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'Empire' Season 2, Episode 8: 'My Bad Parts' Recap

Noah Camarena |
November 19, 2015 | 12:20 p.m. PST

Staff Reporter

"Empire" (Fox)
"Empire" (Fox)
Lucious (Terrence Howard) calls out his youngest son Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) with a diss track from Freda (Bre-Z). He really wants to rile up his son.

While this is going on, Hakeem is busy with his new girl, Laura (Jamila Velazquez); but he takes a break to check out the diss and see Frida calling him a little girl.

Meanwhile, Lucious and Empire are working on a campaign to get Jamal (Jussie Smollett) partnered with Pepsi. Pepsi asks Jamal for a song that he will submit to become the new face of Pepsi. Lucious thinks that he will be the one working with Jamal on the song, but Jamal heads out to work with Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) instead.

In response to Freda, Hakeem publicly calls her out to a rap battle. While Hakeem is worried about this stage in his life, Anika (Grace Gealey) finds out she's pregnant. She believes it's from her night with Hakeem when he came running to her after he was kidnapped.

Hakeem is still worried about the rap battle and he doesn't even know about Anika. Laz (Adam Rodriguez) has told Cookie about the rap battle and Hakeem thinks he is getting it in her head that he will lose. Hakeem is confident that he'll win no matter what but he doesn't seem to understand that Lyon Dynasty is done if he loses.

Jamal is having another meeting with Cookie about the song when Lucious shows up with a new song for him to work on. Jamal isn't very confident with the song, but he deals with it for Lucious’ sake.

Anika goes to work out and runs into Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday). They have a talk about Rhonda’s pregnancy. She tells Anika that Lucious loves babies, which gets Anika thinking about how she can use her own pregnancy to her advantage.

Hakeem walks in on Cookie talking to Jamal and he asks her why she loves Jamal more than him. She has been spending all her time with Jamal’s deal with Pepsi and has not spent much time with Hakeem and his rap battle. Hakeem says that if she keeps working with Jamal, he'll  tell Lucious.

Anika goes to meet with Hakeem and is about to tell her about her pregnancy, but then Hakeem tells her that he thinks he’s in love with Laura.

Jamal goes to meet with Lucious to talk about the song he gave him. He tells him that he likes his own song better. When Jamal goes to record the song, he brings both of his parents and tells them he wants them to put their two songs together. They don't want to work together but Jamal is insistent that this is the song he wants. His parents continue to argue and they tell Jamal that he is going to have to choose one of the two to work with. The parents end up making a bet after Jamal storms out. Cookie says that if Hakeem wins the rap battle, she'll get to release Jamal’s next album and if Freda wins then Lucious will get to release one for Hakeem.

Jamal and Hakeem hang out and talk about their problems. Hakeem tells Jamal to stop seeing their parents as parents and to view them as business partners. Jamal tells Hakeem that he can’t focus on the battle because he's an artist and is used to making music, not battling.

Jamal debuts his new song for Pepsi using both of his parents songs. He then tells them that his next album is going to be produced by both of them. Pepsi also tells Jamal that he got the deal.

At the end of the rap battle, right before Hakeem is crowned the winner, he reveals that he is dropping his last name to cut all ties to his dad. Just as he says this, Lucious has a flashback to when he was sleeping on the streets and slept under a lion statue, probably when he realized that he would adopt that as his name.

After the battle, the family goes out to celebrate together, but Cookie is interrupted by her sister, Candace. She tells Cookie that their other sister Carol is running another scam. Cookie tells her that it’s nothing to worry about but Candace then reveals that Carol left her kids with her, blaming it on Cookie.

Hakeem leaves the party and drops off Laura, but the car he leaves her in is being driven by a disguised Anika.

Watch “Empire” Wednesdays at 9 on Fox.

Reach Staff Reporter Noah Camarena here and follow him on Twitter here.



 

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