‘Special Ops: Lioness Season 1 Episode 3 Recap: “Bruise Like a Fist” 

Cruz Manuelos blasts down Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay Bridge in a Mercedes-Benz, straight toward her undercover life as Zara Adid, the newest friend of Aaliyah Amrohi. She’s in contact with her boss on a burner phone, and they decide that Zara’s university major will be undecided. “It’s boring as fuck,” Joe says. “That’s the point. Don’t let her friends dig into you. Answer their questions with a question.” As Cruz will soon discover, this is more difficult than it sounds. But for now, she pauses. She gazes across the Bay, feeling the sun on her face. And then she tosses the burner off the bridge. Inside the op, Bobby and Tex will monitor her progress via listening devices. But beyond that Cruz will be on her own. She takes a deep breath and gets into character. 

Laysla De Oliveira is so great in these moments in the early episodes of Special Ops: Lioness, because she allows us to be with Cruz as she walks boldly but carefully on the precarious line between her new professional reality and her constructed identity. A highly-trained Marine, Cruz is familiar with the chain of command, and with how to take orders. But we also know enough about her past to understand that with Joe, there is something deeper driving her. She doesn’t want to let her new boss down, perhaps because she senses that a lot of others have. But there’s also a pragmatism shared between them. As operators in a high stakes environment where the landmarks are always shifting and the road disappears with each mile traveled, Cruz and Joe know the only thing to do is to keep pushing through. But in their performances, De Oliveira and Zoe Saldaña also reveal these characters’ more fraught inner lives, where the consequences are different – more personal –  and what’s lost is ever more difficult to get back. 

In that respect, Joe is taking fire from all sides. With Cruz inserted into her mark’s mansion party, and Two Cups, Tucker, and Randy leased out to a cocky CIA case officer called Kyle (Thad Luckinball), she comes home for the night, only to discover her daughter Kate canoodling with a boy on the couch. “We’re way past ‘ma’am,’” Joe says, switching into her work voice and absolutely melting the kid where he stands. But Kate is obstinate – “You can’t just show up every six months, play parent, and lay down the law” – and Joe’s husband Neil sounds a similar note of frustration. Her repeated absences from their homelife make it difficult to present a united front on the day-to-day issues of raising two kids, and especially a teenager.

Cruz enters a luxurious estate on the water, where a full security team runs her photo and license plate through their database before escorting her to the pool area. Aaliyah welcomes “Zara” and introduces her coterie of idle rich young people: workaholic fiance Ehsan (Ray Corosani), womanizing Kamal (Sam Asghari), lecherous Sami (Adam Budron), and Malika (Carla Mansour), Nashwa (Layla Mohammadi), and Nala (Priscilla Doueihy), who Aaliyah characterizes based on their various dramas and jealousies. (“She’s rescued another stray,” one of the women comment.) Cruz knows Bobby and Tex can hear everything. But Joe and the team might as well be a world away. In here, in this undercover life, it’s always think on your feet time. But Cruz is ready for that. She capably deflects a doctor’s questions about her range of “car crash” bruises, the ones that are actually hematomas in the shape of fists. Enduring the impromptu SERE grinder was tough. But out here in the field, she continues to prove her mettle to Joe and the team.

It’s Lioness showrunner, exec producer, and writer Taylor Sheridan’s usual MO to pen episodes exclusively, and “Bruise Like a Fist” is no different. Which is perhaps why the unsanctioned operation Kyle leads Two Cups, Tucker, and Randy into down in Texas feels like another chapter of Sicario. Superficially, it’s a simple asset extraction. But then Kyle deploys an EMP to disable a Sheriff’s department vehicle, unruly drug cartel gunmen try to horn in on the action, and the CIA has to shoot its way out of a situation it shouldn’t really have been part of in the first place. (Texas being US soil, and all.) Don’t worry, Kyle says. This violent kerfuffle won’t even make it to breaking news status. Which is exactly what Josh Brolin’s Matt Graver and his team understood in Sicario, when they took down two teams of cartel thugs in broad daylight at the El Paso border crossing.

It’s like Errol (Martin Donovan) says. Kaitlyn Meade’s husband, a high level financier, laments that in a media landscape where facts are disgraced, nobody believes anything, and no one has the time to dig deeper. Which in one way makes things difficult for those who control information. But in another, it also informs impunity above a certain pay grade. Special Ops: Lioness is presenting its world as a zero sum game. We know all too well the danger to life and limb Cruz faces on the front lines of spycraft. But there are larger forces in competition, too. “Be careful poking that bear, Kaitlyn,” Errol says of Aaliyah’s father, the Lioness program’s principal target and a partner in a powerful petroleum cabal that might as well mint money. “Or the target will be on you.” It’s a remarkably detached statement to exist between married people, and one that perhaps illustrates where Errol’s loyalties truly lie.

“It’s not just husbands they choose for you. They choose it all.” Cruz is beginning to understand how trapped Aaliyah feels as an Arab woman with access to untold wealth but almost no autonomy. The dismissiveness of Malika, Nashwa, and Nala, with whom she’s required to remain friends; the disrespect of Sami, who Cruz puts in his place; and Ehsan’s sudden proclamation that they’re moving the party elsewhere: in a way, Aaliyah and Cruz are equally adrift inside this world. The group moves on from the mansion in Chesapeake, rolling to a fixed base terminal for private aircraft – no commercial air travel for these people – and it’s all Cruz can do to improvise a Zara moment, saying the tail number out loud for the ears of her team before Aaliyah and Ehsan and the rest settle inside the G800 for a surprise trip to who knows where.    

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges