Taylor Sheridan's 'Lioness' Season 2 finale features television's all-time best shootout
Exhilarating and emotional, the 20-minute sequence seems to last an hour.
Before we get into the most intense shootout that television has ever put together, let’s set the record straight about one thing: It’s perfectly fine for Taylor Sheridan to be in ANY of his projects. Stop bitching and whining about it. One simple reason: He’s a good actor and fits into any of his script-built worlds. So, cut it out and read up.
In the ultra-thrilling Season 2 finale of his underrated (maybe under-appreciated is a better word) Paramount Plus series, Lioness, we see a sniper hidden in ruffled grass and trees emerge from a low ground setting to speak through comms to our main character and it’s Sheridan covered in camouflage. Did anyone watching do a double take, and immediately place their hand in the air for a different actor? Nope!
He’s one element in the hyper-intense action drama series, more of a recurring character than a mainstay. One of those shit-hit-the-fan mercs that you love having on your side during a gunfight. When our main character, played by the wonderful Zoe Saldana, leads her CIA special unit into Iran to send a message to neighborhood nations that our border isn’t the only one with an open sign attached, they catch hell escaping and find themselves in a fight for their lives.
Let me point another thing out that Sheridan’s under-loved series does well, and that’s not overstaying the welcome. Eight episodes is enough, TV power players. 10-12 can be too much. Anything more than that is definitely too much. Did you ever remember the first episode of a season from Grey’s Anatomy by the end of their epic marathons? Heck no. You felt like an exhausted intern.
Lioness will kick the shit out of your senses and eliminate the overgrown fingernails from your body, but it never makes you tired of it. With her team pinned down and awaiting air support, Saldana’s Joe teams with Sheridan’s merc to hold off an inbound Iranian army. With her own helicopter crashed and pilot injured, it’s all hands and guns on deck. What follows is nothing short of visceral.
A kind-of watching family member or friend could waltz into the room and sit down for the shootout and suddenly forget time was moving forward. If you ever watched Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of The Sun with Bruce Willis, specifically a climatic escape sequence, you’ll get the tone and vibe of Sheridan’s violent bluntness to his action scenes.
Director Stephen Kay (a staple in great TV episodic history) syncs with Sheridan’s style for television’s most relentless and extended battle. The bullet fire is realistic sounding, as is the movement and tactics of the soldiers. For all the people who whine about a lesbian love interest on the show, they forget that Lioness is populated with strong female personalities portrayed by Saldana, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Ehle, Jill Wagner, Genesis Rodriguez, and Laysla de Oliveira. All of them play an integral part in the missions. It’s not just the men firing those bullets.
Sheridan’s entertainment sessions are well represented on both sides of the sex. It’s always been that way. If you are mad he doesn’t write women like Greta Gerwig, sleep well with the fact that the women in his shows act and operate just like one from Kathryn Bigelow’s films. The Oscar-winning director would be impressed with the tactical command of Sheridan’s action scenes and the intelligence behind his scripts.
You know it’s a good scene when exasperation hits after its completion. By the time those choppers and bomb-dropping machines lay down cover and eliminate the rest of the threat coming after Joe’s team, the audience breathes a heavy sigh of relief. It’s as if we were there avoiding fire and having the sounds of world-enders explode in our ears. That’s when you know it’s being done right.
Say what you what about Sheridan’s ego and writing style, but it’s sharp and irresistible. If the Lioness Season 2 finale didn’t prove that with a thump, I don’t know what could. Now, since I just finished that particular season and scene, I need a cigarette and piece of chocolate to properly decompress.
If you’re not watching this show, show some self-respect and get started tonight. Do it for Saldana alone, because she could melt all of this snow in my neighborhood with her ferocity first and then her looks. But also come for another great Michael Kelly performance (even if he always plays the same kind of guy) and a mint Morgan Freeman speech to add to his arsenal of legendary monologues.
He talks about 9/11 in a scene with Kelly that reminds you how good of a President George W. Bush turned out to be in the wake of a disaster. The undoing of that trust built up there eroded over the next two decades, though. It’s those world-blending scripts that keep you informed and entertained that television thrives on, so hopefully another round of Lioness is coming.
Lioness is fantastic television. IMO the jewel of the TV Sheridan-verse (Landman is trying hard for that title), though admittedly I haven’t watched Mayor of Kingstown yet. I always say for the two months it’s on, Lioness is the best show on tv during those weeks. And yes that shootout was awesome, but for me it’s second best by a nose to the shootout in Mexico that began the season…that one was just so tense and badass. Every time you thought they were all good, it ramped up to another level, almost like a videogame. Great stuff.