Thursday, December 15, 2016

My Review of Empire's 3x09: "A Furnace For Your Foe"


Written by Ilene Chaiken & Mike Pyken
Directed by Sanaa Hamri

Andre (to Shyne): "Time to kill my father."

And we're into mid season finale territory where a few more skeletons came out of the closet and two characters seem to be in cahoots for a plan that is inevitably going to fail when the show returns next year.

Andre telling a victorious Shyne that he wants to kill Lucious is all well and good but it's doomed to fail. Still though I'm loving the darker Andre and this week we were given some closure with him and Ghost Rhonda as she gave him a checklist to complete (make Nessa a star, destroy Anika, hardly Legion of Doom stuff) and he's certainly getting on with it.

Of course, the Anika is something they're going to have to leave for a bit, even though this week we had Leah disrupt another sex scene between Anika and Lucious. It's almost as though the character is speaking for everyone when she laments about the both of them. However when Lucious wasn't getting his rocks off with Anika, he did have better storylines this week.

His team up with Diana in order to break up Cookie and Angelo began and ended a little messily when Diana backed out of their arrangement and Lucious retaliated by outing a former DUI Angelo was involved in that resulted in a woman's death. I have to admit, it's a bit of a juicy spoiler and it'll be interesting to see how the show deals with the fallout when it returns.

Speaking of things that need to be dealt with, the show finally saw Cookie and Lucious actually send Jamal to rehab and it was more than overdue at this rate. I'm glad that Jamal is going to get actual help now. Hopefully this will mean we get the character back on track in the latter half of the season.

As for Shyne and Tariq - both have been scheming against Lucious and only Shyne has actually succeeded in getting his feet further into the Empire table while Tariq has had his connection to Lucious exposed and had Shyne gloat about playing him. I still don't really care about either of them as characters though.

- Hakeem and Tiana may have just decided to give their relationship another go when the former kissed the latter on stage.
- Nessa won't take care of Andre like Rhonda did with him. That may be the best thing for Andre in the long run.
- Standout music: Hakeem/Tiana's Starlight and Jamal's Born To Win.
- This episode was given an earlier timeslot to make way for Star (premieres January 4th). The second half of this season will air from March 2017.

A Furnace For Your Foe was a solid mid season finale. I do think the episodes before it were a little better but there's some nice stuff set up here to be explored in the remaining nine episodes of the season and Star should help fill in a nice void until it's return.

Rating: 7 out of 10

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