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For a clandestine operation this loud and chaotic in the shadow war of global intelligence, you’d think the Lioness crew would’ve been more prepared for the possibility of the fight coming home. Chalk it up to the leftover hubris of late-20th-century American empire and the grand illusion of a liberated civilization thriving behind an impenetrable fortress. But I reckon team Lioness is all of us in that sense. Drowning our denial in generous sips of coffee, chanting “this is fine” as the flames of imperial decline grow around us. The finer point: Joe McNamara and the gang are already leagues behind in the home-turf spycraft arena, which means they’ll have to rely on an unconventional new Lioness — Ukrainian double-agent Oleksandra Balakin — to bring them up to speed and lead them through this season’s central survival mission.
An unconventional Lioness needs an unconventional recruitment scenario. Oleksa’s comes in the form of a neat little interrogation thriller sequence. We open on a nondescript residential block in Kyiv (the cold-blue hue once again cranked to 11 in case you forgot Ukraine is vaguely scary) where a couple of our Special Forces guys break into Oleksa’s mom and sister’s apartment, setting up a laptop camera in front of them and immediately threatening to kill them should they make any sudden moves. Oleksa watches them from the other end of the camera feed, in the middle of a gnarly interrogation with Kyle and Cruz — the latter silently watching Oleksa go through a cruel facsimile of her own violent recruitment crucible in the first season. Time to show the Agency what you’re made of.
Kyle doesn’t waste any time, coming on strong with immediate threats to have Oleksa’s mom and sister raped and murdered, but it’s the accusation that she’s a Russian spy that sends her into a tailspin — dealing repeated blows to Kyle’s head and tearing her shirt open with a warrior’s air. “Go ahead,” she taunts. “Shoot me right here!” The reaction seems to suffice for Kyle, as well as Cruz, who isn’t as adept at the art of spycraft but can tell this isn’t a soldier who’s acting like she has something to hide. “Sorry for the inconvenience,” the more intimidating Special Forces guy tells Oleksa’s family as they pack up and leave in a flash — a deadpan exit from fresh carnage so diabolically polite you could almost classify it as Americana.
But hold up, cowboys and cowgirls, ‘cause the real Americana comes out in Joe’s monologue to her family over the most cursed McNamara family breakfast so far. While Joe and Neal scramble for coffee and cereal in the giant, empty pantries at Camp Peary, Kate calls a “family meeting” and firmly announces that they want Joe to quit her job. Her response is a massive self-report: “I don’t know what your passion in life will be,” she tells her daughters. “Your father’s passion is fighting to save lives. My passion is fighting to save a way of life.”
Sorry, Joe, but it’s giving fascist. “I’ve killed for this way of life,” she admits. “And I believe our right to choose how we want to live our lives is worth the sacrifice.” Preserving our “way of life” has been the dog whistle at the heart of American imperialism project ever since the end of WWII when we decided we’d maintain the world’s governance (and our material dominance within it). On her way out the door, Joe forces a gun into her husband’s hand, dismissing this clear breach of his core values as an “insurance policy,” nothing more. She apologizes for bringing this world home, but now she’s gotta go to work. And right now, all that means is finding the rest of the enemy combatants. Joe is mostly effective as an enigmatic protagonist bordering on an unreliable narrator. It isn’t always easy to tell how much she’s buying her own jingoistic bullshit at any given family breakfast, but when the time comes to lay it out on the table with her own family, she appeals to her sense of passion for stormtroopin’ in the CIA. Wherever the total of her life’s work ends up on the Good/Evil scale, she knows full well the cost of maintaining the American way of life. She’s no longer just a soldier, but an embodiment of American tyranny at home and abroad.
Randy and Two Cups drive Joe’s daughters to school (which ends with these guys thinking a traffic jam is like a setup or something and crashing through traffic with the police siren on, surely alleviating Joe’s daughters of any notion that they’re mom is in this business of “keeping them safe”) while Bobby escorts Joe to the office to get up to speed with Byron and Kaitlyn. (Here’s the exact point where I realized Kaitlyn’s looking like she’s stylized to look like Erika Kirk.) Anyway, Kyle and Cruz are also in attendance to clarify that, however, the enemy tagged Joe in the Yurimov job, they didn’t learn it from Oleksa. No way this patriotic Ukrainian warrior would do anything to advance a Russian cause and so forth. Both Byron and Joe seem to value Cruz’s measured confirmation of Oleksa’s intent over CIA dirtbag Kyle’s word (which, to that I say… word), but now Joe’s gotta give Oleksa a talking-to and dressing down of her own — complete with a Michael Corleone-style “in my HOME” lecture and a hard punch in the face — as if this poor agent hasn’t taken enough blows from her comrades in arms in the last 24 hours.
But Oleksa stays cool under the pressure of another interrogation (this one set at a commandeered floor of an office building, an aptly disorienting liminal space from which to carry out one’s clandestine interrogations), giving Joe a blunt, and in its bluntness, convincing prognosis of their situation, and how she can help them fix it. “They don’t know it was you. They think [Yurimov]’s still there. So now you tell them you have him,” she admonishes, “and all the hornets come out. And I show you the hornets.”
Sounds like a deal to Joe. Next stop: the “Farm,” where the whole crew gathers for the debrief, and this strike-back mission begins in earnest. Everyone’s spread out with a respective mountain of vending-machine snacks in front of them, each taking their own moment to stare down Oleksa, when Joe takes the floor. Things are tense at first. When asked if they can call her Alex for short, Oleksandra stands her ground with a significantly less Americanized alternative, Oleksa, and multiple grumbles from under the breath of her team keep things icy. Kyle re-confirms that Oleksa’s been vetted and is genuinely on their side in this thing — even if partially under duress, but it’s Oleksa’s display of insider knowledge that gets everyone to shut up and listen. She identifies Cruz and Josie as the Lionesses of their last two operations, and Joe as the Lioness who called in a missile strike that killed al-Zarqawi along with the wife that she befriended. The point is, the other global powers know more about them than they even thought possible, and they’re using that knowledge to advance the cause of America eating itself from the inside out. “Disease kills the bear,” Oleksa clarifies. “And they’ve been infecting you for many years.”
What follows is a dossier of high-profile American citizens and politicians who are actively under the thumb of clandestine agents from other countries, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation on how clandestine operations work on U.S. soil. A big clump of narrative table-setting that grinds the episode to a halt and makes for largely uncompelling television. In combination with the scene that preceded it — another Kailtyn/Errol dialogue in which the military-industrial power couple give voice to geopolitical fears from “both sides” of the American upper-middle class isle — it’s a mess of political signifiers and scary buzz words that mounts to this: while China is playing a long game of misinformation and economic interwovenness with the U.S., Russia remains the premiere executor of good old fashioned boots-on-the-ground espionage. Things like honeypotting and blackmailing U.S. citizens of interest — from high-level researchers at universities to governors and senators — are still the name of the game. As a double agent operating in the top half of the “misinformation pyramid” as it’s laid out before them, Oleksa is now in a position to trigger a whole network of foreign operators out into the open.
There’s just one little reveal that raises a red flag for Joe. Oleksa is still “under,” meaning she’s still an active agent as far as anyone to whom she reports is concerned. An abrupt sidebar with Kyle confirms that the reasons are diabolically political. Blowing Oleksa’s cover would mean publicly admitting that there are five senators on her asset list — one of whom was seduced into posing for some, uh, compromising photographs. So now the question becomes: how do we kick this off without revealing too much at once, thereby fully eroding the already paper-thin facade of strength and security around our government and institutions?
Back in conference with Kailtyn and Byron, Joe and Kyle propose something of a middle-ground tactic: inform the public via the press secretary that they’ve captured a Russian honeypot agent — no names, no pictures, just a statement that they’ve apprehended an agent on U.S. soil who’d made contact with “numerous U.S. officials” for coercion purposes, but interests of national security prevent any further disclosure for the time being. As for Oleksa, they’ll turn her loose and stay close while every SVR agent under her watch reaches out. Hook, line, sinker.
But as the episode closes out on another flash-forward to Joe’s captivity, we’re reminded that the plan of escape from this hellish timeline only throws her deeper into its clutches. The aforementioned press conference in real time gives way to footage of the same conference from a TV mounted to the ceiling. Joe is underneath it, forced to watch the self-planted seed of her destruction from her own torture chamber as a water dropper pelts her forehead. It’s a bleak portrait of a world gone mad that, despite its placement in a lackluster expositional filler episode, might feel earned if it didn’t also feel like a muddled, health-hearted sunk-cost excuse for the havoc the American empire, in its violent death throes, wreaks upon the world.
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