“No wonder that boy ran off to London,” Cookie jokes.

“I thought he was running away from Lyon drama,” Becky says, pausing before she gets serious. “I really miss him.”

“Please don’t get me started; I miss him so much,” Cookie replies, before quickly diverting the conversation. “Anyway, why do we need to have this slumber party?”

It was a fleeting 20-second exchange that attempted to tie up the loose ends of months of real-life controversy. In February, “Empire” was filming the final episodes of its fifth season when Mr. Smollett was arrested and accused of paying two acquaintances to stage a racist and homophobic hate crime against himself in downtown Chicago. The producers of “Empire” later announced that Mr. Smollett would not appear in the final two episodes of the season.

The question of whether Mr. Smollett would appear in the show’s sixth and final season remained. After weeks of uncertainty, Lee Daniels, one of the show’s creators, posted a tweet saying that Mr. Smollett would not be returning. In August, a Fox executive confirmed that there were no plans for him to appear in the sixth season.

There is plenty of precedent for writing television characters out of fictional worlds when the actors force their hand. Kevin Spacey was fired from “House of Cards” after he was accused of sexual misconduct in 2017. (His character, the egomaniacal politician Frank Underwood, was killed off .) After Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet, the “Roseanne” reboot on ABC was canceled and spun off into a show called “The Conners.” (In the new show, Ms. Barr’s character has died from an opioid overdose.)