‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Episode 4 Recap: “The Choice of Failure”
In Special Ops: Lioness, it’s becoming increasingly clear how much borrowed time Joe’s professional life has bought against the personal life bank. While she drives her work family forward with detached, whatever it takes efficiency, which in Episode 4 (“The Choice of Failure”) manifests as Joe, Tucker, Two Cups and Randy languishing below decks in a yacht parked off a beach in the Hamptons, her home family continues to grow and change around the absent space within it. As Joe pushes Cruz to stay relentlessly on mission, challenging her to create bonds of trust on the fly as Aaliyah and her rich kid crew party their way through Long Island, she fields phone calls from her husband Neil where they slice up the silences using the measured tones of their professional lives. And so it is that when the worst thing happens – Kate and her friends are involved in a deadly car crash – Neil and Joe can only discuss the logistics around what’s missing. “I won’t tell her you’re coming in case you can’t pull away.” Active parenting and covert operations are a combustible mix.
Kate’s leg is badly damaged, and she’s facing surgery to decrease the swelling of her brain. But that’s not even the worst of it. Not only did one of her friends in the vehicle not survive, but Kate’s visit to the ER has also revealed something else: her pregnancy. (She’s 14.) Neil is somehow both doctor and dad as he delivers the news. “You’re pregnant. You broke our deal with boys. It’s very likely that the trauma you’ve experienced terminated the pregnancy. But if somehow the fetus survived all of this, you’re going to have a very, very big decision to make. Now at least, you can learn from the consequences while benefiting from the lesson.” It’s not possible to know how this conversation might have gone. Would it have been different if Joe had been there? Instead, Neil calls while she’s monitoring Cruz’s movements – work family stuff – inside a cheezy bar in Montauk packed with spendy finance bros. And we can see Joe’s dual existences ripple across Zoe Saldana’s features like a storm forming on the horizon.
There’s another storm system forming, and it’s over Langley. Kyle might have acted with impunity when he concocted an unsanctioned CIA mission on US soil using Joe’s Lioness QRF assets to extract a cartel HVT from the back of a county sheriff’s van. But the faces of Kyle, Two Cups, and Tucker appearing on border patrol surveillance footage is creating a wave of blowback with the bosses. This is only the second appearance from Michael Kelly in Lioness, but he’s in a pretty delightful Grade-A Asshole boss mode as Deputy CIA Director Byron Westfield. It seems like Kyle was already on a short leash with Westfield and Kaitlyn Meade. But now, if his stunt in Texas doesn’t produce his promised Al Qaeda personnel smuggling route, his overreach could cause trouble for Lioness when Joe least needs it least.
Inside that world, Cruz continues to play Zara as an impressionable college student. And while her conversations with Aaliyah draw them closer – the latter admits that what she wants for herself is never factored into the equation of an arranged marriage – the friend group still doesn’t completely trust Zara, and she’s shadowed at all times by Aaliyah and her fiance Ehsan’s security detail. In Montauk, an attempt by Cruz to flirt and fit in becomes a recovery op for the Lioness team when she’s roofied by a deadbeat at the bar. But with her attacker apprehended and dealt with, it becomes a question of her being compromised. Can Cruz as Zara find a convincing way back into the undercover? “We’ve never had someone this close to a tier 1 target before,” Joe tells Meade. And if Cruz’s intel is solid that Aaliyah’s wedding will indeed be in Dubai, that’s a location where the team can cover her effectively. The group might not trust Zara. But Aaliyah seems to. Cruz will be re-inserted after the roofies scare, back to being by her mark’s side, and dancing on the point of a sword.
“We’re sacrificing our children is what we’re doing. We’re trading them for professions.” Joe and Neil agree that their vocational choices are threatening the sanctity of their lives as parents. And Joe marvels that Kaityln Meade was able to manage raising children while working full-time for the Agency. (We already know Meade detests her ex-husband, so there is tension unresolved in that circle, too.) But as she leaves the op in Montauk and heads for home and the hospital and Kate’s impending surgery, it’s not clear what kind of quick fix her arrival can elicit. Joe’s work family can move and pivot with an elasticity that stretches across the globe – from Montauk to Morocco, they can be primed, in position, and ready to act. But that kind of response inevitably pulls resources from the other side, and Joe’s life with Neil and their daughters. She can’t be both places at once, and simultaneously be effective in each. But from the conversations we’ve heard, that’s the false equivalency she and her husband have developed, and that they’ve been resolved to work with for quite some time. Something’s gotta give. And at least so far, Joe has been more engaged with the profession than the sacrifice.
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
