Military thrillers are all the rage these days, and Taylor Sheridan‘s Lioness is no exception. As the show (formerly titled Special Ops: Lioness) is set to return to Paramount+ at the end of the month, now is the time to revisit the series’ first season before the military drama returns for round two. Season 1 follows CIA operative Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) as she leads a covert unit in an effort to take down a terrorist cell from within. But things get a bit sticky when her undercover “Lioness,” Sergeant Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), gets too close to her mark. If you need a refresher before tuning in to Lioness Season 2, keep reading…
‘Lioness’ Season 1 Positions Joe Between Country and Family
Season 1 opens with Joe losing one of her Lioness operatives, a woman named Isabel (Ariella Ezekiel), to an Islamic terrorist cell after her hidden cross tattoo is discovered by the enemy. Unable to get her soldier out alive, Joe is forced to call in an airstrike on the entire compound, killing her operator in the process before she is tortured to death for information. Frustrated and unnerved, Joe is quickly tasked with another mark, an Iranian businessman and militia leader named Asmar Ali Amrohi (Bassem Youssef), who has serious ties to terrorist groups throughout the Middle East. As a financer for many of these operations, Amrohi is a hard man to reach, but his daughter, Aaliyah (Stephanie Nur), is much easier to catch. It’s here that Joe is forced to recruit Cruz as her next Lioness, who, due to her own personal issues, struggles to trust her.
Nevertheless, the game is quickly afoot, and Cruz (under her cover as “Zara Adid”) soon makes contact with and befriends Aaliyah, who is about to get married. Over the course of the season, Joe continues to train Cruz, preparing her to gain the trust of Aaliyah in any way she can. Unfortunately, Joe’s attentions are soon divided when trouble on the homefront begins to boil over. Halfway through the season, Joe’s daughter, Kate (Hannah Love Lanier), is in a serious car accident. The whole thing is a serious weight on Joe, who wasn’t there to help guide her daughter to make better choices, but it’s only made worse when her husband Neal (Dave Annable) discovers that Kate had been pregnant during the accident. With Neal working as a child surgeon and Joe always away on secret missions she’s unable to disclose, Kate feels abandoned by her family, something Joe struggles to reconcile with.
Making things even tougher for our heroine is Kyle McManus (Thad Luckinbill), a fellow CIA operative who borrows some of Joe’s QRF operators — Two Cups (James Jordan), Tucker (LaMonica Garrett), and Randy (Austin Hébert) — for a domestic operation that goes south when a firefight breaks out on the U.S./Mexico boarder. The whole thing puts the Lioness operation at risk and nearly derails the entire mission when Joe’s tactics and leadership decisions are called into question by her superiors. Thankfully, her boss and mentor Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) is by her side, in both her work and home struggles.
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Mark your calendars for October 27.
Cruz’s Dual Identity Causes Major Issues Throughout ‘Lioness’ Season 1
As all of this is going on, Lioness pivots back to Cruz’s work undercover. Things seem to be going well as Aaliyah quickly trusts her, asking the undercover Lioness to join her and her friends on a weekend trip. All goes well, even if some of the other women don’t take to Cruz so easily, but things get a bit more complicated as Aaliyah and Cruz begin to develop feelings for one another. Eventually, they sleep together, and it muddles things up for Cruz, despite Joe’s efforts to help her push past it. Having been abused her whole life, Cruz has finally found someone who makes her feel safe, yet it’s her job to use that trust as only an olive branch toward her target.
Needing to convince Cruz to finish the job, Joe forces her to watch eight straight hours of footage of these very same terrorists killing (and worse) innocent people around the globe. Having to push past her own feelings, Cruz returns to Aaliyah, meeting her in Spain. In the Season 1 finale, “Gone Is the Illusion of Order,” Cruz is confronted by Aaliyah’s fiancé, Ehsan Al Rashdi (Ray Corasani), who she is then forced to kill before killing her target, Aaliyah’s father Asmar, as well. Escaping the compound, Cruz is eventually rescued by Joe and the QRF but argues that she’s only made Asmar a martyr, pointing out that Aaliyah’s future children will grow up hearing stories about how their grandfather was murdered by infidels.
One of the main themes of Lioness — which we see in both Cruz and Joe — is this idea of dual identities. With Cruz, she’s pretending to be a woman who doesn’t really exist, and yet, she allows her true self to blend in with “Zara” enough that she feels more authentic with Aaliyah than she does with Joe and the team. It’s this struggle that makes it nearly impossible for her to complete her mission, and though she does, she later admits that her feelings for Aaliyah are the only thing authentic about the whole experience. On the contrary, Joe hides her work life entirely from her family, including her husband, and fights to separate the two. It’s only in the season finale that Joe can no longer separate them, breaking down in Neal’s arms as she decides she wants to take a desk job, removing herself from the very horrors she’s fighting to keep away from her family. It’s a powerful moment and one that lingers as the credits roll.
‘Lioness’ Season 1 Opens the Door for New Threats in Season 2
Anyone who’s seen the trailers for Lioness Season 2 knows that Joe ultimately doesn’t go through with her comments about getting a desk job. Instead, she continues to fight for the United States’ interests, leading the Lioness team in new efforts for domestic security. Though Season 1 told a fairly self-contained story, there are still ideas threaded throughout these first eight episodes that the second season could easily explore. What becomes of Cruz after this mission? How do Joe and Neal deal with their family troubles, and how do they get Kate on the right path? Now that Asmar is dead, who is the US’s next big target? And how will the trouble on the border lead into Season 2?
Right now, we have a lot more questions than we have answers, but Taylor Sheridan will no doubt address these things with Lioness‘ sophomore outing. Given the star power that includes Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman, and Morgan Freeman (the former two who also serve as executive producers), it stands to reason that Lioness will blow us away with Season 2, and will hopefully continue some of these stories that were left ambiguous by Season 1’s end.
Lioness Season 2 premieres October 27 on Paramount+.
Special Ops: Lioness is a Paramount+ original series starring Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman. The series centers on a marine and a CIA agent who work together with the daughter of a dangerous terrorist group to destroy the organization. Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone co-creator) and Jill Wagner created the series, which was directed by Paul Cameron and Anthony Byrne.
- Release Date
- July 23, 2023
- Seasons
- 1
