Season one of Special Ops: Lioness has finally come to an end, and with it, potentially the run of Cruz's stint in the division. We're not really sure what's going to happen if there's a season two, but the way this week's episode went, it sure looked like both Cruz and Joe weren't long for the team. And speaking of "not long for...," we should also probably talk about what happened at Aaliyah's (attempted) wedding, since it was packed full of climactic action.
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Here's what you need to know about what went down in the Special Ops: Lioness season one finale, as well as a few predictions for what could come if there's a season two.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Special Ops: Lioness season 1, episode 8
Airports are shadier than we think
When Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) and the team land in Barcelona, they wish her well, give her a beacon, and send her off with Kyle (Thad Luckinbill). In the car, a new member of the team stamps their passports and after they're dropped off under the airport, they glide into the terminal separately through an unmarked door. From there, they're on the plane to Mallorca. Everything goes incredibly smoothly, and it's got to make you wonder: Is this kind of secret CIA-type stuff happening all the time? Is the snoring guy next to you on a plane really a covert operative?
Aaliyah's fiance isn't a fan of Cruz
Luke Varley/Paramount+
When Cruz is ushered into the compound, she has to go through a whole bunch of security protocols. She's then let into a room where Ehsan (Ray Corasani), Aaliyah's (Stephanie Nur) fiancé sits. She greets him warmly, but he's all business, asking her why she left the New York hotel room crying not once but twice and why Aaliyah was seen crying as well. She tells him that it was because Aaliyah's scared to get married, and she's scared as well, but for different reasons. She says, "She's scared because her life's about to change, and I'm scared because my life won't change.'
He doesn't buy her half-lie at all, marveling to his guard about how women can "even tell the same lies." He gives her a sudden slap and then warns, "Tomorrow Aaliyah is my wife, and tomorrow there is no more you. If you tell her we spoke, I'll throw you in the sea." She claps back at him, telling him that she'd like to see him try, and when the guard asks if he should throw Aaliyah out, Ehsan tells him in Arabic that Cruz has to stay, lest his wife "spend our wedding night with her legs closed." Gross. On the way out of the door, Cruz claps back at Ehsan again, telling him that she thinks that's pretty likely anyway, and he gets enraged, asking her who taught her to speak to men that way.
While you can't blame Cruz for not backing down, it does feel like that exchange is what inevitably blows her cover since it's Ehsan who runs facial recognition on her—which, why didn't the government clear her off the net?—and finds out both that she ran high school track and that she's a Marine. More on how that all plays out later, though.
The crew sets sail
Meanwhile, Joe (Zoe Saldana), Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) and the crew have all boarded a boat headed for Mallorca. They're a pretty conspicuous bunch, despite their fishing pole and guitar cases, and when they rendezvous with the military men on board, they find out all sorts of stuff about where their gear has been hidden and how the boat handles in a chase. They set off on a four-hour cruise to Mallorca, where they'll keep an eye on the site for the wedding.
Morgan Freeman is pissed
Luke Varley/Paramount+
Back in the states, Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) dips into the situation room where he's confronted by Morgan Freeman's Secretary of State Mullins, as well as a whole bunch of other official-looking government and military types. They scold him for not bringing along Cruz and Kaitlyn and for even letting the mission go on in the first place since POTUS is in Paris and "there's not a city in Europe with more terrorist cells in place." Is that true?
Regardless, Byron tells them that he thinks the mission should move forward because "if our asset is able to neutralize the target herself, I don't see how this is linked back to us in any way." The suits tell him that Amrohi got rich by moving eight million barrels of oil to China and Russia every day and reiterates what we heard in Episode 7 about how "we keep the devil we know because the world doesn't have the leaders to navigate with the devil we don't know." He recommends the mission be called off, and Byron tells him (and confirms) again and again that it's in motion whether they like it or not since there's just no way to get word to Cruz in the compound. Sorry, sketchy government business types!
Joe's head isn't in the game
On the boat, Joe gets a call from her daughter Kate (Hannah Love Lanier), who's had a screaming nightmare in which she found herself back in the immediate aftermath of the car wreck. She tells her mom that she's distraught because she missed the funeral, so she never had a chance to say goodbye. Kate tells her, "You say goodbye in your heart. It doesn't matter where you are. You can close your eyes and say goodbye." For a second here, I was a little worried this was foreshadowing about what was going to happen to Joe later in the episode, but she made it out of the whole thing alive, so phew.
When Joe comes out of the bedroom, she's crying, and the team notices. Later, when they all gear up, she's also on her phone and distracted. Kaitlyn confiscates her phone, telling her, "You will never get back to them if you keep thinking about them."
Wedding night in the villa
Luke Varley/Paramount+
Back on dry land, Cruz and Aaliyah do a little mixing and mingling on the girls side of the wedding villa, meeting the bride's very stoic mother and making eyes at each other over conversations about how Aaliyah doesn't like kids. She's resigned to the fact that she'll have to have them either way, saying, "I hope that I love my children. I hope God gives me that."
She also reveals the fact that her father has actually come to the wedding, a fact that seems to set Cruz back. The government also catches his presence via satellite imagery, immediately setting the country's readiness to Defcon 3.
Cruz meets Amrohi
When Aaliyah sneaks into Cruz's room later that night, the bride-to-be tries to go for one last night of passion, but Cruz sketchily demurs, telling Aaliyah that she's a liar and a bad person and basically outing herself as someone who maybe isn't who she says she really is. Aaliyah seems to either not pick that up or not care, though, as she's still fully into her.
In an effort to dodge the advances, Cruz heads off to find water for them in the kitchen. There, she sticks her head in the freezer in an effort to stay alert and in the game. That's where Amrohi finds her, though he doesn't appear to have heard her "focus on the mission" mantra. He genuinely seems to be a very nice person and seems to know Cruz as a college student friend of his daughter's. As they share some of the best gelato in the world, though, Ehsan runs in screaming, "Marine!"
Cruz's instincts quickly kick into action, and she takes him out quickly and with little fuss. Amrohi clocks her with a pan, but Cruz grabs a knife, stabbing him in the abdomen over and over and over. When he falls, she pulls his head, cuts his throat, and bolts. She activates her beacon, and the boat team hops into action, heading for the shore.
Cruz runs for her life
It doesn't take long for Aaliyah to come looking for Cruz, only to find her father and Ehsan lying in a lot of blood. She screams, which alerts the security (why didn't they follow Amrohi to the kitchen in the first place, I wonder?), and they're quickly on Cruz's tail, firing at her as she dashes toward the water. She gets injured running somehow, and while it slows her down a smidge, she's still bound for the shore.
Unfortunately, though, Cruz gets pinned down behind a stone statue by the water, and things don't look good for her. Of course, that's right when Joe and the team show up, using startling efficiency to extract Cruz and take out every single shooter from Amrohi's team in an effort to "clean the scene."
Eventually, they all end up back on the boat, where Cruz clocks Joe and then tells Kaityn she hit the target. Kaitlyn relays the message to the states, telling them, "The ace of spades is dead. We have joy." That goes over like a lead balloon, with one of the suits telling Byron, "Congratulations, deputy director. You have set Mideast relations back 40 years." Byron is indignant, saying that if they didn't want Amrohi dead, they should have taken him off the most wanted list. He just did his job, and if they have a problem with that, then they need to reexamine how they do business.
When Cruz is done with Kaitlyn, Joe pulls her on deck, where Cruz tries to land another punch. Joe tells Cruz that if she ever does that again, they'll fight until dawn, but Cruz says they won't because she's done. "Look at what you did to me," she tells Joe. "Look at what you made of me!" She tells Joe that Amrohi was "an old man," and she killed him in his underwear. Joe tells Cruz that she shouldn't think of it that way because killing him saved lives, period.
Cruz isn't hearing it, though. She doesn't sleep anymore because of the Lioness mission, and she's not happy with who she's become. "My heart isn't a weapon, and my body isn't a tool," she tells Joe. When Joe tries to come back at her with something about how she did well, either way, Cruz tells her, "Someday [Aaliyah's] going to have kids and those kids are going to hear about how their grandfather died, and all we did was make the next generation of terrorists." She's right, of course, and Joe seems taken aback by the assertion. When next we see her, she's back at home in Virginia, sobbing in her husband Neil's (Dave Annable) arms.
It was all just about money, really
Luke Varley/Paramount+
Meanwhile, over at Kaitlyn's house, she comes in to see her husband Errol, dealing with whatever he does on all those monitors. He tells her that oil's down eight dollars a barrel in pre-trading, and they have a little back and forth about what that means. She muses a little about the advantages that the people running the market have, and he tells her that if she really wants to know, she should start wondering who rings the bell. It's very ominous, indeed, and if all this carnage was just so oil could get a little cheaper until the next big players shuffle into place, was it really all ever worth it in the first place? That's pretty much where the show ends, so we don't get satisfactory answers, unfortunately.
Questions and predictions
The Lioness season finale ended with a bang, but it also ended with a lot of closed doors and sad Marines. While we got to see Aaliyah sitting, seemingly thinking about who Cruz really was, we don't really get to see a conclusion to her story—or to anyone else's, for that matter. While it still hasn't been confirmed whether there will be a second season of Lioness, Taylor Sheridan seems to have left himself in a good position for the show's likely return. Here are our predictions for how that could go.
- Prediction: Lioness returns, but with an almost entirely new cast: Cruz is out—or at least that is what she tells Joe at the end of the episode. If that's true and if Joe decides to take herself out of the field and start riding a desk, could we maybe be on course to see Joe in Kaitlyn's spot or even Kaitlyn in Kaitlyn's spot and Joe off doing who knows what? It could depend on the whims and shooting schedules of Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldana, but there's a world in which Lioness returns both with all the players we already know and love and, on the flip side, as basically an entirely new show with all new ops, a new target, and some new young wide-eyed Marine brimming with confidence that they'll quickly ruin.
- Prediction: Cruz and Aaliyah return: While there's a world where the show is shaken up entirely for a second season, you could also make the case that something ends up happening with Aaliyah—she escapes to the U.S. and turns into an informant, let's say—and Cruz gets convinced to come back into the fold. She loves her, after all, even if they can't be together.
- Prediction: Cruz killed the wrong guy: Now, look. I don't know if this is true. Bassem Youssef is listed as "Amrohi" on IMDB, and Aaliyah seemed pretty shaken up, so I'm going to assume that Cruz did actually kill Aaliyah's dad, especially since she'd probably seen his most wanted photo. On the other hand, the guy in the kitchen never actually said, "my daughter, Aaliyah." Instead, he said stuff like, "Oh, you're Aaliyah's friend," and when Cruz said, "Your daughter," he either knew she meant Aaliyah or said something like, "Oh, you mean Aaliyah." What if the man Cruz killed was an uncle or something and not Amrohi? Could season two find Cruz, Joe, and everyone else on the run and/or fighting back against the consequences of their actions? We'll just have to wait and see, I suppose!
Season 1 of Special Ops: Lioness is streaming on Paramount+.
