‘Empire’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: ‘True Love Never’
It's time for another episode of Empire.
True Love Never begins with Cookie sleeping with the enemy. Literally.
She attempts to get out of bed with Laz to go to work for fear of Hakeem ruining Dynasty Records, but Laz woos Cookie with the promise of bacon, so she stays and evidently has raucous sex with Laz for three days straight. Way to go, girl. He’s the enemy, but way to go.
Freda and Jamal are both in the studio working on songs for Lucious. Freda, although fussy, proves to be prodigious in the studio and has Lucious more excited than we’ve seen him this season thus far. Jamal, however, isn’t getting the same kinda love from Lucious. To be a scorned son! Good thing he has Cookie to text for input on his song, which definitely isn’t going to make Lucious happy if he ever finds out.
Luscious solicits a living room session with a music giant Huey Jarvis, in the hopes of getting his new artists the attention they deserve. Jarvis asks for more, and Lucious has a flashback to his childhood where he can be seen possibly burying bullets. What a life this man has had.
Hakeem, having gotten over his post-kidnapping trauma, is on a mission to help Laura of Mirage a Trois to become more of a lead singer. She gets bumped out of the lead position by a side b--h named Carmen during a performance of their new song “Mimosa," and Cookie tells Hakeem she doesn’t have what it takes. Meanwhile, Andre continues to struggle with his faith and how to deal with his father’s wishes to have Freda’s gang injunction lifted.
Cookie and Jamal have a reunion, one which TRULY warms my bones. They’re such a good pair together, and Cookie gives Jamal all of the right advice on what to do to his song before his performance for Huey Jarvis. She invites him to Lyon Dynasty to tweak some of the song he has prepared. Lucious obviously has no idea this is happening, and if he were to find out, something tells me we’d see a new side of angry from the Lyon Patriarch.
Andre ends up blackmailing the clerk to get Freda’s injunction lifted, which I’m sure isn’t the most Christian thing to do, but then again, Andre is still a Lyon. Hakeem has Laura sing a spanish cover of “I Will Survive” in public in hopes of boosting her confidence. She does, and the two FINALLY make out and Laura sufficiently gets her swag.
After previously knocking him out cold in the boxing ring for calling his lyrics “shallow," Lucious meets with Jago in the hospital to convince him to merge his company Swiftstream (a construct of Mimi Whitman) with Empire Records. As he was previously resistant, Lucious successfully convinces him to make a deal only after having him *pumped* with morphine. Like, I mean pumped.
Laz convinces Cookie to meet with Hakeem’s kidnappers to strike a deal. Although Hakeem is still wary of these men, which makes more sense than most things Hakeem feels, they successfully strike a deal for 15% revenue in exchange for the concert venue. Hakeem calls out Cookie for sleeping with Laz, but she makes sure he knows she has everything under control *cough*.
Jamal slays his session with Huey Jarvis, but his glory is interrupted by another flashback from Lucious’ childhood. Kelly “Mother of Lyon, Child of Destiny” Rowland is looking for a gun and bullets with her son sitting in the room with her. This memory has stuck with Lucious, as when he goes back to his apartment with Mimi and some random girl for a possible menage a trois, he sees a gun on the random girl’s thigh and freaks out. Right before that, however, he notices Mimi making a shady phone call which could possibly be an ulterior motive on her end.
Lucious grabs the gun his mother seemingly used to kill herself with (which he keeps in his apartment) and calls Freda into the studio. They re-record "Boom Boom Boom" with some added sounds from his mother’s gun, and the episode ends with Lucious saying “history in the making.”
THE GOING’S GETTING ROUGH, Y’ALL.
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