Lioness Returns For An Action Packed — And Thought Provoking — Second Season
Should Loving Your Country Come as the Expense Of Your Humanity?
You might well have seen the teaser for Season 2 of Lioness Taylor Sheridan’s exceptional CIA drama that airs on Paramount Plus and Showtime and where the first two episodes dropping of how streaming and cable nearly simultaneously. The major highlight is Zoe Saldana’s Jo looking at a potential new recruit and asking over and over: “Do you love your country?” When the recruit responds: “I’m serving my country right now!” Jo says simply “Your country needs more.”
At this point I suspect Jo has made a similar pitch to every recruit she’s had for the Lioness program, one that we learned is trained for the sole purpose of using female soldiers in long term espionage programs with the sole purpose of killing Islamic terrorists. We saw what that entailed when things went badly in the teaser of Season 1 and we saw a ‘good’ outcome at the end of the season. Looking at that I’m beginning to wonder if Jo is making the pitch as much to her new recruit but to herself.
Saldana was exceptional in Season 1 playing the head of a CIA-Military covert ops training program, not just for her exceptional power but because we see a woman who has learned to turn her humanity off and become a soldier every time she goes to work. Her husband Neal (well played by the subtle Dave Annable) has been more understanding of it then he should, her children, particularly her oldest less so. And she clearly has convinced herself that her purpose for all the sacrifices she has made for serving her country are being done purely for her family. The problem is, and it’s increasingly clear in Season 2, is that Jo is having increasing trouble accepting that while she loves her country, it is at best going to be a one-sided love and that at the end of the day, the people who represent in elected office are going to give nothing in return.
This is the clear in the opening episode when Jo is called into the Situation Room along with two of her superiors, Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) and their superior Bryon Westfield (Michael Kelly, now promoted to series regular) A Congresswoman from Texas has been abducted by a Mexican cartel. The agency knows they can find her and get her out clean. They are told in so uncertain terms by the Secretary of State (played by an unusually cold and unemotional Morgan Freeman) that they want it to be messy. They believe that China is behind this and that geo-political forces are in play and after its over, they want to send a message. The President (who is as of yet unseen) in an election year and the last thing he wants is to be seen as soft on terror. Speaking as though they don’t even see Joe; an undersecretary says casually: “Put a lioness on the ground.” Joe barely holds it together telling them , correctly, that a lioness is training for assassination. The Secretary of State, who is also African-American, doesn’t even look at her when he says: “Well, when you kill him could you possibly grab his f — -ing phone?” Jo asks for three months and is told she can have three weeks. Kaitlyn and Westfield are political enough to make it clear that it can be done and all but haul Joe out of the room. Joe can barely raise objections before she’s told that she has to lead a mission to rescue the Congresswoman and that she doesn’t even have the benefit of her team to do it. It’s telling that Joe, who spent much of Season 1 projecting authority in the face of any objections from her team, basically just nods and gets her kit.
She’s understandably pissed that she finds she has to work with Kyle, the cowboy agent who basically spent all of Season 1 pissing on the authority that Joe clearly represented. Thad Luckinbill (also promoted to regular) is just as loathsome as ever but I’m beginning to think that he may be more attuned to reality than Joe is willing to be. I believe there’s a chance that long ago he realized the kind of master he’s serving and that he knows that the longer he does his job, the more likely it is he’ll end up in an unmarked grave with no record of him in the files and a star on the front of the CIA as the only representation of everything he’s done in ‘service of his country’. Much of Season 1 is an extended action sequence with the Mexican cartel in hot pursuit, firing on them non-stop and he’s trying as calmly as possible to find a way to escape. That escape route turns out to be driving the car into a riverbank where the drop isn’t clear to their eyes in the sky and neither is the depth of the river. They’re basically being forced to hope they can avoid being blown apart by the cartel in the hope they don’t die in an explosion or drown as an escape route. When Joe shouts out to him during this: “If we survive like this, remind me to kick your ass,” Kyle says in something very close to seriousness: “I hope we live long enough for you to get the chance.”
And if that’s the typical day at the office, it’s understandable why Kyle can barely work up the energy to go through the motions coming to a federal crime scene or treat anyone around him, including Joe, with respect. Why bother with all the trappings of civilization when you know very well you might drown in a car as happens to one of the soldiers at the end of the episode? Kyle knows this and has accepted that when compared to the mission his life is meaningless. So when Joe tries to take a swing at him after they survive, there is a certain hypocrisy considering we know in the second episode she’s going to basically ask another soldier to do the exact same thing and just as likely not come back alive.
Joe shouts that: “I have a family”, and Kyle’s response is very telling: “I think should call them.” By this point Joe has managed to survive the mission, has debriefed the Congresswoman (who now knows that her family was killed when she was abducted) has promised her revenge, consoled one of the soldiers who went into battle with her about the loss of comrade (Sheridan himself) and then gotten into an argument and fight with Kyle. Only then does she remember she hasn’t called her family and she turns her humanity back on, assuring them that everything is fine. The problem is Neal has been watching the news and even though his wife’s face was blurred out he saw the aftermath — and so did Joe’s daughter. Joe knows that she’s not going to be home that long and will no doubt soon be training another woman to sacrifice her humanity and possibly her life on a mission that is on an accelerated timetable and is beyond the parameters of what the team can do. Yet there’s no question in her mind what master she’s going to serve.
Though she has yet to appear on the show in the first two episodes Layla De Olivera, who played Cruz in the first season, is still listed as a series regular. How she’ll end up back in the storyline is hard to say: at the end of the mission she resigned from the Lioness program in no uncertain terms and made it very clear that she considered not only Jo but everything she’d made her do as a monster. As I’ve written previous articles about Lioness there are parallels to Homeland in the characters of both Joe and Kaitlyn to the relationship between Carrie and Saul throughout the latter series. Having watched the brilliant work of De Olivera, it’s clear her parallel can be found in Peter Quinn, the agent who had the clearest moral quandaries about the horrible things he had to do in the name of the agency. Repeatedly during his first two seasons as a regular Quinn made it very clear that he wanted out of the agency and that he had no use for the kinds of actions Carrie and his superiors were willing to do. “Is there no line you won’t cross?” he actually shouted at her at one point. Cruz is clearly the conscience of this series as we saw in her relationship with Aaliyah and how Joe had to play on her love of country to get her to do something horrible. It says a lot for the show that while Cruz’s innocence was forever lost in the first season of Lioness her soul remained intact and her final exchange with Joe when the mission was ‘successfully completed’ made it very clear that she had no use for the kind of narrow view of the world that Joe did. She walked away with the integrity that none of the other characters on the show have and I can’t wait to see how the two meet up again. Cruz will not fall for the same speech that Jo gives the new recruit.
Lioness is, as I mentioned in an article I wrote last week, a surprisingly subtle and nuanced show about the War On Terror then we’ve gotten in twenty-two years. The action sequences may remind you of Jack Bauer, but this is not 24 and while the comparison to Homeland is a viable one, it looks at politics in a more radical way than the Showtime series. With Joe as it lead character, it shows a team leader who in a world that is all gray, increasingly preaches a narrative of black and white not because she believes but because it’s the only thing holding her nebulous grip on work together. It shows an incredible group of actors, not only as the soldiers and agents but as the superiors, people like Kaitlyn and Westfield who have more of the picture then their agents do but never enough to know if they’re doing the right thing. It shows politicians who have less regard for the people who do the horrible things in their name and how the solders pick up on this an act accordingly. And it shows in its character of Errol, Kaitlyn’s husband, a man who may very well know the entire picture better than anyone in Lioness and is at the end of the day, as controlled by events as anyone else. (I look forward to see of Martin Donovan.)
The question asked in the teaser by Joe: “Do you love your country?” is no doubt the theme of Season of Lioness. Just as important is another question that Neil asks his wife: “Are you okay?” Joe was asked that repeatedly by both her husband and Kaitlyn over and over Season 1 and she kept saying neutrally “I’m fine,” when we know she’s anything but. We saw the consequences of it on not only Joe but her family and yet she refused to take a desk job she was offered by Kaitlyn even though it might be the best thing for her family and herself. We know Joe’s answer to the first question is always going to trump honestly answering the second but she never bothered to ask the second to Cruz last season and there’s no sign she asks the question of anyone else on her team. At some point Joe is going to take a look at the mirror. And when she does, she may finally have to give a different answer to the question she keeps asking.
My score: 4.5 stars.