by Andy Andersen for Vulture
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 don’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 Carillo 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 sidequest. 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 “advisors,” a.k.a. intercept the trafficking ring themselves, with extreme prejudice.
Meanwhile, it’s wheels up and en route to the Carillo 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 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.”
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.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.