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.
So, imagine my surprise when season 2 opens with the Lioness team gearing up for another mission. A Texas congresswoman is kidnapped and moved across the border into Mexico. It’s now Kaitlyn’s job to answer the call and investigate. Kaitlyn’s husband, who explained that season 1’s plot was all about oil prices in the previous finale, tells her to “take a look at Mexican exports on [her] drive over, particularly oil.” I have a growing fear that season 2 might just repeat season 1.
Kaitlyn joins up with U.S. Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman) and CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly). They discuss the details of the case and throw wild speculations in the air about the criminals and their potential ties to Russia and China. I can only imagine that the U.S. government let Sheridan sit on a real American military strategy meeting and that he wrote down what he heard word for word.
Kaitlyn: Russia?
Mullins: It does fit their covert ops strategy, but they don’t have the leverage.
Westfield: It’s China.
Mullins: We think that’s a likely possibility.
Westfield: A U.S. military operation on Mexican soil is a political disaster. The President’s own party will turn on him. The other side of the aisle? They will destroy him. Some form of Vietnam in this hemisphere shifts our focus from the East and it drains our resources even faster than Ukraine. China is Mexico’s number one trade partner in crude oil, natural gasses, as well as gold. So, any military response to this on Mexican soil renders our opposition to a move into Taiwan as both hypocritical to NATO and the U.N.. And with Russia chair of the security council? China has free rein of a Taiwanese invasion.
Um…what?!
Let me remind everyone that we’re just ten minutes into the premiere of Lioness season 2 and all that happened is that as a Texas congresswoman was kidnapped and taken into Mexico. From that alone, the CIA deputy director has somehow convinced the Secretary of State that not only is China involved in this scheme, but that it has global implications. He reckons that this chain of events is the only natural outcome:
1. China pressures Mexico to send a cartel to kidnap a Texas congresswoman and bring her to Mexico.
2. If the U.S. performs an operation on Mexican soil, it will weaken the country’s position with NATO and the UN, because the U.S. looks like hypocrites. (If they’re against China’s invasion of Taiwan.)
3. China invades Taiwan “with little to no consequences.”
I’m certain that the world doesn’t operate on this level of 4D chess, because China doesn’t need to come up with a scheme this far-fetched just to upset the global hierarchy. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and they didn’t kickstart that campaign with a political Rube Goldberg machine. Still, this is our board game for season 2. And guess what? They want the Lioness team to handle it.
“A Lioness isn’t designed to gather intel,” Joe tells the boardroom. Secretary of State Morgan Freeman loads one in the chamber spits out this response: “After you kill the guy, could you be so kind as to grab his fucking phones and his computers?” End of meeting.
Morgan Freeman returns!
So, it’s wheels up for Joe. Christmas tree decorating will have to wait. She heads to Del Rio, Texas, to meet her new team. I kid you not, they’re led by Taylor Sheridan, AKA “Cody.” He’s shirtless and brandishing heavy artillery. When they run into early trouble, Sheridan takes out three guys by himself. He even writes himself some one-liners. “You know what they say, Joe, beware the old soldier. He’s old for a reason.”
Driving through Mexico, they immediately find the men holding the congresswoman hostage and kill them. Now, all Joe and her team must do is drive her back across the border. They find themselves in a car chase involving eight to ten police cars. For some reason, they kill all of them. I thought they were supposed to save the congresswoman in an undercover mission, but now there’s a dozen dead cops in Mexico. A helicopter shows up and rescues them all.
“Now, we play offense,” Joe tells the congresswoman. “My agency doesn’t do courtrooms.” Joe, I don’t know what your agency does. At least Cruz found her way out—and hopefully stays out.
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