Special Ops: Lioness Season 2, Episode 1 Premiere Recap
This story contains spoilers for the season 2 premiere of Special Ops: Lioness.
I won’t lie to you, reader—I’m surprised that we’re back here. Special Ops: Lioness was one of Taylor Sheridan’s most unprecedented shows, for better or worse, and the Yellowstone creator’s motivations for writing it felt murkier every episode.
The series follows three women in the CIA’s “Lioness” program, which sends female operatives undercover into dangerous criminal organizations. As you might expect, Lioness ran the usual gamut of spy-show antics in season 1. The rookie agent fell in love with the enemy, lost her way, and needed her team to help her save the day. But Special Ops: Lioness often shared just as much pessimism for the all-female CIA program it highlighted as it had for the terrorists it depicted as the show’s enemy. Essentially, Special Ops: Lioness made everyone the villain.
As I wrote during the first season, “Life in Special Ops is pure hell. This isn’t an all-Beth Dutton army with kick-ass one-liners. (Could you imagine?) Lioness is a dark portrayal of how people wield power—and the violent ends are often women getting battered, bruised, tortured, or all of the above combined. Because of that, it’s often hard to know who the audience should be cheering on in Lioness—if we should be rooting for anyone at all.”
Knowing Sheridan’s track record 0f pumping out endless amounts of television, season 2 was inevitable. I initially thought that we would move on to another “Special Ops” team in an anthology-style series, but I was wrong. There’s a new mission ahead for the Lioness crew, even though all three of the main women were heavily disillusioned by their crusade in season 1. Rookie operative Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveria) was tortured and trained to kill. Lioness head Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) learned that their business in the Middle East had more to do with money than the threat of terrorism, and lead officer Joe (Zoe Saldaña) was forced to convince herself that every awful thing she did was just.
“Look what you made of me,” Cruz tells Joe in the season 1 finale after she murders her target, billionaire Asmar Amrohi (Bassem Youssef). Joe reminds Cruz that she just eliminated “one of the worst fucking perpetrators of violence in the past 20 years,” even if the series did very little to justify those claims. “All we changed was oil prices,” Cruz replies. I never expected anyone to come back.
