Lucious burnt up a photograph of himself with Bunky and Vernon. See you in heck, fellas.

The episode then ended with an instant-classic TV moment: The prosecutor lady getting in her car only to find that Uncle Vernon was riding shotgun! Oh man, where to even begin with this? See, this is why we love Empire. It’s a show that prizes audacity over logic, and thank god for that. Truly wonderful. (But man, she is really gonna have to get some extra deodorizers at the car wash now.)

“Poor Yorick” was a fast, flashy, and ultimately very fun episode that finally moved us past some of the more basic Empire vs. Lyon Dynasty stuff of the past few weeks. I can’t claim to be super riveted by whatever’s going on with Jamal, but points for making the Andre plotline kind of great? And even though we’ve seen Cookie cornered by law enforcement in the past, it was nice to see her use the situation to her advantage for once. Also… An admirable lack of new guest stars this week! Not saying the guest stars have been to the show’s detriment quite yet, but the lack of distraction seemed to suit this show well. Yes, in Empire terms, this was an episode that finally remembered where its corpses were buried. Let the nasty surprises continue!

What did YOU think about “Poor Yorick”?

Empire airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox.