by Johnny Loftus for Decider
In Special Ops: Lioness, it’s becoming increasingly clear how much borrowed time Joe’s professional life has bought against the personal life bank. While she drives her work family forward with detached, whatever it takes efficiency, which in Episode 4 (“The Choice of Failure”) manifests as Joe, Tucker, Two Cups and Randy languishing below decks in a yacht parked off a beach in the Hamptons, her home family continues to grow and change around the absent space within it. As Joe pushes Cruz to stay relentlessly on mission, challenging her to create bonds of trust on the fly as Aaliyah and her rich kid crew party their way through Long Island, she fields phone calls from her husband Neil where they slice up the silences using the measured tones of their professional lives. And so it is that when the worst thing happens – Kate and her friends are involved in a deadly car crash – Neil and Joe can only discuss the logistics around what’s missing. “I won’t tell her you’re coming in case you can’t pull away.” Active parenting and covert operations are a combustible mix.
Kate’s leg is badly damaged, and she’s facing surgery to decrease the swelling of her brain. But that’s not even the worst of it. Not only did one of her friends in the vehicle not survive, but Kate’s visit to the ER has also revealed something else: her pregnancy. (She’s 14.) Neil is somehow both doctor and dad as he delivers the news. “You’re pregnant. You broke our deal with boys. It’s very likely that the trauma you’ve experienced terminated the pregnancy. But if somehow the fetus survived all of this, you’re going to have a very, very big decision to make. Now at least, you can learn from the consequences while benefiting from the lesson.” It’s not possible to know how this conversation might have gone. Would it have been different if Joe had been there? Instead, Neil calls while she’s monitoring Cruz’s movements – work family stuff – inside a cheezy bar in Montauk packed with spendy finance bros. And we can see Joe’s dual existences ripple across Zoe Saldana’s features like a storm forming on the horizon.
There’s another storm system forming, and it’s over Langley. Kyle might have acted with impunity when he concocted an unsanctioned CIA mission on US soil using Joe’s Lioness QRF assets to extract a cartel HVT from the back of a county sheriff’s van. But the faces of Kyle, Two Cups, and Tucker appearing on border patrol surveillance footage is creating a wave of blowback with the bosses. This is only the second appearance from Michael Kelly in Lioness, but he’s in a pretty delightful Grade-A Asshole boss mode as Deputy CIA Director Byron Westfield. It seems like Kyle was already on a short leash with Westfield and Kaitlyn Meade. But now, if his stunt in Texas doesn’t produce his promised Al Qaeda personnel smuggling route, his overreach could cause trouble for Lioness when Joe least needs it least.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.