When Hakeem suggests Tiana sing the female part of the song he and Jamal are working on for a movie soundtrack, Becky and Jamal look shocked and concerned. When he asks why they're looking like that, they ask if he thinks Laura would be okay with it. He assures them she understands it's business, and moves forward with having Tiana sing the part. While he and Tiana are recording, later, he is eyeing her, and she may be slightly flirting...maybe. Later, when he talks to Laura, she is actually pretty upset, but not just because she thinks Tiana wants him back, but also because she thinks Hakeem should have pushed for Laura to get to sing the part. Her head is all the way blown up if she really believes that, but on to other things...
Candice has returned to tell Carol she needs to take her kids back after the winter break, now that she's sober. And while out to eat, Carol tells her she needs time so she can tell Cookie what happened between her and Lucious. Apparently she helped Lucious kill a few people while Cookie was locked up! What they didn't know was that they had an eavesdropper at the next table, and he approaches Carol later. It turns out he's an old friend named Tariq, who used to be a cop. Carol asked him if he still was, but he says it didn't pay enough. What he didn't say, but we saw when he paid for their drinks (Carol opted to drink cranberry juice), was that he's with the FBI!! And before I leave Carol, I wonder why they had Porsha tell Carol she would be jealous if her sister was Cookie and she didn't have anything. I hope they aren't setting Carol up to fail as a sister in future episodes. She seems to legitimately not be jealous so far.
Rhonda has been spending some time with Anika, and things seem to be coming back to her memory. At Hakeem's, while Anika is having things for the baby delivered, one of the deliverers pushes Rhonda out of the way to avoid a falling box. And she has a flashback of feeling hands push her down the stairs the night she lost her baby! She reveals this to Anika. And later, while they are talking and she's having a drink, she sees Anika shoes (Louboutin flats), and she has a flashback to seeing someone with red bottom flats walk out the door while she was lying on the ground that night!! Anika asks her what's wrong, and she plays it off by saying it's the wine making her light headed. I'm glad she's figuring it out!!
Meanwhile, Andre is spending time with Leah Walker, and she comments on his eyes and asks if they are related. Next thing you know, he's taken her out of the home and brought her to Jamal, Hakeem, and Lucious' rehearsal for the ASAs! When he says it's their grandmother, no one seemed to believe him at first, but Lucious just looks at her without saying anything! When she tries to touch his face he pulls away, drops a tear, and walks off telling Dre he doesn't know what he did. We learn that she did try to drown him and shoot herself. But there were no bullets in the gun. Also, she blamed him for her wanting to kill herself. She ended up being put in a mental health hospital, until a Ronald Reagan policy had many mental ill patients released from hospitals. Lucious ran into her living out on the street, but by then he and Cookie were married, on welfare, and Cookie was pregnant with Hakeem. When Dre tries to stop them from taking her back to the home, Lucious tells her she's not like Dre. But Dre refuses to let her go back to the home. She says she wants to go home, and by home she says she means with Dwight (Lucious). Lucious is hesitant for obvious reasons, clearly traumatized by what he endured as a child, but allows her to go home with him. He has a nurse there, and tells his maid, Juanita, to keep an eye on her at all times and to make sure she takes her meds. She keeps calling him Dwight, and he keeps telling her his name is Lucious. When he hears her playing a song she used to play with him, he sits down and joins her (later incorporating it into the song he puts together with Jamal and Hakeem for the ASAs). But even in this moment you get a little bit of tension as she confronts him about telling the family bad things about her and he continues to correct her when she calls him Dwight. But the worse was yet to come.
One night, more like 3 in the morning, she has him follow her into the dining room, where she has several cakes laid out!! He asks where Juanita is, and she basically tells him she fired her, because she doesn't like anyone in her kitchen!!! He tries to tell her it was his maid and she can't fire her, but she tells him to sit down and eat the cake. He does, as she stands over him with the knife in her hand telling him how everything bad that happened to her (including his father being murdered) was because of him!! At one point she asks him if he loves her, and he hesitantly says yes, and she calls him a liar!!
O...and with the knowledge that Harper told Dre about his grandmother, Thirsty takes her for a drive. She thinks it's to go see Lucious, and when she realizes it's not, she tells Thirsty she can't be threatened. He assures her he's a gentleman and wouldn't lay a finger on her and pulls over to let her out, after she asks what he was going to do. And as she is getting out and still talking, how she didn't see this coming I don't know, two masked men grab her!!
Meanwhile, on the ASA front, after his mom introduces him to D-Major (musical director for the ASAs), Jamal is disappointed to learn Cookie has traded in his solo performance of a new song for a trio with Hakeem and Lucious over one of his old songs. Jamal attempts to get D-Major to let him do his solo performance, after D-Major told him to stop having a hissy fit when Jamal first heard the news. This included Jamal approaching him in the studio. D-Major tells him there are ways to make him change his mind, but that isn't it. I got exactly what he was hinting at as soon as he said that, but not sure Jamal did. D-Major then sends everyone out of the studio and ends up kissing Jamal. One can assume from the rest of the scene the two hooked up, but the next time Jamal sees him he seems cold. So Jamal assumes he isn't interested, until D-Major comes to Jamal's place. At this point Jamal realizes he acted that way, not because he wasn't interested (or trying to be professional at work like he claimed), but because he wasn't out. And Jamal told him he wasn't interested in being a part of that. However, he has a change of heart towards the end of the episode and asks D-Major to meet him at his place, saying he can handle the situation. O, and given the performance is still a trio (though a good one), I suppose hooking up with him behind closed doors also isn't how you change D-Major's mind!