However demented its boomery mix of red- and blue-coded signifiers of institutional distrust — never without a little dose of militant-cowboy dark-Brandon patriotism — Lioness is the perverse and fractured imperial drama our perverse and fractured empire deserves. Its second season ends with another bang that hits like a diabolical whimper. “All we did was change oil prices,†Cruz had told Joe at the end of the season-one special op. By the end of this year’s finale, the Lioness team has wrought an even nastier trail of carnage on two different continents. And all they end up really doing is changing cartel bosses and improving a sitting president’s re-election prospects. No sense of victory over the forces of old and evil.
At the top of the episode, the Lioness crew returns to Josie’s old base near the Turkey-Iraq-Iran border convergence to suit up for the final excursion. We get a decent lay of the land, including how precarious things will be for Joe, should the mission go south and she leave the base to intervene. We also get a scene where Joe, Cruz, and Josie all dunk on the same base commander, who Joe reamed within an inch of his life in the second episode. Nobody girlbosses the shit out of the war on terror like Lioness. Meanwhile, in San Jose, Costa Rica (signified by the vaguely racist shift in sepia tone from bright-yellow to reddish-orange sepia), Kaitlyn and Byron are getting into some vintage CIA/cartel deal-making with Pablo Carrillo. It’s a particularly ghoulish two-hander from Michael Kelly and Nicole Kidman, combining their respective House of Cards and “Anti-Everywoman†auras to chilling effect. It’s almost hard not to get to the heart of their proposal before they do — a classic offer to take over an elicit empire and rule it under the protection of the U.S. government. Pablo’s brother is a threat because he fostered relationships that threatened U.S. intelligence. What they want is a man at the head of Los Tigres who they can trust to refrain from working with their enemies. And inform them when enemies reach out. “Work to eliminate their influence anywhere you can find it,†Kaitlyn adds.
Pablo is keen on the idea. Enough to be the one to pull the trigger on his brother moments after they’ve arrived at his house and secured the Chinese intelligence agent. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A-OK when the new boss is in the pocket of the U.S.A. “I think the longer you’re away, the harder it is to watch,†Kaitlyn says to Byron after he throws up in their luxury jet bathroom. “Easy to forget how ugly this keeping the peace can be.†Love the cold defeatedness with which Kidman delivers that line. Makes “keeping the peace†sound like the pathetic code phrase it really is. But it’s not the murder of a cartel boss and the implanting of another that makes Byron sick. “What makes me sick is how little will change,†he replies.
“Change,†at least in the sweeping altruistic sense that Byron means it, certainly doesn’t seem to be in Secretary Mullins’ mind in Washington, watching on as the Middle East side of the mission kicks into high gear. True to form for any of our U.S. intelligence operators, Mullins pays fleeting lip service to their more polite justification for engagement: Two Chinese nuclear scientists are en route to Isfahan Nuclear base with information or supplies to enrich and activate Iran’s nuclear capabilities. It only takes the slightest nudge from Mason to get him to put his cowboy spurs on and admit to the real reason for the season: it’s a show of brute strength. If China and Iran want to fuck up U.S. borders, we’re gonna disrespect yours back tenfold. Domination is the only acceptable mode of stability for the biggest gun in the West. But hey, at least Mullins is willing to take the fall for this whole mad operation should it go up in smoke.
And up in smoke seems the fate of this mission once we hear “the bird is down†and Josie’s chopper crashes into the brush below. Cruz and Josie both survive the crash, but Josie’s leg makes her barely mobile. Meanwhile, Joe takes the rest of the crew to the crash site in armored trucks where not even Cody and his sniper can provide enough cover (again, Taylor Sheridan giving himself a one-jan takedown of a tank scene is exactly the type of self-aggrandizing TV auteur’s indulgences I hold space for). The carnage ensues and the “enemy combatants†build up until our whole crew finds themselves pinned down from all sides. And that’s when the angels rain heavy artillery down from above — boy, we really have to wait till the last minute to exercise the full, dramatic force of our military might, don’t we.
Mullins breathes a heavy sigh of relief back in Washington as the Lioness crew returns to base, about as bashed, bloodied, and beaten as we’ve ever seen them. Joe looks around at her team in tatters and you get the sense that she still hasn’t found her mythical way out of field-op life, nor will she anytime soon. “You’ll always have a home to come to,†Neal tells Joe when she arrives back at the house in the final scene. Given the harsh emotional stakes Neal was throwing down in the last episode, it’s a bit of a false note, and it feels like a rushed relationship reset for season three. Then again, there’s something appropriately ominous about Joe coming home in one piece without some cataclysmic excuse to blow up her family life. Should Joe and the Lioness crew grace our TV screens for a third Special Op, there’ll be nothing standing between Joe and her tragic bond to the job, not the outcome. Mission success, mission failure — it’s all gray, baby.