When the second season of “Empire” ended, it was pretty much certain that someone was about to die – the question was who. When we last saw Rhonda and Anika, they were fighting on a balcony. It was now revealed that Rhonda ended up falling off during the fight, crashing down to her death.
Her body actually fell right in front of Lucious and Jamal, who got to witness her last moments. Andre was right above watching the whole thing as well, leaving him obviously devastated. Anika, on the other hand, felt so stressed from the whole event that she gave birth to her child prematurely, and it turned out to be a girl instead of a boy.
So, while most shows like to take things easy at the start of a new season, gradually introducing new developments to their fans, the producers of “Empire” are apparently not quite familiar with that idea. They started things with a major bang, and now everyone is wondering what their plans for the rest of the season are.
It seems like the whole plan was to just get things started in a heated fashion though, and the first episode should apparently not be taken as any indication for what fans should expect from the rest of the show’s current run. The producers seem aware that these kinds of developments are too heavy for their fans to endure on a regular basis, which is why they are going to take things more easily now.
Meanwhile, they also addressed the situation with Anika and Rhonda. Many fans were left wondering why it was Rhonda who was chosen to die and not the other girl, and the showrunners were obviously prepared to face those questions too.
It sounds like it was not an easy decision for the showrunners themselves, and they also found it hard to figure out who of the two should be killed off after that incident. In the end though, Ilene Chaiken seemed confident about the crew’s decision, and there were also some hints about more developments related to Rhonda coming up in the future.
That’s right – if the implications are correct, Rhonda’s character is not entirely out of the show just yet, and we’re still going to see her on the screen from time to time. However, Chaiken didn’t want to do into detail on that, so we have no idea what the producers’ plans for the character could be.
Realistically, there aren’t that many possible explanations. She will likely appear in someone’s flashbacks or dreams, and this will likely be related to a major revelation about one of the other characters. In fact, we can probably already guess whose dreams those are going to be – Anika was obviously very distressed by what happened, so she’s a pretty good candidate for seeing the image of Rhonda haunting her.
This will be an interesting development in light of her recent pregnancy, and the writers could actually play things out in a very cruel manner for her character. In the end though, things already went quite poorly for her, so we’re not sure if she deserves even more negative developments.
We already saw Andre having hallucinations related to Rhonda, but according to some fans, that would be a too obvious explanation for the upcoming developments in the rest of the season. It’s entirely possible that he will not be the only one suffering from those visions.