Special Ops: Lioness is a 2023 Spy Fiction show streamed online through Paramount+. Created by Taylor Sheridan, it stars Zoe Saldaña, Laysla De Oliveira, Dave Annable, Morgan Freeman and Nicole Kidman. The first episode premiered on July 23, 2023.
The show centers on the perspective of a CIA case officer named Joe, who's married to a pediatric oncology surgeon named Neil. She's placed in charge of a CIA program known as Lioness, which recruits experienced female soldiers who can go undercover and investigate female persons of interests linked to high-profile figures. Joe's assisted by a CIA Special Activities Center (SAC) unit, assisting as a Quick Reaction Force (QRF).
After an op in Kobane, Syria, goes wrong with one of the Lioness operators captured by Islamic State fighters, Joe's tasked to get another replacement. The top candidate chosen was Cruz Manuelos, a Force Recon Marine who saw action overseas, including Afghanistan. The unit is tasked to go after Middle Eastern Terrorists.
This show provides examples of:
- Action Girl: The female soldiers recruited through the Lioness Program. Cruz was the latest recruit to join.
- Affably Evil: Asmar Ali Amrohi is a funder of terrorist groups whose acts have murdered thousands. In his only appearance he is polite and friendly with Cruz. Right before she killed him.
- Arranged Marriage: Aaliyah is having her marriage arranged, which she doesn't want, though her father doesn't care. Cruz also pretends that she's getting a marriage arranged too while infiltrating Aaliyah's social circle.
- Badass in Distress: Cruz is a trained Marine, but nonetheless gets drugged by a man in a bar whom she runs into, who nearly raped her as a result.
- Bar Brawl: After they learn about Cruz's being tortured under Joe's orders, her teammates go into a bar where the guys who did it are, beating them up for revenge on her behalf.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Cruz gets several wounds during her Training from Hell which stay with her the rest of the season, but they really do nothing to detract from her beauty.
- Bittersweet Ending: Season 1 ends with Cruz successfully killing her target, the target's son-in-law-to-be and getting away alive. Joe makes it home and breaks down in her husband's arms. But, Cruz's heart is broken and quits. Aaliyah is left to pick up the pieces and may (or may not) seek revenge. The US Government's leadership laments how it likely set relations in the Middle East back 40 years and the drop in oil prices makes it more difficult to phase out fossil fuels.
- Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Joe immediately orders the boy whom her daughter Kate's making out with out when she finds them together.
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Joe's oldest daughter Kate is resentful, rebellious and often disparages her.
- Butch Lesbian: Bobby is a lesbian with short hair and a Tomboyish Name to match who mostly wears very masculine clothing. She's also One of the Boys with her team.
- Contrived Coincidence: Cruz runs into Amrohi just as Ehsan learns her true identity and alerts him, allowing her to kill both of them using a nearby kitchen knife.
- Convenient Miscarriage: Kate has one during surgery, which relieves her from deciding about whether to have an abortion.
- Create Your Own Villain: Cruz thinks that killing Aaliyah's father has likely led to the creation of a new generation of terrorists. Her reasoning being that Aaliyah will marry someone, have children and her children will want to avenge their grandfather when she tells them how he died.
- Dark Action Girl: Some of the bad guys confronted by the QRF team involve female bodyguards working under the Amrohi family.
- Death of a Child: Neil, Joe's husband, is a child oncologist who has to face the fact that about half his patients will die before turning 18. His job is introduced with him having to tell the parents of a six year old girl with a brain tumor their best option is just spending time with her before she dies, as surgery is only going to extend her life temporarily at best, while she'll be left in constant pain.
- Defiant Captive: Cruz, a trained Marine, fights back hard when she's kidnapped and tortured by unseen captors. It turns out this was a test by Joe.
- The Determinator: Cruz is a very strong-willed woman who doesn't let anything stop her from achieving her aims.
- Dirty Business: This is lampshaded throughout the first season. Cruz is to befriend Aaliyah and gain her confidence so she can get close to Aaliyah's father and assassinate him. If Cruz gets close to her target but cannot kill him, her bosses will probably send a missile down on her location just to kill him.
- Domestic Abuse: Cruz ran from an abusive boyfriend to the US Marines, joining them out of gratitude (as a Marine recruiter stopped her boyfriend attacking her) and for a permanent escape.
- Downer Beginning: The show opens with an operative's cover being blown within a terrorist compound, forcing Joe to choose between attempting a rescue or ordering a drone strike against the compound, killing the operative. She chooses the latter, demonstrating the moral grayness of working for the CIA.
- Elites Are More Glamorous:
- The SAC is tasked to assist Joe in field operations.
- The Lioness program itself, as it looks for female recruits who are experienced and have specialist skills.
- Flipping the Bird: Secretary of State Mullins flips off Byron, who chewed him out, in the season finale.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Kate miscarries during surgery rather than having to decide whether she'll have an abortion or not. Her mother Joe also chose not to have an abortion after getting unexpectedly pregnant with her.
- Groin Attack: A serial rapist is on the end of one after drugging and trying to rape Cruz. Joe and the team stop him before he rapes her and Joe stomps on his groin multiple times, then takes his drivers license and threatens to kill him if he says anything. They then take multiple DNA samples—tearing his hair out.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: Joe (who's black) is married to Neil (a white man) and they have two girls. The older, Kate, beats up a white girl from the opposing team while having a soccer match for insulting her with a slur based on her heritage, and says her dad can't truly understand after he tells her off about this.
- Hates Their Parent: Joe's daughter Kate shows dislike of her and says she hates when Joe comes home (probably due to resentment over her so frequently being gone).
- Just in Time:
- The team rescues Cruz right before a man is about to rape her.
- Later they again arrive right before the Amrohi security guards were about to shoot her dead.
- Lesbian Jock: Cruz was a star athlete in high school, and it turns out she's bisexual.
- Lingerie Scene: Cruz and Aaliyah both are shown in their undergarments at length while trying on dresses together when the two go out shopping.
- Look Both Ways: Kate gets injured in a car accident because a friend of hers, who was driving, had been distracted by looking at something on another girl's phone and ran a stop sign, with their car being hit from the side by an oncoming truck.
- Loving a Shadow: Cruz obliquely tries to tell Aaliyah, who's fallen in love with her, that she doesn't really know her at all, as Cruz's an undercover operative sent to kill Aaliyah's father.
- Meaningful Name: The episode title "Sacrificial Soldiers" when Joe was forced to call for an airstrike in Kobane so that the undercover Lioness operator was not tortured and killed for ISIL propaganda.
- Mercy Kill: Arguably. In the opening episode, Joe ends up ordering an airstrike that takes out the target but also kills her embedded operative. The mercy part is that her cover is blown, is in a location that would take too long to mount a rescue, and is about to get strip-searched and tortured to death by her captors.
- Middle Eastern Terrorists:
- Joe and the SAC unit is tasked to take out an ISIL unit in Kobane, Syria in "Sacrificial Soldiers". However, their undercover soldier was caught by ISIL fighters and was about to be killed when Joe called for an airstrike.
- Later on, Joe recruits Cruz to investigate Aaliyah Amrohi, daughter of businessman Asmar Ali Amrohi, who's said to have ties to terrorists in Iraq. The op starts in Kuwait since Aaliyah can only go there to spend her money, though it later turns out that her family has access to a mansion in the US.
- By the end of the show, Aaliyah acknowledges that her father is called a terrorist, but she insists that her father sells oil to any country or group that wants it, even if they're condemned for being a bad guy.
- Missing Mom: Joe is mostly away for work while her husband's with their daughters and the older one, Kate, clearly dislikes her (probably because of this).
- Ms. Fanservice: Cruz and Aaliyah, especially the latter, are beautiful young women. The two of them are shown in swimsuits, lingerie and (non-explicitly) naked at several points, including having sex.
- Mugging the Monster: Three young thieves try to rob the house where Joe's team are. After easily being captured, they get the fright of their lives, sent off with a $10,000 bribe and death threats to never speak about their experience.
- Open-Minded Parent: Neil turns out to be okay with Kate being felt up by a boy, so long as nothing else happens. Her mom Joe isn't happy to hear about this however. It turns out Kate had sex though, and got pregnant from him or some other boy, so it's somewhat deconstructed as being overly indulgent.
- Operation: [Blank]: The name of the op to capture/kill Asmar Amrohi is Operation Yellow Jacket.
- Parental Sexuality Squick: Kate expresses disgust when her mother Joe refers to the place where she was conceived fondly.
- Parents Walk In at the Worst Time: Joe comes home and finds Kate, her oldest daughter, on the couch making out with a boy whom she then orders to leave. Kate is mortified and tells her off about it.
- Polyamory: Joe and her husband Neil have an open marriage, as they both mention having sex with other people while they're apart when talking together, just for physical comfort.
- Pool Scene: Cruz first meets Aaliyah's friends while they're lounging in a pool wearing swimsuits. They're all attractive young people.
- Queer Establishing Moment: Aaliyah spontaneously kisses Cruz in a moment of joy. Before long it becomes clear this wasn't just a fluke, as the two kiss again before having sex.
- Scars Are Forever: Cruz still has several scars on her body from being beaten by her ex-boyfriend. She claims they're from a car accident once, but the doctor examining her soon sees through this.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: After Cruz kills the target and escapes, she punches Joe in the face (twice), argues that what they did not only didn't change anything but have made things worse, and quits.
- She Cleans Up Nicely: Cruz wears unflattering rough clothes then later military fatigues early on, but easily spruces herself up into flattering outfits when getting close with Aaliyah, who's quite rich.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Kate wakes up screaming with nightmares of her accident afterward. It's also made clear her mother Joe and Joe's asset Cruz are deeply affected by their experiences in covert ops.
- Shoulders-Up Nudity: Cruz and Aaliyah were shot this way a couple times while they're naked.
- Shower Scene: Cruz and Aaliyah have an intimate conversation in the shower.
- Shown Their Work:
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Word of God says that the Lioness program was inspired by actual US military protocol on using female soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan when they interact with female civilians to avoid bad situations when male soldiers are involved such as interrogating and searching female civilians (and terrorists). Joe actually mentioned in "The Beating" that the Lioness selects female soldiers in the US military because Washington DC can't afford a major scandal from the Muslim world if a male soldier is caught doing something to a female civilian that is inappropriate even if he's doing his job such as searching them for weapons/illegal items. This was the reason why Team Lioness was created in the US military. - "The Lie Is the Truth" shows that the CIA can't operate its SOF units in American soil due to legal concerns. The QRF Joe works with is benched just for being involved in San Antonio, even if they masqueraded as a BATF SRT team.
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- Slashed Throat: Cruz finishes off Amrohi by cutting his throat after stabbing him repeatedly.
- Slipping a Mickey: Cruz's drink gets drugged by a man she meets at a bar then she's dragged away by him after it takes effect before the team saves her from his impending rape.
- Sorry, I'm Gay: Bobby replies that she's a lesbian when Kamal first starts to hit on her.
- Spotting the Thread: How the last Lioness' cover gets blown when her mark spots a tattoo of a cross under her armpit while bathing. During the debrief, Joe says that the undercover claimed that she had no tattoos. The CIA Deputy Director tells her to "check every inch" of the next recruit to ensure that there are no tattoos, not merely take her word for it.
- Starcrossed Lovers: Cruz knows very well that her relationship with Aaliyah will go nowhere, despite its passion, as she's tasked to kill Aaliyah's father. Further, in any case Aaliyah's getting married very soon and would be cut off from her after that.
- Statuesque Stunner: Cruz is beautiful and very tall (her actress is 5'8).
- Surprise Pregnancy: Kate didn't know she was pregnant until it was discovered while she had blood work done for something else in the hospital. Her mother Joe then tells her that Kate's conception was itself unplanned as well.
- Teen Pregnancy: Joe's oldest daughter Kate is pregnant, it's revealed, after she's in a car accident and gets her blood work done. She's only fourteen.
- Their First Time: Cruz and Aaliyah have sex after they establish a mutual attraction for each other.
- Tomboyish Name: Joe is a tough female CIA agent who's skilled in combat. She works with Bobby, a female Marine. Joe's youngest daughter is also called Charlie.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- In "Bruises Like a Fist", three of the QRF team extract an informant who is the target of a drug cartel. After an extraction, using an EMP device that takes out two vehicles filled with bad guys and a semi that crashed into them, the remaining members in a third truck thinks it's a good idea to chase them down. A burst of fully-automatic gunfire from two rifles into their windshield sends them into a rollover crash.
- In the season 1 finale, Ehsan finds out Cruz's true identity. Instead of alerting security and having them quietly go and get the principal away from her, he just goes running into the kitchen shouting. Cruz beats and stabs him to death for his trouble, takes out the target, and escapes before security can respond.
- Toplessness from the Back: Cruz and Aaliyah are shown naked while shot from the back more than once, including when they have sex.
- Training from Hell: Joe subjects Cruz to a simulated SERE training in order to learn what can break her in case her cover is blown in an actual operation with beatings, loud music blaring 24/7 and being hosed with high streams of water, followed by waterboarding. One of the interrogators, Cody, pins her down from the back, suggesting that Cruz was sexually assaulted in the past from her anguished reaction.
- Wham Episode:
- The QRF team finds out the simulated SERE op on Cruz was sanctioned by Joe in "The Beating" from Cody. He tells them to take it up with her if they don't like it. It doesn't save them from getting a beat down by the QRF team and Cruz, who nearly kills Cody before being pulled off.
- "The Lie is the Truth" has the op to capture or kill Asmar Amrohi as Operation Yellow Jacket. Also, the CIA's control on the op is being yanked out unofficially due to the San Antonio op.
- "Wish the Fight Away" has Aaliyah and Cruz get close. Really, really close. This starts to conflict with Cruz's mission.
- "Gone Is the Illusion of Order" has Ehsan find out Cruz's true identity through a facial recognition database search.
