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For a clandestine operation this loud and chaotic in the shadow war of global intelligence, you\u2019d think the Lioness crew would\u2019ve 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 \u201cthis is fine\u201d 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\u2019ll have to rely on an unconventional new Lioness \u2014 Ukrainian double-agent Oleksandra Balakin \u2014 to bring them up to speed and lead them through this season\u2019s central survival mission.<\/p>\n
An unconventional Lioness needs an unconventional recruitment scenario. Oleksa\u2019s 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\u2019s mom and sister\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019re made of.<\/p>\n
Kyle doesn\u2019t waste any time, coming on strong with immediate threats to have Oleksa\u2019s mom and sister raped and murdered, but it\u2019s the accusation that she\u2019s a Russian spy that sends her into a tailspin \u2014 dealing repeated blows to Kyle\u2019s head and tearing her shirt open with a warrior\u2019s air. \u201cGo ahead,\u201d she taunts. \u201cShoot me right here!\u201d The reaction seems to suffice for Kyle, as well as Cruz, who isn\u2019t as adept at the art of spycraft but can tell this isn\u2019t a soldier who\u2019s acting like she has something to hide. \u201cSorry for the inconvenience,\u201d the more intimidating Special Forces guy tells Oleksa\u2019s family as they pack up and leave in a flash \u2014 a deadpan exit from fresh carnage so diabolically polite you could almost classify it as Americana.<\/p>\n
But hold up, cowboys and cowgirls, \u2018cause the real Americana comes out in Joe\u2019s 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 \u201cfamily meeting\u201d and firmly announces that they want Joe to quit her job. Her response is a massive self-report: \u201cI don\u2019t know what your passion in life will be,\u201d she tells her daughters. \u201cYour father\u2019s passion is fighting to save lives. My passion is fighting to save a way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sorry, Joe, but it\u2019s giving fascist. \u201cI\u2019ve killed for this way of life,\u201d she admits. \u201cAnd I believe our right to choose how we want to live our lives is worth the sacrifice.\u201d Preserving our \u201cway of life\u201d has been the dog whistle at the heart of American imperialism project ever since the end of WWII when we decided we\u2019d maintain the world\u2019s governance (and our material dominance within it). On her way out the door, Joe forces a gun into her husband\u2019s hand, dismissing this clear breach of his core values as an \u201cinsurance policy,\u201d nothing more. She apologizes for bringing this world home, but now she\u2019s 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\u2019t always easy to tell how much she\u2019s 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\u2019 in the CIA. Wherever the total of her life\u2019s work ends up on the Good\/Evil scale, she knows full well the cost of maintaining the American way of life. She\u2019s no longer just a soldier, but an embodiment of American tyranny at home and abroad.<\/p>\n
Randy and Two Cups drive Joe\u2019s 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\u2019s daughters of any notion that they\u2019re mom is in this business of \u201ckeeping them safe\u201d) while Bobby escorts Joe to the office to get up to speed with Byron and Kaitlyn. (Here\u2019s the exact point where I realized Kaitlyn\u2019s looking like she\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s measured confirmation of Oleksa\u2019s intent over CIA dirtbag Kyle\u2019s word (which, to that I say\u2026 word), but now Joe\u2019s gotta give Oleksa a talking-to and dressing down of her own \u2014 complete with a Michael Corleone-style \u201cin my HOME\u201d lecture and a hard punch in the face \u2014 as if this poor agent hasn\u2019t taken enough blows from her comrades in arms in the last 24 hours.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s clandestine interrogations), giving Joe a blunt, and in its bluntness, convincing prognosis of their situation, and how she can help them fix it. \u201cThey don\u2019t know it was you. They think [Yurimov]\u2019s still there. So now you tell them you have him,\u201d she admonishes, \u201cand all the hornets come out. And I show you the hornets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sounds like a deal to Joe. Next stop: the \u201cFarm,\u201d where the whole crew gathers for the debrief, and this strike-back mission begins in earnest. Everyone\u2019s 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\u2019s been vetted and is genuinely on their side in this thing \u2014 even if partially under duress, but it\u2019s Oleksa\u2019s 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\u2019re using that knowledge to advance the cause of America eating itself from the inside out. \u201cDisease kills the bear,\u201d Oleksa clarifies. \u201cAnd they\u2019ve been infecting you for many years.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 another Kailtyn\/Errol dialogue in which the military-industrial power couple give voice to geopolitical fears from \u201cboth sides\u201d of the American upper-middle class isle \u2014 it\u2019s 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 \u2014 from high-level researchers at universities to governors and senators \u2014 are still the name of the game. As a double agent operating in the top half of the \u201cmisinformation pyramid\u201d as it\u2019s laid out before them, Oleksa is now in a position to trigger a whole network of foreign operators out into the open.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s just one little reveal that raises a red flag for Joe. Oleksa is still \u201cunder,\u201d meaning she\u2019s 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\u2019s cover would mean publicly admitting that there are five senators on her asset list \u2014 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve captured a Russian honeypot agent \u2014 no names, no pictures, just a statement that they\u2019ve apprehended an agent on U.S. soil who\u2019d made contact with \u201cnumerous U.S. officials\u201d for coercion purposes, but interests of national security prevent any further disclosure for the time being. As for Oleksa, they\u2019ll turn her loose and stay close while every SVR agent under her watch reaches out. Hook, line, sinker.<\/p>\n
But as the episode closes out on another flash-forward to Joe\u2019s captivity, we\u2019re 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\u2019s a bleak portrait of a world gone mad that, despite its placement in a lackluster expositional filler episode, might feel earned if it didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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