Photo: Ryan Green/Paramount+

Did you want the best? You have the best! The hottest special ops band in the country: Lioness! That's right, folks: The world is a patch of sunshine on one of Taylor Sheridan's sun-kissed, rippled biceps, and we're just living in it. Hey, cool with me. The future of this little Sheridan side project, which could have ended after the first season, was uncertain. But with what appears to be a large audience on Paramount+ and the desire of Sheridan, the exceptional cast and everyone else involved to make it happen, old Father Duty is once again calling out to Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and the Lioness crew.

The last we saw of our ragtag CIA agents was that they had successfully assassinated an Iranian-backed terrorist leader. Their lioness, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira), completed the mission alive but mentally tattered – unfazed by Joe's assurances that the operation saved lives. “All we did was change oil prices,” Cruz said during her emotional exit from the Lioness program. As the search for her replacement begins in season two, the specter looms over how right she was.

As for the big question: Who is the new lioness? We'll get to know her in the second episode of our two-part premiere night. Our first episode is about triggering the bloody incident, reorienting ourselves in the world and rules of the show, and some Imperial dudes rock, Sicario-Style action for your problem.

The cold is breaking – violently. A US congresswoman is kidnapped by a cartel and her family is murdered in their sleep. Joe is enjoying an impromptu breakfast at the Waffle House with the family when she gets the news on TV. Meanwhile, everyone's favorite CIA fuckboy, Kyle (Thad Luckinbill), swings his cock around the crime scene to get an overview of the area. At headquarters in Washington, the usual suspects at the controls of power are gathering to plan the next steps. They're back, folks. That's them all Back: Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly), Mason (Jennifer Ehle) and Hollar (Bruce McGill) and Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman) – all captivating stars and standout character actors, bringing their signature rhythms and verbal notes to the simmering spy planning chatter throughout Morgan Freeman as Secretary of State Mullins holds the fort with some well-placed, occasionally F-bomb accented mic drop moments.

Joe arrives late to the meeting, just in time to catch the gist of the debriefing and its call to action. Conveniently and somehow undetected, even as she was dragged from her home in the middle of the night, Congresswoman Hernandez (Czarina Mireles) was monitoring her, so they knew she was being held in a house in Ojinaga, just across the border. They want an extraction chaotic enough to attract attention, but sending an official strike team across the southern border violates treaty protocols with Mexico. In a classic manifestation of what I like to call a “Dum Clancy” plot device, they justify the action by speculating that there must be another major world power behind this kidnapping, and right now they are assuming it is China. They're trying to strongly move the global political body so they can invade Taiwan or something. Regardless, there is a risk of the geopolitical status quo unfolding, as is common with the spy genre. Meanwhile, this band of US intelligence ghouls seeks a loud but successful extraction followed by an “enhanced CIA presence in Mexico” – to achieve justice against this cartel and liquidate the potentially larger threat behind it.

And they want a lioness on the ground. Not surprisingly, Joe is annoyed by the task of training a new lioness in weeks when it takes months. They can eliminate the leader of the Los Tigres cartel, but gathering information is no longer part of their job. This is where Freeman gets his first big chance of the season: “All right, after you kill the guy, could you be so kind as to grab his damn phones and computers and anything else that might have fucking intelligence?” Come on, Girls – even when we steal information, we do it the cowboy way. You should know that. Kaitlyn chimes in: You can handle the job.

So the stage is set. Get dressed everyone; It's time for the Extraction – an extended, multi-part, slightly sepia-toned chase shootout in Mexico. Some serious “cowboy shit” organized by, of course, fucking Kyle. If hanging out with the inglorious bastards of the Lioness crew was as important to your enjoyment of the first season as it was to me, the delay you feel in fully returning to the team will prove a disappointment here. But hey – instead we get the man, the myth, the legend in the game front the camera. That's right: Just when you thought Sheridan had already retarded enough by writing the entire show himself (which he has reportedly done on all 17,000 of his currently running shows) and directing the first two episodes of the season, our man takes over the cast yourself – in all his chiseled, leathery glory – as the titular “old soldier” Cody.

Joe knows Cody from back then, just like she knows all the boys from back then; Such a guy, our Joe. Anyway, she's not entirely sure that the aging Cody took the lead in this extraction, even accompanied by his two wingmen Tracer and Dean (what, are we about to play?). Overwatch here with those names?), which can only be taken as additional reassurance that Cody is going to get hell on this mission. Sheridan is incredibly forgiving and since I didn't expect we'd get another season of this madness in the first place, I'm 100 percent all for it. For a penny, for a pound and so on.

Once they recover the missing congresswoman from an enemy vehicle and return her safely to US territory (via car jump into an open river and a finale). Apocalypse now”Joe promises to personally exact extrajudicial retribution on Los Tigres. “Justice is a different entity,” she says. “My agency doesn’t do trials.” A damn hard-hitting Clint Eastwood line if I ever heard one. And Saldaña delivers it with that familiar short-span musculature, telling us that Joe is ready to go all the way with this thing.

After sufficiently setting Kyle up for getting her team involved in some very risky “cowboy shit” again (I'm not sure what else she expected from this “old spy Barbie” as Cody calls him). , considering his overall track record as an agent). As Joe wreaks all-American carnage no matter where he's called, broken up, and dropped off, he steps back to protect her sexy house husband, Dr. to call Neal (Dave Annable) and her two daughters. The turmoil that accompanied her family during her professional absence seems to have largely (and somewhat too conveniently) subsided since the first season. Apparently this also applies to her most pressing feelings of separation and occasional trauma-induced disinterest in family life. This bodes well for any of us who found Joe's family affairs overblown and at least partially unnecessary, and sets us up for a less melodramatic back-and-forth between the family's innocence and the mission's looming corruption as the new season progresses.

As for the new lioness, hold on tight because she's coming hot in the next episode!