Lioness Season-Premiere Recap: WWI and Star Wars Slammed Into Each Other

Special Ops: Lioness
The Spider and the Fly
Season 3 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Things have changed since we last blew shit up on the world stage with the Lioness crew. Different president, dismantled and disorganized government institutions, and a war with Iran, to name just a few world events that would inevitably constitute a narrative shakeup for a show about a CIA Special Ops team bearing witness to a burning world from the front-row seat of their clandestine assassinations and gunfights, at home and abroad. But going into season three, Lioness is well-positioned to meet the times while still humming on what I’ve referred to in the past as the Dum Clancy register: stoking the omnipresent fears of your typical patriotic dad-show viewer as fuel for the all-American ass-kickin’ war-games melodrama. New regimes, new oil prices, same Special Ops.

As always, the ass-kickin’ melodrama begins and ends with our Mother Lioness, Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara. That’s literally the case with the season three’s premiere, bookending all the action with two scenes of violence at her front door. The opener is a flashforward that quickly and effectively reorients us to the show’s mindset and to Joe as our central protagonist. Joe works out in her garage to the sounds of news chatter, signifying the various wars and conflicts and disasters currently in the spotlight on the global stage, followed by a sunny ‘90s-sitcom-style breakfast with her daughters and longsuffering gray-beard hottie husband with a heart of gold, Dr. Neal (Dave Annable). Joe is a knowing witness to and participant in the rot at the heart of Western Civilization. She’s still in the espionage game to protect what’s left of the status quo and keep her family safe, though it looks like she’s finally settled on some kind of stable desk job at the CIA.

Meanwhile, our golden demonic Greek-chorus power couple, Kaitlyn Mead (Nicole Kidman) and her financial bigwig husband Errol (Martin Donovan), give voice to the reigning establishment anxieties on the menu — Chinese communist infiltration of American Universities and AI as an all-powerful Moloch that will end democracy more quickly than a million Chinese-operative journalists ever could or whatever. It’s business as usual in Lioness’s Washington, D.C., when Joe is pinned in her car and nabbed just as she pulls out of the driveway.

Queue the internal “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” and it’s six months earlier. The Lioness crew are making contact with a Ukrainian/Russian double-agent who’s been planted at Georgetown University. She’s got info to trade on Aleksi Yurimov, a russian spy who currently runs Russia’s Special Task Force. He’s moved to the frontlines of the Ukrainian War, and her agency wants to hand him over to the CIA. “He’s Putin’s hammer,” she explains to Joe. If they kill him, Putin’s retaliation will be severe. “But if you take him, it’s just the game.” Hard to argue with that one, though Joe does emphasize the mortal risk it poses to her and every member of their team should they be caught mid-extraction. Alas, the opportunity to take a major piece off the game board is simply too good a Special Op to pass up. 

We change scenes to a theater of trench/drone warfare in Donetsk, Ukraine, marked by a stark visual shift to a cold, blue-hued color grading that hits like the Eastern European equivalent of the Sicario-sepia (heretofore used by this show for the dual purpose of flattening the image of both Mexico and the Middle East). The target is camped out inside a pipeline beneath a farmhouse across the battlefield. Meanwhile, the Lioness team is escorted through the trees to a bunker-base of operations as drones whiz across the sky like a plague of locusts and the ground around them erupts with mortars. One of the best things Lioness has going for it remains its ability to make lizard-brainy, Apocalypse Now-style action sequences and wartorn images within a small-screen milieu. Also giving props to Taylor Sheridan and crew for an entertaining, well-staged, if not typically silly exposition sequence that gets the whole ass crew back together — including the bulk of the Lioness team as well as Commander Cody (Sheridan stunt-cameoing once again with all the swag of this world’s Mad God) and his Special Task Force — to orient the new location and plotline in the comfortable-old-shoe vibes of the broader, familiar ensemble. Everybody gets a chance to bicker and puff their chest or almost get in a fight with somebody else in the room and reacquaint themselves with the audience. The main takeaway: Cody’s team needs Joe on hand to identify Yurimov in the extraction. The rest of the Lioness team will have to hang back and provide cover from the base, except Cruz (returning season one Lioness Laysla De Oliveira, always a welcome second-string lead presence to augment Joe’s severity with a little John McClane-style swag), who’ll be covering Joe’s back with one of Cody’s guys.

The team isn’t happy about staying behind while the boss risks life and limb, but as Cody points out, none of them are trained for the type of warfare being waged on this front. “It’s like World War I and Star Wars slammed into each other,” returning fuckboi agent Kyle (Thad Luckinbill) tells the team after the heated briefing — a boneheaded but incredibly apt description of the whole extraction sequence as it unfolds.

“You got drones and every concept weapon the planet being test-driven out there while soldiers are still charging over trenchwalls with goddamn bayonets.” The only thing missing from that bit of Sheridan military-cowboy poetry are the dogs, which really tie the whole cyberpunk-level-of-hell-coded scene together as they chew through each combatant wave. Back at the base, the team is still bickering with the other troopers. The line that had me howling this week comes from Tucker (LaMonica Garrett) when a guy tries to warn them that they’ll lock the bunker door once the drones start flying. “Hey, if we want that door open, we’re gonna open it,” he says. “And you ain’t gonna fucking like how we do it, but I promise you it’ll be open. Motherfucker.” No inter-departmental honor among thieves. 

Joe, Cody, and the task force eventually make it to the pipeline in another Sicario-coded underground stealth-warfare moment and extract the man they spot as Yurimov in particularly gnarly fashion — Cody pulling no punches and showing no sign of empathy as they rip a tracker out of his armpit. “We just killed a bunch of people for a chess piece in a war that has nothing to do with us,” Joe tells Cruz in a quick impromptu conference back at the base. So why are intelligence agents swarming this operation? What’s the game behind the game here?

Answers for another episode. In the meantime, the ripple effects are already felt. Joe’s just made it home from Ukraine and curled up on the couch with a drink when she’s attacked by unidentified would-be assassins posing as state police. She guns both of them down in an instant and calls for immediate FBI intervention at her house, but a new, disembodied threat looms over her. Looks like this season’s covert war is heating up on home turf.