TV Show Review

TV Review: EMPIRE: Season 2, Episode 4: Poor Yorick [Fox]

Bryshere Gray, Empire

FOX’s  Empire Poor Yorick TV Show Review. Empire: Season 2,  Episode 4: Poor Yorick is the recently deceased uncle Vernon (Malik Yoba) who FBI needs as a witness. In order to find him, they raid Empire, guns blazing, wrecking offices and confiscating whatever the hell. Jamal (Jussie Smollett) is in the studio preparing a track and discussing his upcoming Rolling Stone cover. He tried to stop the raid of Lucious’ (Terrence Howard) office to no avail, and just as Becky (Gabourey Sibide) tries to be crafty with her phone, the feds aren’t too amenable to being video’d. What exactly are they looking for? The definitely have a warrant.

Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) and Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) are at odds over just about everything in their business. Anika (Grace Gealey) lets them see the raid has gone viral, and her only chance of keeping a job is to sign Royale-T (Ivan Ellis). Hakeem is holding strong for his girl group, but contracts are contracts. Cookie is still a little too much of a control freak to see boundaries in business. She tries to rush out, but the feds bust up her place too.

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Thirsty (Andre Royo) gives Lucious a nice wake up call after they have some call girls stay the night. The feds are on the way to his doorstep with Roxanne. Lucious greets her in the buff and she looks unsettled when she gets a glimpse below the waist. Not sure what’s going on down there. I’m not sure I want to know.

Lucious interrupts a meeting at his company to tell everyone that now is the best time to expand and proceeds to rally the organization into solidarity against the feds. He tells them they have nothing on him, and the press opportunity is going to be huge. It’s time for the Lyons to roar.

Thirsty is trying to keep the family calm. Lucious is trying to see the bright side, and even calls Cookie the “love of his life”. There’s still speculation around Vernon. Can they convince him not to testify? Well, no. He’s dead. And this is Andre’s (Trai Byers) shining moment to be part of the family business again.

So, he wants to dig him up. That’s real swell. Later he tells Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday) that God has been speaking to him. Right. And digging up a body he helped hide is “God’s work”.

Cookie tries to initiate a truce with Lucious and wants the boys to do a music video together. Lucious won’t let them back on the radio, though. He calls Anika a liar when Cookie tells him that he wanted to steal the master tapes according to Anika. They get into one of their spats and she recommends he be nicer to Andre, or else he won’t see the grandbaby.

Jamal is shooting a really corny scene for his R.S. cover with some trendy artist (Adam Busch). His boyfriend, Michael,  is so freaking jealous, but the shoot gets converted into a live practice that captures some of Jamal’s real soul power pretty well.

At the video shoot, Cookie steps out and gets arrested for a supposed outstanding warrant. Roxanne (Tyra Ferrell) threatens to hurt her kids and leak Andre’s medical report that says he’s bipolar. She has nothing on Cookie except for a photo of Porsha (Ta’Rhonda Jones) jumping a turnstile in the subway. Cookie comes up with a brilliant lie to forstall the Empire takeover of APEX radio, and tells Roxanne that Bunkie’s (Antoine McKay) death might be a result of a disagreement with Lucious over the radio company.

Hakeem loses his composure over the painting created from the photo shoot when it shows up at the video shoot. He stabs the picture of Jamal in the throat after Lucious calls him a “mama’s boy”. They try to keep shooting the video, but Hakeem and Jamal get physical. Hakeem tells Lucious that he’ll never come back to Empire and storms out of the video shoot.

As Andre and Rhonda are trying to dig up Vernon’s body, she realizes that the marker they were using to save their spot is actually a hole that all the trees have in common. Thirsty and Lucious cruise up on them and reveal that they had put a tracking device on Andre’s car. Thirsy whips out his corpse detector and finds the body.

Hakeem is chilling at a cute club and encounters a new Latina singer, Laura, (Jamila Velazquez) who is mind blowingly gorgeous and a better singer than Valentina was. He is mesmerized. It is the first time for her in front of an audience.

Back at the body scene, Andre is saying a word for his dead uncle who winds up in Roxanne Ford’s car the next morning as she is heading to work. Good one, Thirsty.

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Stephanie King

I am a meticulous writer. Story is my strong suit. I do not waste time on political "critique" or paranoid "undertones" that might have been an inspiration to a story writer, but clearly are not a main or secondary theme. I can identify high concept, main and sub theme(s), protagonists and antagonists, secondary character roles, the turning point, the key, the antagonist's story thrust, the spine, twelve sequences, the climax, the resolution, and most importantly, the goal of any film. I am aware of the act structure which can be from three to five acts, generally. Aristotle elaborates in his Poetics on Plato's Republic on act structure.
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