Lioness Season-Premiere Recap: Trophies … Big Ones

Special Ops: Lioness
Beware the Old Soldier
Season 2 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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You wanted the best? You got the best! The hottest special-ops band in the land: Lioness! That’s right, folks: The world is a sunspot on one of Taylor Sheridan’s ranch-tanned, rippling biceps, and we’re just living in it. Hey, cool with me. The future was uncertain for this little Sheridan side project that could’ve been at the close after its first season. But with an apparently sizable audience on Paramount+ and the will to make it happen on the part of Sheridan, the exceptionally stacked cast, and everyone else involved, old Father Duty’s callin’ again for Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and the Lioness crew. 

The last we saw of our ragtag CIA operatives, they’d successfully assassinated an Iranian-backed terrorist leader. Their lioness, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), ended the mission alive but in spiritual tatters — unswayed by Joe’s reassurances that the operation saved lives. “All we did was change oil prices,” Cruz had said on her emotional way out of the Lioness program. As the search for her replacement kicks off in season two, the specter looming over the proceedings is how right she was. 

As for the big question: Who’s the new lioness? We’ll get acquainted with her in the second episode of our two-episode premiere night. Our first episode is all about setting off the bloody inciting incident, reorienting us in the world and rules of the show, and some imperial dudes-rock, Sicario-style action for your trouble.

The cold open rips — and rips hard. A U.S. congresswoman is kidnapped by a cartel, and her family is murdered in their sleep. Joe is enjoying an impromptu breakfast at Waffle House with the family when she gets the news from the TV. Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite CIA fuckboy, Kyle (Thad Luckinbill), is swinging his dick around the crime scene, getting a lay of the land. At HQ in D.C., the usual suspects at the levers of power are gathering to plot the next moves. They’re back, folks. They’re all back: Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly), Mason (Jennifer Ehle) and Hollar (Bruce McGill), and Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) — all riveting stars and standout character actors contributing their signature rhythms and verbal notes to the simmering espionage plan-making patter, all while Morgan Freeman as Secretary of State Mullins holds down the fort with some well-placed, occasionally F-bomb-accented mic-drop moments.

Joe arrives late to the meeting, just in time to get the crux of the debrief and her call to action. Conveniently, and somehow undetected even as she’s ripped from her house in the middle of the night, Congresswoman Hernandez (Czarina Mireles) kept a tracker on her, so they know she’s being held at a house in Ojinaga, just across the border. They want an extraction that’s messy enough to make a scene, but sending an official strike team across the southern border is against treaty protocols with Mexico. In a classic manifestation of what I like to call a “Dum Clancy” plot device, they justify the action by speculating that there has to be another major world power behind this abduction, and right now they figure it’s China. They are trying to move the global political board in a big way so they can invade Taiwan or something. Regardless, the threat of a geopolitical status quo knocking loose is established per the espionage genre’s wont. In the meantime, this gang of U.S. intelligence ghouls is aiming for a loud but successful extraction, followed by an “increased CIA presence in Mexico” — seek justice against this cartel and liquidate the potentially bigger threat behind it. 

And they want a lioness on the ground. Joe’s unsurprisingly put out by the task of training a new lioness in weeks when months are required. They can eliminate the Los Tigres cartel leader, but intelligence-gathering isn’t part of their purview after that. Here’s where Freeman gets his first big shot of the season: “All right, after you kill the guy, could you be so kind as to grab his fucking phones and computers and anything else that might have some fucking intelligence?” C’mon, girl — even when we’re heisting some intel, we do it the cowboy way. You should know that. Kaitlyn chimes in: They can handle the job. 

So the stage is set. Suit up, everyone; it’s time for the extraction — an extended, multipart, vaguely sepia-toned car chase–shoot-out in Mexico. Some serious “cowboy shit” organized by, of course, fucking Kyle. If hangin’ with the inglorious bastards of the Lioness crew was as core to your enjoyment of season one as it was mine, the delay in getting back with the team in full will prove a letdown here. But, hey — instead, we get the man, the myth, the legend in front of the camera. That’s right: Just when you thought Sheridan had stunted enough by writing the whole show himself (as he claims to have done with all 17,000 of his shows currently running) and directing the first two episodes of the season, our guy casts himself — in all his chiseled, hunky-leathery glory — as the titular “old soldier” Cody.

Joe knows Cody from way back, just as she knows all the guys from way back; such a guy’s gal, our Joe. Anyway, she’s not too sure about long-in-the-tooth Cody running point on this extraction, even in the company of his two wingmen, Tracer and Dean (what, are we about to play Overwatch here with these names?), which one can only take as extra assurances that Cody’s gonna badass the shit out of this mission. Indulgent as hell on Sheridan’s part, and seeing how I didn’t think we’d get another season of this madness to begin with, I’m 100 percent here for it. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that.

Once they’ve retrieved the missing congresswoman from an enemy vehicle and gotten her safely back on U.S. territory (via car-jump into an open river and one final Apocalypse Now “Ride of the Valkyries”–style blast of defensive gunfire from an air-support helicopter), Joe promises to personally carry out some extrajudicial retribution on Los Tigres. “Justice is a different agency,” she says. “My agency doesn’t do courtrooms.” A Clint-fucking-Eastwood badass line if I’ve ever heard one. And Saldaña delivers it with that familiar wired, short-fused muscularity, telling us Joe is ready to go all the way with this one.

Having sufficiently reamed Kyle for getting her team involved in some hyper-risky “cowboy shit” again (not sure what else she expected from this “ol’ spy Barbie,” as Cody calls him, seeing how his entire track record as an agent is setting up all-American carnage like this no matter where he gets called in, wound up, and set off), Joe steps away to call her sexy house husband Dr. Neal (Dave Annable) and two daughters. The turmoil that followed her family in her professional absence seems to have largely (and a little too conveniently) subsided since season one. So have her most pressing feelings of disconnect and occasional trauma-induced disinterest in family life, it seems. This bodes well for any of us who felt Joe’s family stuff was overwrought and at least partially unnecessary, getting us ready for a less melodramatic push-and-pull between the innocence of family and the looming corruption of the mission as the new season progresses. 

As for the new lioness, hang on to your butts ’cause she’s comin’ in hot in the next episode!