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.
No comments:
Post a Comment