Lioness Recap: Lie Craft

Joe doesn’t trust the new lioness. For all her time and experience behind the intelligence curtain, she still insists on running her operation in good faith. For the love of country, warts and all. But, as resident queen of pragmatic CIA ghoulism Kaitlyn Meade reminds her, Joe “shouldn’t trust any of them.” Trust, in other words, is not a luxury available to anyone who serves the Agency. Spycraft is “lie craft,” and Joe suspects Josephina Carillo’s story isn’t her whole story. The trick is figuring out what to do with the truth once you extract it.

This week, Captain Carillo arrives at Fort Bliss, the temporary rough-and-tumble home of the Lioness crew and gets a condensed, but no less nightmarish intro course in militant espionage, while Joe gets another quick fix of Full-House style domestic play, and Kaitlyn greases some wheels of power in Washington. The button gets pushed on Josephina’s cover, with news of her discharge spread over cable news. Back at the saucy-exposition meeting room, our big-wig Greek chorus of Mullins, Mason, and Hollar express concern over the convenience of their new asset’s cover story and point out the historical stickiness of CIA operations moving drugs across the border. A quick nudge from Kaitlyn gets the real concern out of them, though: public outrage over the congresswoman’s abduction isn’t holding, and the press is resisting a push for greater awareness. The response is divided on party lines, and as the show has reminded us at least twice every episode so far, there’s an election looming. The President is polling at 40 percent, and they need more support from their side of the aisle to move on their current plan (as if we needed to be reminded of our real-life election. We’ll see how that plot point affects the enjoyment of the show come next week. Yikes!).

So Byron and Kaitlyn split duties convincing the two senators holding up the votes. Kaitlyn enlists the help of her Illuminati financial investor husband Errol (Martin Donovan) to “opine on the economic consequences of another high profile target on U.S. soil” over dinner with Senator Fuller while she lets it slip that the abduction was a probe instigated by Chinese intelligence. With the boogeyman sufficiently incepted through hushed tones, the senator seems interested in letting Kaitlyn and her team take care of it all quietly — somehow stopping another 9/11 from happening while preventing a devastating market collapse. I don’t know; that’s the argument Kaitlyn and Errol make between bites of what I’m sure is insanely expensive, mediocre-ass, well-done steak. And I guess it’s enough to get the Senate on board and procure a black fund for the mission.

Only three episodes in, and Joe’s home-life pattern is already getting a bit redundant — pull up to the driveway with a melancholy mix of weariness and relief, get triggered into perceiving a phantom threat, draw a gun and almost shoot a family member. This time, though, she catches Dr. Neal enjoying a quiet afternoon bath while the girls are away. I think we can officially hand the devoted and devastatingly hot TV house-partner championship belt — husband, wife, or otherwise — to Dave Annable, who’s so goddamn handsome as to make these otherwise hilarious, sitcom-y family intrigue worth sitting through (the whole “you should be happy your parents love each other” scene after Kate walks into direct view of her parents’ parts mid-smash had me in tears). Even when they stick him with the task of arguing with his daughters about their friend being non-binary over breakfast, complete with a groan-worthy appeal to the “free exchange of ideas,” cribbed from whatever episode of the Joe Rogan podcast he heard that morning. Just when I thought my sexual orientation was shifting from “Zoe Saldana verbally destroys someone” to “Dave Annable makes eggs.” Anyway, on her way out the door, Joe backs him up with a little CIA-mom twist: “What your father means is ideas are meant to be challenged. He has the right to disagree with you and you have the right to disagree with him. There are nations where that right doesn’t exist and those are the places you don’t want to visit.” Joe goes to those places so they don’t have to, etc etc. The inner conflict between her patriotism and detached realism seeps through the things she tells her family as justification for her absence.

Like Joe, the Lioness series continues to run on the mythical boomer centrist’s vague distrust in our institutions undercut by a resounding belief in the fractured American white-hat mythos. It also continues to exhibit the type of uncanny, lizard-brainy images of combat and violence to erupt from Hollywood’s deep well of dissonant, yoked espionage dramas. Josephina’s welcome to Fort Bliss is characteristically cold and all the more abrasive by the lack of privacy in the open bunk, co-ed showers, and open latrine. “I can tolerate this in Pakistan; I can’t do this shit in Texas!” shouts Bobby, storming out of the shower after Two Cups runs in to take a huge emergency dump — the whole mad scene recalling the co-ed showers of our future fascist space military in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. Josephina suggests they break the ice and get to know each other at dinner, but the Lioness crew isn’t interested in getting to know their lioness this time around — not beyond her cover. “We don’t got time to learn both,” says Tucker. This party starts at dawn.

Which is where Josephina shows her natural aptitude for the job, owning a standing target at the firing range and demonstrating a rapid-fire mastery of boots-on-the-ground directives in the noise-torture obstacle course or whatever. Things get shakier, though, when Joe puts her through a goofy-looking VR exercise. Josephina yells, “Let her go!” at a fake assailant holding a fake hostage with all the fervor of a boomer shrieking in terror at a VR roller coaster. This makes it pretty funny when Joe says, “What are you, a cop? ‘Let her go’?” The point is that this is a kill team and a kill team only. To kill is to survive. And now, Josephina’s survival will require her to destroy her family.

Here’s where Joe takes Kaitlyn’s queue from the top of the episode: she can’t trust Josephina, but she can use that distrust to identify pressure points — recruit not by way of comradery but by fear. Josephina told them a heavy stack of lies: that she didn’t know her father and uncle’s business and didn’t speak Spanish — enough to put her away as a mole with a phone call to the Military Police. If she lied to protect her family, how are they supposed to believe she’ll destroy them for love of country? Josephina claims she broke away from them a long time ago because she didn’t want to know or have anything to do with the cartel. She seems to be telling the truth on that count, but the truth doesn’t matter when she’s already been cast in the central role of this operation. Under duress, she plays her part and makes the introductory call to her father. All in a day’s work when you’re in what Kaitlyn Meade calls the “sovereignty of our nation” business.