EMPIRECAP: 1.DONE

LET'S LOOK BACK ON A SEASON OF GOD KNOWS WHAT

By Ryan Nanni Mar 19, 2015, 12:58pm EDT

After last night's Empire season finale, I came to an unexpected realization: if you try to describe the plot of this show to another person, you sound like a very young child making up a story as she goes along. In the two-part finale alone, Lucious learned he doesn't have ALS, Jamal gets named his successor anyways, Cookie found out she wasn't actually on the Empire board and got thrown out of the company, Hakeem got revenge on his father by sleeping with Anika, Lucious made a full and detailed confession to killing Bunkie while he was sleeping and Cookie happened to be in the room, Andre found (and quickly lost) religion, Rhonda revealed she's pregnant, and Lucious got arrested right before he was going to take the stage.

AND I've left out a murder.

It's just hard to love a show with such haphazard writing, and I say this as someone who was way into 24. Everything that happens on Empire feels like an accident or a rash decision rather than an affirmative choice by a character. Maybe that's what makes the show so popular - the inherent unpredictability from week to week. That at least gave Empire a way to move the pieces around on the board, even if it all happened at the very end. We started with Jamal and Cookie aligned against largely everyone else, and now we have Jamal and Lucious aligned against largely everyone else. It doesn't make sense how we got here, but it's movement.

You know what? This is too much serious conversation for this show. If they're not going to approach it with any level of thought, I'm not going to either. I don't know if I'll be back for Season 2 of Empire, but I can at least go out with this: a recasting of the show if it aired in the 1980s:

LUCIOUS LYON: Avery Brooks