‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Episode 2 Recap: “The Beating”

Over a quiet meal at an upscale Washington, DC restaurant, Joe was delivering a progress report about Cruz to Meade as Special Ops: Lioness Episode 2 (“The Beating”) opens. They agreed it was smart for their new recruit to justify her constructed identity not having any social media by saying it’s forbidden by her conservative father. And with their mark, Aaliyah Amrohi (Stephanie Nur), having landed in America, Meade emphasized that Cruz should remain at Bragg and be invisible to the outside world. What if Aaliyah were to run into her on the streets of Georgetown? Unlikely, but it’s important to maintain operational security. And while Cruz is for sure settling into her new role (not without friction, but more on that in a second), this restaurant scene is more important for what it reveals about Joe’s relationship with Meade. Her CIA supervisor can also ask Joe about her husband and home life, and when that happens, we can watch Zoe Saldaña adjust Joe’s emotions in real time, her face becoming drawn and full of tension. “We do the best we can.” Charlie (Celestina Harris), her younger daughter, is a good student. But Kate (Hannah Love Lanier), her daughter who flat out said “I hate when she’s here” about Joe, well…

The resentment is real with this one, who rightly bristles at racist comments she receives at school. Her dad says she can’t beat the hate out of someone. “But you can try,” she answers, and Neil knows that’s exactly what her mother would say. And at home, when Joe listens to Kate’s side of the story, it’s a scene that feels like a parallel to a later one, where Joe is explaining her reasoning to Cruz. Whether it’s mother to teenage daughter or boss to her new recruit, Special Ops: Lioness is careful to emphasize, Joe is certain in her words and always justifies her actions. She’s even got an answer for Kate when she walks in on mom strapping on her pistol. (Joe and Neil’s daughters apparently believe that their mother works as a translator.) “Why do I have a gun? To protect the people I work with.”

Kate isn’t the only one doing the fighting – there are haymakers all over this episode of Lioness. Like when Neil, who is a physician, must break the news of his six-year-old patient’s tumor to her parents. It’s terminal, and he accepts the father’s punch to his mouth, because it’s what he would’ve done. And while Joe has been quietly impressed with Cruz’s development on the job, “I want to put her through the grinder,” she tells Meade. “I have to be sure.” The grinder, we soon learn, involves a team of masked Delta Force operators (Joe refers to them as “CAG”: Combat Applications Group) interrupting Cruz on her nighttime run, putting her in zip ties and a shroud, and throwing her into a dungeon-like offshore prison. Isolation torture. Churning fire hose torture. Temperature torture. Heavy metal auditory torture. Torture with no official name for the torture. But if you think Cruz is just going to sit back and take it, you haven’t been watching. Anytime her captors approach, she lashes out with fists. They want to break her, so they’ll know when she’ll break under enemy torture. (Joe: “Everyone breaks.”) But Cruz is mostly just angry. “I’ve been through S.E.R.E. you fucking bitch!”

And yet, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, as difficult as that program is, we’re beginning to understand that Joe and the CIA have encountered worse in the field. As Joe tells her new recruit, the torture training is key for her future survival. It’s key, because it might prevent Joe having to make awful next of kin phone calls, calls where she can’t explain that someone’s daughter was beheaded and set on fire. It doesn’t make Cruz feel any better – especially because she doesn’t have any next of kin. (The CAG captors twisted this against her, dismissing one brother as a jailbird and insinuating that her other brother died in her care.) “The Beating” is an effective name for this episode, because as hard as it is physically and mentally on Cruz, it feels like that for us, too. We’re inside this new world with her as viewers, a world of murky, high-stakes spycraft, and hotdogging operators, and of torturing your own people so they die less soon later on. 

But we have an ally in Laysla De Oliveira. De Oliveira has been the best thing in every scene she’s in since Lioness began, and as Cruz, she illuminates this journey through a dangerous and volatile world. We’re with her as Cruz battles insomnia, her eyes darting around frantically. We’re especially with her whenever she’s raining blows on an adversary. And most of fall we’re with her for the evolving team moments, where as fellow worker bees for the CIA, Bobby, Two Cups, Tucker, Randy, and Tex have quickly accepted Cruz as their own. They have cap gun battles inside the team house at Fort Bragg, they accept Cruz’s torture wounds with “You should see the other guy” casualness, and look to scrap immediately when they learn it was CAG guys who put her through the grinder. Sanctioned by the boss or not, these guys took it to their teammate, and they need to pay. “We’re with CIA now,” Two Cups tells a bruising sergeant, “So we don’t fight fair, buddy.” And that guy gets tasered as Bobby slams somebody’s head into the bar rail.

With all of this episode’s team-on-team unrest and teenagers challenging their parents’ authority, it would be easy to forget that there’s an op ongoing. It’s a surprise when Cruz’s mark calls in the middle of the bar fight, but she takes a deep breath and heads outside to take it. Sure, she’d be happy to meet Aaliyah at a pool party, Cruz says in the guise of her constructed identity, as she looks with a frown at the cuts and bruises all over her body. And from Joe, we also learn a little more about this Lioness operation’s target. Amrohi, Aaliyah’s father, is a terrorist, and that’s bad enough. But his terrorism is informed by greed. And as long the wealthy elite can deflect attention toward “the great devil” America, they can use that fear and anger to mask their true motives, which mostly come down to hoarding cash for themselves. Greed. It’s basic. And it’s what will draw her into his circle. “If Aaliyah brings you close and you get a chance,” Joe tells her, “you must find a way to survive whatever hell he puts you through until I get there.” From what we’ve seen, it’s a safe bet that Joe won’t have to drop a missile on Cruz. 

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