‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Episode 6 Recap: “The Lie Is The Truth” 

You want gravitas? Morgan Freeman can get you gravitas. And he’s bringing his equally great at gravitas pals Jennifer Ehle and Bruce McGill with him. With only two episodes left in Special Ops: Lioness Season 1, Taylor Sheridan’s Spy Shit thriller introduces Freeman as Secretary of State Edwin Mullins here in its sixth (“The Lie is the Truth”), and Mullins is fucking pissed. “I’ve seen some bullshit in my time,” he grumbles, calling to order the post-San Antonio debrief in an airless White House conference room. Freeman, growly and serious as Mullins, is flanked by Ehle and McGill, whose characters Sheridan does not name. (Sheridan does that a lot, actually, and it’s kind of irritating. Over in the Yellowstone universe, he didn’t outright name Ehle’s sadistic nun character in 1923, either.) We can infer that they’re on the senate intelligence committee, however, because the CIA orchestrating kill missions and ordnance disposal on US soil has resulted in its leash being shortened. Joe, Meade, and Westfield avoid further ass-reaming because the unsanctioned operation was technically a win. The terrorists in Texas had enough explosives to cause a 9/11-level event. But command in the later stages of Joe’s Lioness op will now emanate from the situation room at Langley.    

This new layer of executive oversight presents two issues. First, the CIA doesn’t want anyone, and especially not cabinet members and senators, telling it how to fight a war. But second, it reemphasizes what’s at stake as Cruz closes in on her target. “That marine is going to Majorca,” Joe says, referring to the announced site of Aaliyah’s wedding. “She’s in.” But there are only two ways out – mission success, and mission failure. And as we know from episode one, if failure is imminent – if the Lioness operative on site can’t kill her target personally – then Joe’s gotta make the call on sending either a drone or a Tomahawk missile to finish the job. That doesn’t make her operative collateral damage, Joe tells the senators. It makes her a sacrifice. “A casualty of the situation.” And Jennifer Ehle, delivering it with a rueful sigh, has what might be the best line of this wonderfully tense debriefing scene. “What a lovely war.”

For Cruz, the coldblooded mortal equation at the heart of her new gig as a Lioness operative looms. As Zara, she spends a weekend alone with Aaliyah at the Hamptons mansion, and somewhere between the in-house mud bath and steam room, she finds herself growing ever closer to her mark. The line between her undercover and real selves wavers as the women find a kinship with one another that Aaliyah doesn’t have in her cloistered world of oil wealth and arranged marriages, and Cruz never had at all. (Remember, she joined the Marines to escape severe emotional and physical abuse, and find some kind of purpose.) They’re telling each other secrets. They’re pledging mutual BFF status. They’re watching The Notebook and crying together. When and if her mission goes into full assassin mode, will Cruz really be able to execute Aaliyah’s terrorist financier father? Cruz, beyond the veneer of Zara, shudders at where she’s found herself. The lie is becoming the truth.

Neil says Joe’s heart to heart with Kate in her recovery room worked. The candor they shared served to recalibrate the fraught mother-daughter relationship, and Kate will soon be heading home in better spirits, determined, and preparing for rehab on her leg. “She’s gonna need more of you, though,” Neil adds. And that sets up the same old dilemma. With the op moving definitively overseas and entering its most crucial phase, Joe’s staring down another lengthy absence from home. Lengthy and dangerous. Within their own dynamic, wife and husband understand this. No more band-aids, they say of their sometimes patched over love for one another. They’re in this together, for the duration, and will “bank a few sessions” before she has to leave again. But there’s an element of kicking the can down the street here, too. Joe’s dedication to her profession and the Lioness program is noble. But there’s a real sense that flexion is coming.

When Aaliyah and Zara stayed up most of the night watching movies and crying together, Cruz again told her she could walk away from the marriage. But in actuality, that remains an impossibility. “In my country, my culture, to say no is to shame both families. I’d be taken back to Riyadh and locked away or killed.” It isn’t love, Aaliyah acknowledges of her marital fate. It’s a contract on which her name has already been written. Real love, to fall backwards into it and be lost in that elation, is something neither of them have ever felt, and Aaliyah knows she might as well already be locked away in a Saudi Arabian compound for life. And so, seconds after her mother calls with news of the ceremony’s location in Majorca, Aaliyah and Cruz as Zara kiss. Their whirlwind friendship — built on lies wrapped in truths, which Aaliyah doesn’t know  — has bloomed into a forbidden romance. 

After drawing away from one another awkwardly, what just happened etc. etc., Aaliyah and Zara/Cruz prepare to disembark Long Island for a shopping trip in New York City. Shopping for the wedding. While they’re each thinking about more kissing. For Cruz, the line between running point on a covert op and getting hooked on a feeling just got blown up by a Tomahawk missile.

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