Photo: Greg Lewis/Paramount+
Say what you will of Taylor Sheridan, dude can write a kick-ass pilot. Our Special Ops: Lioness premiere was a banger, for sure, but nothing will prepare you for … “The Beating.” If you see this episode’s title and think it’s referencing anything less than a literal beating, you are sorely mistaken.
By the end of the pilot, there’s little doubt as to Cruz’s ability to absorb any beating into the all-consuming vortex of righteous animal will, nor her aptitude for Lioness spycraft. But Joe’s not satisfied. She’s out to find the real breaking point and will put Cruz through her own little Guantanamo session to do it.
They should have called it “The Beating(s),” though because this is a whole goddamned episode of literal beatings. Like straight punching all over the place. So let’s break the episode down, beating by beating, and see how many teeth we have left by the end.
Beating No. 1 opens on Joe and Kaitlyn at lunch together, the usual talk — “Where’s your mark currently” this and “I want to put the new Lioness through the grinder” that. Kaitlyn asks Joe about the current state of her family life, and as soon as Joe trails off on the subject of her older daughter Kate (Hannah Love Lanier), we cut to a soccer field where Kate’s laying the absolute smackdown on some blonde gal on the other team. Starts with a solid hair pull and ends with a full-on cocked-back Indiana Jones punch to the face.
The aftermath of this one is the least compelling and most rushed story thread (but also the most minor, so that’s something). Both Neil and Joe get a chance to have a little parenting moment with Kate, tell her what’s what, which is when I clocked Kate as this, like, new stock teen character in movies and TV: ornery, moody girl raising her head from whatever secretly smart thing she’s doing on her phone long enough to tell a parent or parental figure something they’re doing is cultural appropriation or something (see also in both the movies I watched this weekend: Barbie and Magic Mike’s Last Dance).
Then (and, of fucking course) Neil’s reaction to his daughter calling him “a white man” is fucking insane. He’s like, “What did you call me?!!” and slams on the breaks like, “I’m Daddy first, white man second, and you’re just like your mom, always wanting to punch the hate out of people.” Her smug half-smile seems to answer, yeah, maybe I am. (Kate fucking rules.)
Our sophomore beating switches the dial on whatever interdimensional cable box I must’ve been watching, and the show goes full daytime network: Dr. Neil, Medicine Daddy. Dave Annabel is absolutely rocking this sexy gray beard and a white lab coat look, so I can’t say I’d blame anyone for giving him room to smolder, you know? Anyway, Neil has to tell a little girl’s parents that she has a terminal, melon-sized, in her head, they can only get out by removing her eye and like a quarter of her skull, but she’d still die. JFC, as if the extended torture sequence we’re all about to sit through wasn’t harrowing enough.
Maybe it’s too soon to say this, but I don’t know what to think about all Joe’s family-life stuff except … what’re we doing here? I guess the idea is we’re meeting Joe and Neil at a breaking point, but Joe’s just decided to turn things around a bit, put more effort in at home and be there emotionally for her husband, bring him the next glass of wine as he broods by the pool and all that. It just feels like too quick a sea change from the discordant (and compelling) tone the family had in the pilot. A perfunctory upswing to balance the carnage, perhaps?
We’ll see. It is pretty interesting, though, when Kate interrupts her mom and dad’s impromptu foolin’ around in the kitchen to fake-cry through a sorry to her dad and flash her mom a Lioness’s death glare on the way out. “How’s that for love?” She whispers, like what she’s really saying is, You’re not the only one in the elite mind-games circle in this house.
Joe and Neil are boning when they both get calls from work. But don’t worry; they make sure ‘n pop off before they answer the phone. Pretty wild to be fuckin’ when you know you’re probably going to get a call from work letting you know your new colleague is kidnapped and ready for you to torture her. (*Zoe Saldana pauses, looks directly into the camera: “Welcome to the CIA.”)
This beating has two rounds: before and after Cruz knows it’s a training test. Yeah, these fuckers just show up in an unmarked van and pluck her off the street during a midnight jog, then wake her up with a mild firehosing cleanse and luxurious sound bath, followed by an exceptionally graphic waterboarding and a nice hard punch to the face the second she tries to fight back.
Now comes the intermission, where Joe comes in for some emotional punches. “Survive, evade, resist, escape.” Can Cruz escape before her interlocutors discover her? “Most can’t,” says Joe. What’s more likely is Cruz will be taken and have to survive until she’s reached. “I need to know how much time I have to do that before you break.”
Joe means it. She’s calling Cruz’s parents and telling them a lie about their daughter dying in a training exercise. Her goal here isn’t to see how much Cruz can take but to know exactly when she can’t take anymore and how much time that’ll give her to mount an assassin’s rescue. “She’s on a suicide mission,” Joe will say later. “I’m just giving her a shot.”
Once a few more emotional blows are dealt (“bet you were a good dancer, now you’re just trying to prove you can’t be broken by the guy who was a little too rough with you in the champagne room” is the jist of it), it’s time for Round Two. Joe sends in this big old bald mustachioed bastard and his gang of ball-busters to wrap this up. “When her focus is on the questions, take her to the ground,” Joe instructs. “Restrain her movement. That’ll be the thing that breaks her.”
She’s basically right, but the commanding officer on sight calls it off before Joe’s satisfied with the results. Then Cruz lays a beat down on almost everyone in the room, which is how you want this mad scene to end and how it had to end to really work. Sheridan is clearly invested in physical torture as an emblem of one’s position to power. How you take a beating is always the key to your subsequent fortunes. It’s an exploitative but profoundly American perspective that reveals a certain apocalyptic undertone to our existence, and one you can spot in most strains of post- or revisionist westerns and spy stories from the late ‘60s onward.
Thank God we end the episode on a fun one. (A “fun beating” … look what you’ve brought us to, Sheridan!)
Per Kaitlyn’s orders, Joe takes Cruz to her new home at Fort Bragg to bunk with the rest of the team (better to have her there than alone in the city where her globetrotting mark might spot her) and leaves her with a word on their target.
“There’s all sorts of terrorists” (yes, ma’am, we’re aware the U.S. calls a lot of people terrorists), but Amrohi’s “brand of terrorism is fueled by something much simpler: GREED.” The idea is this guy seeks unrest to keep the people of his and other regions focused on the greed of the “great devil” America instead of the wealth that he’s hoarding from them. Your typical Imperial yada yada justification. But I guess the point is this guy’s extra bad because he isn’t ideological, so he’s extra dangerous to Cruz, should she face his capture.
Cruz walks through the door of the team house right when the fellas are having a little close-quarters combat practice with airsoft guns. Bobby ain’t having it and drops a smoke bomb or something in the room just to break ‘em up. Jill Wagner’s bringing the heat this episode, setting herself up nicely as the goddamn Stallone of the crew. Anyway, the crew finds out about Beating No.3, a.k.a The Beating, and heads down to the bar where Bobby throws a beer bottle at that bald guy’s face, absolute 0 to 50 in no time. No fair? “We’re CIA now, so we don’t fight fair, buddy.” Two-Cups follows Bobby’s bottle to the face with a casual point-blank tasing before the place erupts into a good old-fashioned bar brawl.
I’m all over this bit of team development, man. Definitely the most appropriate use of literal punches as story development in an episode where literally every story thread is propelled by a beating.
• The little lunch scene between Joe and Kaitlyn that opens up the episode is top-notch. Makes the case for Kidman and Saldana as compelling expository scene partners, conversing with the same rolling, familial intensity of Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro in the Sicario movies. Kidman, in particular, is really working it here, speaking with this uncannily morbid tone that tends to crop up in spy stories like this. There’s like a death-cult energy crackling below the surface, like everyone knows everything they’re doing only amounts to some semblance of controlled chaos.
• When Kate’s like, “Why do you have a gun?” LOL, your mom’s in the fucking CIA. They got guns.
• Just want to point out that episodes under 45 minutes are God’s gift. Even when there’s filler, these episodes are crisp as hell, man. Not saying every show should be the same, but there are plenty of hour-long shows out there that should be 50 minutes, and 45-minute shows that should be 30. Trim the fat!