What To Know
- Sunday’s newest episode of Lioness saw the honeypotting scheme play out, with wild results.
- Here, the actors break down key moments from Episode 5.
How far is too far? That’s definitely a question worth asking after the events of Lioness‘ latest episode. In Sunday’s (August 30) newest edition, titled “The Idiot Army,” the honeypotting mission proves successful — even if it’s a little more involved than anyone expected. Warning: The following post contains spoilers for Lioness Season 3 Episode 5.
The episode picks up where the last left off, as Two Cups (James Jordan) decides to fully commit to his bit and go home with a stripper — a process which requires him to “sign out” the dancer, providing his fingerprints, ID, the works. Though one might expect he wouldn’t follow through on actually sleeping with her, he does. And without hesitation.
Why? Actor James Jordan reasons, “Two Cups is a bit of a wild card … but also, let’s think about it this way. The stakes couldn’t be higher this season. The first season, the fight took us to the sea. The second season took us to the air. The third season, the fight’s come home, literally… The team here is willing to do anything to get [Joe’s] back. If that means blurring some moral lines, Two Cups is willing to do it.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that he fully likes himself the next morning. In a brief but poignant moment, he looks at himself in the mirror, and it seems that there could be a bit of shame silently written across his face. While Jordan wants to leave it to us viewers to decide what his expression means, he admits, “It’s a simple shot of me in the mirror, right? But I did about 20 takes of that because I told the director Robert [McLauchlan], ‘I don’t know what Taylor’s going to want here.’ I said, ‘I have 20 answers to this moment. I’ve got to play every one of them.’ And I think the one that he picked was the right one.”
Emerson Miller / Paramount+
When Two Cups finally wanders downstairs, he’s surprised to find the place filled with men, armed with images of his naked midnight rendezvous and ready to blackmail him. Two Cups’ surprise, Jordan says, is not feigned — even if it might seem so, since he’s so quick to play the fool long enough to summon his team with a hidden button: “No, he didn’t expect it. But what does he do? He’s got to fall into that cover, which is that goofy guy cheating on his wife and kids, and ‘You got me. Oh no!’ Playing Two Cups and getting to see him play these characters himself, to go undercover and play the goof a little bit, and the screw-up, was a lot of fun to do.”
Elsewhere in the operation, Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira) and Josie (Genesis Rodriguez) successfully lure their target, a guy named Cade, into a vulnerable state before bringing Joe (Zoe Saldaña) in to ruin his evening. First, she invites Tucker (LaMonica Garrett) to show them “who we are,” and he quickly obliges with a vicious strike the man won’t soon forget.
LaMonica Garrett reflects on what Tucker’s willingness to be Joe’s first fist means about the character, saying, “He doesn’t say a lot, and when you need Tucker activated, he’s the first one to jump in and get activated. It doesn’t take much to get him going. That scene was fun to shoot. I felt bad for the actor who was opposite [me]. It got a little physical… but Tucker’s been with his guys. He’s been with the QRF for the first couple seasons, and now he’s kind of branching off, and he’s with Cruz, and he’s with Joe, and he’s with Bobby [Jill Wagner] and Josie. So it’s fun, that dynamic. The energy is a different energy than being with Two Cups and Randy [Austin Hebert] and Tex [Jonah Wharton]. It’s different. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different, and it was fun to be a part of that for a couple of episodes.”
Both honeypot schemes quickly bear fruit. Once Cade explains how his meetings with the interested intelligence party are arranged, it’s not long before the team has swarmed the math geek buying state secrets, and Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) reads him his rights — or lack thereof.
Emerson Miller / Paramount+
Meanwhile, Kyle (Thad Luckinbill) and Oleksandra (Elizaveta Neretin) interrogate another man they’ve nabbed — this time, using the force of words and a promised one-way ticket to GITMO.
Though the character has proven to be quick on the trigger in the past, the actor quite enjoyed playing him with mind games instead of might this time. As Thad Luckinbill puts it, “First of all, I’m glad that he mixes it up because it’s fun to play them both. I love the psychological manipulation and the interrogation where you try to get inside their head. I’ve always loved watching that in movies and TV shows, and it’s really fun to play. I don’t know what that says about me as a person. Maybe I should seek therapy; I don’t know, but I really enjoy it…. But the poor kid with the sack over his head… that was a tough day for him.”
After Joe and Cruz take down a professor preaching about some imaginary future in which AI yields a money-free society while harboring secret foreign ties, she laments to Neal (Dave Annable) that the enemy is taking the U.S. down one tiny cut at a time.
The episode ends back in the present-day storyline, amid Joe’s continued abduction, in which her plane lands in an unknown location, and she’s taken outside with her mouth gagged and covered, leaving her fate still very much up in the air.
Lioness, Sundays, Paramount+