Welcome back, Carter.

A year and a half after leaving CBS’ Person of Interest, Taraji P. Henson is back in Tuesday’s episode (10 ET/PT). Her NYPD detective, Joss Carter, was shot to death in 2013 — midway through the show’s third season — before she could identify corrupt officials. Now, as the series fights for its own survival, she’s back in flashback form as colleague Reese (Jim Caviezel) tries to solve one of her cold cases.

“Our show has done flashbacks from the very beginning,” says series creator Jonathan Nolan. “We always knew we were going to revisit this character. We just had to find the right moment for it” that also meshed with Henson’s schedule at her current job on Fox’s freshman hit Empire. Nolan reached out to Henson late last year, saying he told her, “‘We have a killer pitch, are you up for it?'”

It’s a good thing she was game. The shoot called for Henson and Caviezel to spend a lot of time sitting in cars in frigid February in New York, where the show is filmed. “We don’t do green screen and it wasunbelievably cold,” he says. “It’s a good thing we planned on having snow because there was no alternative,” he says.

During those long hours, Carter engages in a little therapy session with loner Reese, who is, to put it charitably, emotionally guarded. Nolan says Carter “was always the one person who could speak truth to Reese and call him on his B.S.” Nolan calls their intimate conversation “a moment you thought you’d never get to see.”

At one point during a stakeout scene, Carter makes Reese change the station on the radio, explaining, “Classic rock puts me to sleep.” Was that line an intentional reference to Henson’s brash record-producer character on Empire? Happy coincidence. Although she had told her POI friends a bit about her new project, Nolan explains, “We wrote the episode before (Empire) started airing and had not yet had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Cookie Lyon.”

And yes, he is an Empire fan. “My wife and I watched every week,” he says. His favorite Cookie scene? Watching her drink a rapper and his crew under the table. “It was definitely not Detective Carter, but it was a glorious moment,” he says with a laugh.

“Taraji is so gifted and has so much range,” Nolan says. “As fun as it was working with her as Detective Carter, you just know there are so many other things that she can do. With all due respect to the other people on (Empire), she is that show. It’s so exciting to see her just tear it up.”

SOURCE: USA Today – Jayme Deerwester