Jamal can't give an interview in peace. Cookie burst into the last one to rant and rave; now he's pulled away from an interview for a Rolling Stone cover story. FBI agents have raided the Empire headquarters and ransacked Lucious' office.
At the little Lyon Dynasty studio, Hakeem is determined to rebuild a girl group and get even with Lucious, who stole his lead singer, Valentina. Cookie, who is wearing some kind of Rosie the Riveter scarf, blows off Anika, who is thirsty to return to Lyon Dynasty. Anika shows Cookie a phone video of the raid, and Cookie cackles and plots—until the feds come for her with a search warrant. She's charged with questionable accessory choices.
Who is that woman in bed with Lucious? It doesn't matter; the big news is that Thirsty and his purple suits spent the night in the guest room "with the twins." Empire, mercifully, doesn't get into details but has no mercy when it comes to Roxanne Ford (who from now on will be referred to as Boob Boob Kitty). When the prosecutor storms into Chez Lyon, Lucious greets her in his birthday suit. Lucious is charged with giving the audience nightmares.
Back at Empire, Lucious convinces investor Mimi Whiteman that being raided by the feds gives the company street cred. Mimi, please don't ever say "This is how playas play to win” again. Mimi gets charged with talking like she's Rachel Dozezal and wearing Vanilla Ice hair.
Cookie and Lucious talk about a truce. Thirsty advises the Lyons to present a united front until they find Vernon, the state's witness. The Lyons don't know that Rhonda already took care of Vernon with a blunt instrument.
Lucious refuses to let Andre return to the company because he was disloyal and went along with Cookie's hostile takeover. Andre doesn't know it, but every time Lucious looks at him, he thinks of his own mother, who had mental-health issues. Andre says he can make this mess with Vernon go away. Lucious will let him return to Empire if he succeeds.
Cookie is pulled off the streets by the cops for failure to appear in court and yells that if she dies in police custody, it's not because she committed suicide. The last time Cookie made a Black Lives Matter statement, she was dressed in a gorilla suit, so this is an improvement. Boob Boob Kitty pressures Cookie to turn on Lucious. She threatens to go after Cookie's sons and release Andre's medical records, which might push him over the edge. Boob Boob Kitty needs to have a seat and pull up two more for those boobs. Cookie lies and says that Bunkie did not want go along with Lucious' plans to buy Apex Records, hoping the prosecutor will squash the deal and allow Cookie to get her artists back on the radio. Score one for Cookie.
Andre says that God is talking to him. God instructs Andre to dig up Vernon's body, which will end the case against his dad. It'll win Lucious' love and get Andre back into Empire. Rhonda comes along because she's "ride or die." Rhonda, please don't ever say "ride or die" again. There's a glitch; woods tend to look like woods. Rhonda freaks out because they can't find the tree with the hole next to Vernon's body because "all these trees have the same hole." It's probably hormones—lots of mothers-to-be get upset when they dig up corpses in the enchanted forest.
A car pulls up; it's Lucious and Thirsty, who used a tracking device to follow Andre and Rhonda. Miss Scarlett explains to her father-in-law how she killed Vernon in the library with a candlestick. Lucious is proud, of course. Having a son with psychiatric issues is a problem, but homicide and a cover-up? Slow clap.
Hakeem, who has spent the episode being mad at everybody, has hit rock bottom and is sitting by himself somewhere listening to a tragic Frank Sinatra cover. Is Hakeem on a Carnival cruise? Some chick comes on the Lido Deck to sing "Blue Bayou" in Spanish. The Empire audience has been begging for Linda Ronstadt tunes, so, um … Hakeem loves her voice, though, and has probably found his next singer.
A montage ensues and there's a digging party in the woods. Thirsty uses his corpse-detection gadget (?!) to find the body. In the morning, Boob Boob Kitty finds Vernon's decomposed corpse in her passenger seat. The corpse is staring at her boobs.
Elaine G. Flores is a New York writer, editor and bon vivant. She’s a hard-core shipper and excommunicated soap opera reviewer. Her fictional dinner-party guests include Omar Little, Buffy Summers, Abigail Mills and Ichabod Crane. You can visit her site, TV Recappers Delight.