Yahoo News Empire season 4 finale delivers TWO major exits
Warning: MAJOR BIG HUGE spoilers from the Empire season four finale, titled 'The Empire Unpossess'd', after the picture...
The Empire season four finale aired last night, and tragically killed off not ONE, but TWO major characters.
Anika Calhoun (Grace Gealey) fell to her death after Andre Lyon (Trai Byers) drugged her, which had her seeing Ghost Rhonda (Kaitlin Doubleday) - and Tory Ash (Rumer Willis) also met her maker.
Speaking to EW, Empire showrunner Brett Mahoney explained why this was finally the end for Anika.
"Well, I think in some ways, she's almost the inverse of what's going on with Cookie," he said.
"Whereas Cookie decided that Lucious was the most important thing to her and she was going to value that, Anika had a different course over the series.
"At first, she had Lucious and the Empire, then she had to give up Lucious and the Lyons, but she finally gets the Empire. So she really does win at the end, only to the cost of her life."
Mahoney also said that Andre and Ghost Rhonda killing her "felt like karma" because Anika "had so wronged" them.
"That's what the audience and fans would have really wanted. Besides the fact that Rhonda's dead, we found a way to give it to them," he revealed.
Explaining Tory's death, he continued: "It's really informing the Jamal story. When she says to him, 'You're always going to be running back to your family, you have this band that you love, but you sacrifice it all for your family,' that just needed to land and come home to Jamal in a visceral way.
"And the fact that he pulled Tory in and pulled her onto that stage really did have true ramifications - and what's more visceral than her death?"
And what of the fate of Hakeem (Bryshere Y Gray), Tiana (Serayah), Bella, and Blake (Chet Hanks)?
"I would just say: Whether they live or die, it's going to have true ramifications moving forward. Nothing between the four of them will be the same," teased Mahoney.
Meanwhile, the Lyon family won't be closing the doors on Empire Entertainment any time soon, as Fox in the US has officially commissioned a fifth season of Empire to premiere this fall.
Empire airs on Fox in the US. In the UK, Empire is airing on 5STAR.
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