Lioness is nothing if not consistent. Through the fog of its incessant sociopolitical incoherence (also nothing short of ur-typical of the militant-spy genre), each episode delivers an even mix of A-list scenery chewing, insane dialogue, and small-screen action that actually kinda rips. And I’ll be damned if week after week, the sum of those parts doesn’t amount to a vivid reflection of America’s collective nightmares circa 2024. “There is no winning. There is just the upper hand,†Cruz tells Josie Carrillo in this week’s lynchpin scene, making the sunk-cost case for American global dominance in its waning days while unwittingly presenting herself as Joe’s ticket out of the endless cold-war games.
Joe is driven by a cognitive-dissonant belief in her Sisyphean post — ever maintaining the upper hand to protect the scraps of the American Dream that cradle her family inside America’s borders. When the Lioness crew arrives back at Fort Bliss, still whiplashed from the Sound of Freedom–coded child-trafficking scene they left behind, she snaps into gray-man action real quick — laying down a cold rebuke from HQ to make sure those children stay left behind and get back to the A-plot, then sidebarring with Kyle, Bobby, and Gutierrez to hatch a rogue child-rescue side quest. Turns out Joe left a tracker behind on one of the kids, and with Gutierrez on hand to lead a DEA interception at the border, she, Bobby, and Kyle can be on site as “advisers,†a.k.a. intercept the trafficking ring themselves, with extreme prejudice.Â
Meanwhile, it’s wheels up and en route to the Carrillo home in Dallas in mere minutes, and Cruz is on deck to pep-talk Josie into “lionessing†her family out of the cartel business for good. There’s an undeniable utility to Taylor Sheridan’s show-don’t-tell-rule-breaking dialogue in scenes like this, where the emotionally damaged parallels between two gray warriors of the deep state are clearly, if not semi-goofily, broadcast. “I’m supposed to look at people I love in the eye, lie to them, pull their whole fucking world apart, take their freedom, maybe even their lives,†Josie tells Cruz. “Do you think you could do that?†A knowing glance is all we need to be reminded of Cruz’s season-one arc, not that she doesn’t literally respond with what amounts to “Yeah, girl, I literally did that when I was the lioness, get it?†But it’s the cold hard truth about her father’s place in society that gets Josie to listen up and board the plane to Dallas. Her father is neither a saint nor a sheep, argues Cruz, so he must be on the lawful-to-chaotic evil scale — more likely lawful evil, him being a cartel lawyer and all. “There is no winning. There is just the upper hand,†she reminds Josie. Theirs is not to choose the enemy or the battlefield, only whether or not to fight. “But choosing not to fight is how warehouses fill up with children.â€
She sounds like Joe dropping that last part in there — the spy-movie lie you can’t fully believe if you’ve really “seen it all†but have to tell yourself anyway to keep the blood boiling. It’s no mistake that Joe’s presence in the background of this pep talk is withheld till its final moments, eloquently visualizing the spark that goes off in Joe’s mind: She’s found a worthy successor.
Cruz confirms Joe’s on the flight to Dallas with an apt assessment of their new lioness, as well as a promising new mission plan through which to funnel her instincts. Nobody’s ever made an informant out of a top-tier cartel member, but Cruz points out that this time, they have one of their daughters to try. Josie still doesn’t want to be there — a terminal foundation upon which to build a lioness mission. Joe reminds her that that’s why she’s here, to make Josie believe her father has a chance. But why not actually give him one instead of breeding false hopes in their primary operative? Besides, flipping her father with an actual chance of rescuing him from her uncle’s plight is something she can actually believe in, giving her a better chance at success. Still in the throes of being all “she me†about Cruz, Joe takes her advice and gets permission from Byron to execute. Josie remains reluctant about the entire operation but agrees to the lower-lift option: give her father the chance to go into protective custody and live out the rest of his days in a “mansion in Idaho somewhere.â€
Joe drops the crew off in Dallas but hangs back to lead the child-rescue side quest. En route, she calls Kaitlyn for permission to give Cruz full rein of the mission. “She’s like me, except she doesn’t have a husband and two daughters,†she says, intimating what she tells Neal in an excited call on the fame flight: “I have my way out.†Joe knows the world order she’s sworn to protect is always hanging by a thread, and she’s let that knowledge metastasize into an invasive belief that only she can keep the thread from breaking … until now. But as the episode closes out with the child-rescue mission literally blowing up in her face, things look bleak for Joe and her future out of the gray zone.
Back in Dallas, Cruz and Josie enter the Carrillo mansion, greeted by Josie’s mom with limited time before dinner to plot out the next moves. Josie left home when she was 18 years old, so she doesn’t have much to go on in terms of what to expect from the next few hours. Sure enough, dinner proves an impossible moment to present father Pablo with the offer to cooperate with the CIA, let alone tell him the real reason for her discharge. The best villains are the ones who are like 90 percent correct in their view and 10 percent maniacally misguided, and Pablo Carrillo presents himself as just such a villain straight away. He starts with the maniacal 10 percent, delivering a trans-panic reactionary rant against the woke U.S. military like it has anything to do with his daughter’s discharge. Then, he starts spitting with a vivid description of an empire’s inevitable path to failure: People become rich, lose confidence in institutions, and outsource the dirty work of imperial maintenance to the desperate people clamoring outside its borders. Pablo has a clear top view of America’s looming collapse, but he ends his speech with an ominous appeal to the new empire soon to rise from the ashes of the old one — thinking on the same scales of survival of dominance as Josie and her newfound nest of spies.