Lioness Recap: From Special Op to Black Op

Special Ops: Lioness
2381
Season 2 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“The question is, would she still be alive if we hadn’t tried to save her?” Joe and Bobby are standing in the aftermath of their child rescue side mission gone awry. The dust hasn’t even settled on the scene yet, and they’ve already figured out the whole cover story. Nothing left to do now but quietly acknowledge the violent futility of your job and get along with the next leg of it. Fire and forward momentum. Remove the byzantine build-up of psyops and special ops and clandestine geopolitical status-quo-keeping, and that’s all that’s left for Joe and the Lioness crew. And anyone else who, by bad luck or circumstance or both, ends up a servant of the gray world. 

Back in Dallas, The Carrillo mansion is full of reluctant participants in a special op still dangerously in flux. Some of them don’t know it yet, but Pablo Carrillo is about to fuck around and find out. Cruz wakes up in Josie’s room to find her wide awake and fretting. She’s now officially a day late on her task of flipping her father, so Cruz motivates her with a warm but steady word of advice, followed by a harsh rebuke to get the job done, and fast — showing off the talents that make her Joe’s shoo-in for Lioness Tamer 2.0. 

“There’s a psychology course in building sources. It says, ‘Your father will always be the man he was in your fondest memory of him, and you will always be the age you were when that memory was formed,’” Cruz tells Josie. The point being, “You gotta remind yourself you ain’t nine. And he is half the man you made him out to be, if that.” It’s a smart play, given the time crunch. Pablo Carrillo is neither the valiant hero of Josie’s memories who saved the baby from the runaway horse nor a diabolical mustache-twirling, child-trafficking villain Cruz could easily paint him out to be. He’s a man and unexceptional as such. Josie is a grown woman with the weight of the U.S. empire behind her, and her job is to play that trump card immediately. 

And just as Cruz warned, Pablo’s suspicions are already at a boiling point when Josie interrupts his morning cigar to break the news: the CIA wants his help to run an op on Los Tigres. Again, Pablo crushes the 90 percent right/10 percent maniacal villain role, delivering a spot-on takedown analysis of the CIA’s role in perpetuating the global drug markets and accompanying militant violence they purport to neutralize before slapping Josie and triggering a fucking yoked intervention from Cruz and the Lioness crew members on site. 

“This should answer the how full of shit is my daughter question floating around in your fucking skull,” Cruz says once she’s knocked Pablo down and put a gun to his head. I love it when they give our girl a heavy Shane Black-style line like that. During the quick skirmish and securing of the location, Two Cups finds out that the maid is an informant for Gutierrez, making our mysterious DEA liaison a likely mole. 

Joe is still conscious when Two Cups calls her from an unsecured line and fills her in, and manages to get a heart-wrenching goodbye-in-case call to Neal AND direct the co-pilot on how to stabilize her before she passes out. Meanwhile, the current two-fold shitstorm state of this special op is passed onto Byron and Kaitlyn, who roll into the exposition/control room in Washington, ready to curse out their superiors. (Speaking of Byron, what’s up with his “based” daughters demanding real milk from a cow or whatever? Is that some Gen-Z trad TikTok thing I’m not hip to?) The newscaster on the TV broadcasts both the cover story and stakes of the incident at the border: FBI, DOJ, and DEA are keeping the nature of the operation secret to “protect the lives of undercover agents still in the field” while operation itself is the “largest loss of life for a federal agency” since the Branch Davidian raid. Whoa, they evoked Waco, dude. This is heavy. 

Mason and Hollar come in characteristically hot on the blame game, arguing that every assurance they were given when they authorized this operation has been violated. Byron, Kaitlyn, and the Lioness crew were given a blank check for resources and assets, and all they’ve done with them is get the U.S. army embroiled in a battle in Iraq, then run an unsuccessful nighttime raid on a human trafficking operation in Mexico. All a far cry from the mission they were supposed to be on in the first place. Byron makes an equally compelling retort: they were assigned to infiltrate the largest criminal organization inside our closest neighbor, with an asset not of their choosing, with agencies that they specifically warned against collaborating with. On that last note, they’re now stuck with the distinct possibility that Agent Gutierrez is a mole for Alvaro Carrillo. True to form, nobody wants to take the blame for knowingly setting volatile acts in motion, and once again, Mullins breaks the hot-potato game with a reminder that chaos management in their M.O. Nowhere to go but forward. So how do they minimize collateral damage now? 

Finishing this mission quietly is going to be tricky, seeing how they’ve got a DEA agent and a major cartel family member in custody. Their only option now is to get Pablo Carrillo back to Mexico and hope the MSS agent they’re looking for is embedded in Los Tigre’s leadership. As for their two high-profile gentlemen in custody, Byron assures the room that the Lioness team will not let either return from the operation once complete. That last part makes this a black op, which means Mullins leaves the room so Mason and Hollar can deliver one of these “we can’t officially authorize this, but we’re fucking authorizing it” type commands.

With Joe heading into surgery at Keesler Air Force Base, prognosis unclear, Kaitlyn heads down to Bliss to join in the Guantanamo-style beating Kyle and the crew are giving Gutierrez. Kyle’s already worked his NSA connections to run Gutierrez’s file and find he’s got no open investigation on Carrillo and no record of the wired informant he’s put in the Carillo house. Kyle struts his black-ops-fuckboi stuff, chewing through an ominous delivery of the federal statute 2381, defining treason as knowingly aiding an enemy of the state and withholding information from a federal agency that results in harm of a federal agent or agency. “That means, Raymond, I can kill you for what you did to us yesterday, and I can kill you for what you won’t tell us.” And that’s just the preshow for Kaitlyn, who rolls onto this torture scene ready up the ante on all of it. She names Gutierrez’s wife and children and threatens to release their names and the names and addresses of his extended family. Because killing Gutierrez “isn’t gonna insatiate our appetite to do you harm for what you’ve done to us.” It’s all classic CIA — embodying the worst characteristics of the final boss in your head, beating the devil at his own game.

Gutierrez responds with an alibi that, while suspicious in its convenience, seems to be on the level. And it certainly tracks with this fear of cartel operatives embedded everywhere within U.S. borders. The way Gutierrez explains it, the only way he could successfully investigate Carrillo is by doing it on the down-low. Keeping zero record of his investigation, including the informant he had in Pablo’s house, was the only way to keep it from leaking to Los Tigres sooner or later. The whole group seems to accept the definite possibility that their captive is telling the truth, but Kaitlyn orders a thirty-milligram methylphenidate injection and polygraph test, just to be safe. 

Meanwhile, father and daughter Carillo are stuck in a room with one another with nothing left to do but reckon with the dead image of their past selves and the opposing operatives the world has made of them. And we still don’t know what’s going to happen to Joe! Hats off to Sheridan this week for leaving me with a genuine lump in my throat, wondering if Joe wasn’t tempting fate a little too much by passing the Lioness baton to Cruz. If these special ops have taught us anything, it’s that death deals little in the way of rhyme, reason, or justice — beholden to chaos with the rest of us.