Empire recap Season 2, Episode 6: A High Hope for a Low Heaven -

After a week without Cookie Lyon (basically a lifetime), “Empire” returned with an episode that revolved around Hakeem’s kidnapping and the events that followed. Cookie and Lucious were forced to work together to get their youngest son back, but it was the Lyon brothers who really bonded after the incident. How long will this brotherly love last? Unclear!

At any rate, we’ve got plenty to recap!

1. Hakeem got kidnapped for like five minutes.

Okay, five hours. At the start of the episode, Cookie was blowing up Hakeem’s phone: “I got Destiny’s Problem Child looking for their leading man!” Eventually, Cookie gets a video message of a sweaty and frightened-looking Hakeem with tape over his mouth. “That’s not real,” she says. “That’s Lucious.” Actually, that’s family dysfunction.

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Hakeem ends up at an abandoned warehouse, where he tries to intimidate his captors, who all have matching bull tattoos. Keem uses some colorful language to ask if they’re cowboys and says “well, my name’s Hakeem,” only it was more like “My name’s Hakee …” because he got punched pretty quickly. “We should have taken the more famous brother,” one kidnapper said, which probably hurt more than the hit to the head.

Cookie confronts Lucious with the video and they find out that Hakeem is being held for a $40,000 ransom, which Lucious probably has in one of his couches. Lucious gets the kidnappers on the phone and asks for “proof of life” — a request he probably saw in a movie. Somewhere between the video request and The drop doesn’t go as planned — Hakeem ends up wandering the streets and goes straight to Anika’s house. Poor unemployed Boo Boo Kitty was midway through a teary conversation with her mother when Hakeem came out from behind a pillar and kissed her passionately before following her inside. Wait, what? Why?

When Hakeem finally reunites with his family, everyone fusses over him, but he brushes off their concern and only reluctantly lets the family doctor check out the extent of his injuries. Hakeem ended up being pretty traumatized by the ordeal and ashamed that he wasn’t able to fight his way out of the warehouse. This leads to some odd moments where Hakeem hears errant sounds and struggles to see correctly. Um, doc, did you check for a concussion?

2. Jamal rejected Empire’s marketing strategy.

With Lucious as his producer, Jamal is finally making strides on his album. But he’s distracted by what happened with Michael and that sleazy photographer. He’s also tired of being marketed as a “gay artist.” When the Staples Center declines to book him for a show because his appeal is “too narrow” Jamal recruits Jameson Henthrop, a well-connected exec who happens to have a professional history with Lucious. As the story goes, Lucious was going to sign with Jameson earlier in his career, but declined when he discovered Jameson was gay.

Lucious’s homophobia is well-documented, but there appears to be more to the story. Lucious cautions Jamal against working with him. As for Jameson, there’s this: “The day I found out that Lucious Lyon had a gay son is the day that I knew, I knew right then and there that there was a God.”

3. Andre made some changes to Gutter Life.

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After being reinstated at Empire, Dre is responsible for helming Gutter Life, the gritty, but fledgling rap label that Lucious decided to resurrect as a vehicle for his protege Freda Gatz. But Dre is concerned about image, particularly how the artists appear to Empire’s stockholders. So Dre, who was baptized in the last episode, takes the opportunity to hold character interviews with the label’s artists. The conversations are fairly lacking until he gets to a rapper named J Poppa, who got the episode off to a hot and heavy kickstart with Becky, Lucious’s former assistant and current A&R rep for Empire.

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Dre assumes that the J stands for juice or jewels, but J Poppa tells him it’s actually for Job and then identifies the Bible verse that Dre quotes. Andre convinces J Poppa to “incorporate the word” into his music and he does this at a Gutter Life showcase, inserting a Bible verse into one of his hits. Lucious is not impressed and Becky looks worried, but Dre insists that it’s purely a business decision.

Freda Gatz performs at the same showcase and she does great until a man in the crowd starts heckling her. She manages to get a few lyrics digs in, but the man doesn’t take a hint. Lucious tells Freda to “stay focused,” but it’s too late. She kicks the man in the face and rushes out of the club. Freda is a point of contention between Lucious and Dre, who thinks she’s a liability for the label, but Lucious says she’s non-negotiable.

He proves his point later when he tells Freda that he relates to her more than he relates to his own sons. He gives her a track that he offered Hakeem in the same episode. It was kind of hilarious to hear Lucious say he wrote a song that consisted entirely of two words — bang and boom — but hey, it’s Lucious.

4. Cookie and Laz got closer.

Laz, the concert promoter that Cookie teamed up with to raise Lyon Dynasty’s profile, advises her to hire the men who kidnapped Hakeem. He reasons that they’ll stop coming after Lyon Dynasty and its artists if they’re legitimately on the payroll. Cookie shuts down the plan at first, but eventually reconsiders, taking Hakeem along with her so he feel in control again.

Things go south when Hakeem pulls a gun on the men and Cookie has to talk him down from the ledge. When one of the men reaches for his own gun, Cookie grabs the gun from Hakeem and informs the group that they’re messing with the wrong Lyon. “You step near me, my artists or my family again, you won’t even hear the knock on the door,” she says.

After mulling over the unexpected kiss Laz planted on her earlier in the episode, Cookie went peak soap opera, showing up at Laz’s door and delivering this doozy of a line: “Make me forget about everything that happened this week, Laz. You said you got me right?” As the two pulled off each other’s clothes, it was revealed that Laz has one of those bull tattoos on his back! Uh oh.

5. Laura saved Hakeem from public humiliation.

Jamal and Dre rallied around Hakeem after his kidnapping and helped him get past his embarrassment over not being able to escape on his own. But there were still doubts about whether Hakeem was ready to perform with his Mirage et Troi at the Big Apple Jam. Hakeem froze on stage, leaving Laura to improvise. She grabbed Hakeem’s face passionately and sang directly to him until he snapped out of it and dropped his verse. Laura basically sang away Hakeem’s concussion!

Hakeem celebrated the performance with a party at his place afterward. Anika showed up to check on him, which Laura didn’t seem too happy about. It’s hard not to feel bad for Anika at this point — as she told her mother she has nothing and no one. Did Hakeem go to her house because it was closest to where he was? Because he seems to have moved on already … again.

Lingering questions: What does the bull tattoo mean? How does Laz know the men who kidnapped Hakeem? What do they want (besides money)? Why did Hakeem run straight into Anika’s arms? And how long will it take for Freda to find out that Lucious didn’t “write” that boom bang song for her?

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