As Lioness season 2 episode 6 begins, Joe (Zoe Saldana) looks utterly lost after going through the failed rescue mission against the cartels. Bobby (Jill Wagner) asks what they can say to the officers who responded to the scene? Since they still have agents undercover, Joe tells her to give no comment. While Bobby tries to comfort Joe that what transpired wasn’t her fault, Joe can’t help but wonder if the girl she placed the tracker on would still be alive if they didn’t try to save her.
The fallout from the incident is quickly building. When Byron (Michael Kelly) learns of it he demands Joe immediately get on a plane to debrief. Meanwhile the other agencies that have arrived on the scene don’t seem as willing to sweep this story under the rug like Joe wants. Add in a potential mole inside Joe’s team and all hell breaking loose at the Carillo household, and the entire mission is becoming a s**t show.
That’s not even mentioning the most potentially shocking development of the episode, which you can read about below with our full Lioness season 2 episode 6 recap.
Father/Daughter chat
The morning after their awkward first dinner at the Carillo household, Josephina (Genesis Rodriguez) tells Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) she doesn’t recognize her father, Pablo (Demián Castro), anymore, and that she’s scared of him. She recalls a memory when she was 9 when her father rescued a baby falling from a horse, saying she thought he was immortal. Cruz explains daughters often think of their fathers as they are in their fondest memories, and see themselves as the age they were in that memory. But Josephina isn't 9 years old anymore and her father isn’t who she thought he was. She needs to talk with him about why they’re there.
After a little chit-chat with her father, Josephina starts the tough conversation. “They know,” she tells him, the CIA; they know about his connection with her uncle’s cartel. Pablo quickly becomes furious, slapping his daughter. He yells that the CIA doesn’t care about drugs, so why would they look to destroy their family? He is about to hit her again when Cruz comes in and subdues him, confirming what Josephina is saying: they’re CIA.
All of this was seen on security footage, which brings Pablo’s men rushing toward the house. But Two Cups (James Jordan), Tex (Jonah Wharton) and Randy (Austin Hebert) also saw it and are driving in as reinforcements. They take out the security team and secure the house.
Cruz tells Pablo he has two options: they can arrest him now for his role in helping the cartels, seize his assets and put him in county jail, where he’s unlikely to last the night; or he can work with them, helping to ID a foreign asset and then place him in witness protection. Reluctantly, it seems Pablo goes with option two.
Inside man/woman?
As the team continues to secure the Carillo house, Two Cups comes upon the maid, Atzi (Sofie Calderon). While he searches her he finds she is wearing a wire. She’s apparently an informant for DEA Agent Guiterrez (Kirk Acevedo), something he failed to tell Joe and her team.
Two Cups calls Joe on her personal phone, explaining her work phone isn’t working; she pulls it out and realizes it's been destroyed by a bullet, which surprises her and immediately worries her. Two Cup fills her in on everything, saying the mission is compromised and they have nine hours to come up with a new plan before the next Carillo security team comes in for their shift. Joe instructs him to get to a secure place and fill Kyle (Thad Luckinbill) in on everything, especially about Guiterrez.
Unsurprisingly, Kyle and the rest of the team aren’t happy Guiterrez could be a mole. They get him in the car under the guise they need to get back to base. But once he is in the car they start beating him and accusing him of being a mole, promising them they will find the truth.
Medical emergency
After Joe gets off the phone with Two Cups, she removes her gear and sees she was indeed shot during the rescue mission, and with no exit wound the bullet is still inside her. She calls Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman), telling her she’s been shot in the liver and needs surgery. Kaitlyn has the plane rerouted to land at a military base in 20 minutes, but Joe is quickly getting worse.
Joe calls Neal (Dave Annable), who is with the girls at a soccer game. Through strained breath, she tells him the sun rises and sets with him and that he needs to take care of the girls; Joe seems doubtful she’s going to make it out of this one. As Neal desperately asks what’s wrong, Joe passes out.
Once the plane lands a doctor begins to treat Joe and transports her to a hospital for surgery.
The blame game
Before they go into a meeting with Mullen (Morgan Freeman) and his team in the Situation Room, Kaitlyn tells Byron that Joe is in surgery, but whether or not she’ll pull through is still unknown. She also informs him about Guiterrez not sharing that he had an informant with the Carillos, which they can use to shift some of the blame off them for everything that has transpired.
As they enter the Situation Room, they are quickly shown a news report about the botched mission; apparently other agencies didn’t follow suit with the CIA’s desire for no comment. This sets off a shouting match with everyone pointing fingers at each other for how this mission has gotten out of hand and morphed so much from what they originally intended. Mullen gets everyone to calm down, asking how they move on from this. Is the mission still possible and what are the risks?
Kaitlyn informs them about how their lioness mission was compromised because of not being told about Guiterrez’s informant. They currently have Pablo in custody and Guiterrez detained; they’re permitted to do the latter even though Guiterrez is a federal agent because of code 2831, which is for treason, saying Guiterrez’s withholding of information can be classified as aiding an enemy of the state. However, despite all the risks, Byron adds they’re not in a position to stop; they need to shift the focus of the mission.
Instead of an undercover embedding operation, they change it to a hard target hit — killing Josephina’s uncle, Alvaro Carillo, and hoping that the Chinese operative they're truly after is with them. Once the mission is over, they’ll kill Pablo and Guiterrez to make everything neater.
The dangers of this plan force Mullen to step out so he has deniability. While his associates say they can’t authorize a black ops mission like this, it’s implied that Byron and Kaitlyn have the green light.
Kaitlyn takes over
Kyle and the team are torturing Guiterrez at the base for information, but when Kaitlyn arrives on the scene she takes over the interrogation. She says they have all the information on Guiterrez’s family, and if he doesn’t cooperate they will release their information, putting them at risk from the cartels. This gets Guiterrez to talk, but he maintains he’s not a mole.
He’s been on Carillo for years, including using the maid as an informant because she was his kids’ former nanny; but he didn’t have her wear a wire until the CIA showed up. Even after all of his years of surveillance, he says there’s no hard evidence linking Carillo to the Cartel. His bank accounts are normal and he got his house because the person who built it left it to him in his will.
Kaitlyn wants Kyle to have Guiterrez take a polygraph test to confirm all this is true; if he fails, she tells him to dump Guiterrez in the river. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn takes Bobby and Tucker (LaMonica Garrett) to Dallas to meet up with Cruz and that team.
Speaking of, as they hold Pablo in a secure location he simply looks at Josephina with rage in his eyes. While she can’t quite hold back her tears, Josephina stares just as hard back at her father.
New episodes of Lioness season 2 premiere Sundays in the US and Mondays in the UK on Paramount Plus.
