Two things can be true at once: Lioness remains, for many viewers, the weakest series in Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ slate—and season 3 is still its strongest run yet. That tension makes the disappointment in episode 2 sharper. Sheridan has built a reputation for writing women with bite, agency and proper story weight. In the second hour of the new season, when Cruz Manuelos finally gets a moment with her new love interest, that reputation frays—not because the women are written as weak, but because their intimacy is treated as something the plot is in a hurry to interrupt.

Spoilers for Lioness season 3, episode 2 follow.

Sheridan’s women—until the queer ones need time

On cowboys, land and the West, Sheridan’s instincts are widely praised as bold. On women across his universe—Michelle Pfeiffer’s Stacy in The Madison, Kelly Reilly’s Beth in Yellowstone and Dutton Ranch, Zoe Saldaña’s Joe in Lioness—the praise has often been the same: shrewd dialogue, substantial arcs, choices that feel reasoned rather than ornamental. Lioness itself put women at the centre of a paramilitary espionage machine usually coded male.

Episode 2 is where that pattern, for LGBTQ+ women on this show, starts to feel conditional. Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), pulled away on work that includes retrieving a potential hostage connected to the Ukraine thread, comes home to Josephina (Genesis Rodriguez). The setup is deliberately sensual: Josephina waits wearing little more than a bow. They end up in the bath. Passion is just gathering when Cruz’s phone rings. Undercover Russian operatives have hit Joe’s house; the FBI and the Lioness unit need her. The couple’s frustration is visible. So is the sense that they have not had real time together for a long stretch before the season even began.

Not the “bury your gays” beat—something colder

Classic television has often punished queer women with death: a partner killed in a shock cut (The 100, Last of Us debates, Last Tango in Halifax in a different register). Lioness is not doing that here. Cruz and Josephina are allowed to exist as a couple in theory. What they are denied is the scene’s payoff—the ordinary narrative permission to complete a moment of pleasure without the A-plot kicking the door in.

You can read the interruption as realism. Special-operations lives are chaotic; emergencies do not respect date night. The counter-argument in the critique is timing and habit. The Lionesses are not a standard duty roster; the show chooses when the phone rings. Having it ring at the exact turn from tenderness to sex fits a long, dreary television habit: queer women’s desire is shown just long enough to register, then deferred so the “real” story (usually violence, usually the straight or institutional centre) can continue. Male-male intimacy, as many Russell T Davies dramas demonstrate, is not interrupted with the same statistical regularity.

The result is a grey zone that can feel crueller than a clean break-up. The relationship is ideologically present—Cruz has a girlfriend; the camera acknowledges desire—while romance itself is kept at arm’s length. Whether that stems from conscious choice or unconscious bias is something only the writers’ room can answer. On screen, the effect is the same: LGBTQ+ women as a structural afterthought to operational tempo.

Joe’s war and everyone else’s second place

Season 3’s engine is Joe’s jeopardy—attacks on her home, Russian networks, questions of betrayal. In that hierarchy, Cruz and Josephina’s private life will always lose the scheduling fight. Flying under the radar is already a vulnerable position; stacking deferred intimacy on top of it makes the relationship look pre-loaded for attrition. If the pair unravels across the season, it will not shock viewers who have watched the show subordinate every soft beat to Joe’s next threat.

That does not make Lioness uniquely hostile. It does make episode 2 a useful stress test of Sheridan’s much-advertised skill with women. Writing women well in command, combat and moral compromise is not identical to writing queer women as people whose pleasure is allowed to finish a scene. One can admire Saldaña and Kidman’s centre-of-gravity roles and still notice when De Oliveira and Rodriguez are used primarily as a brief, frustrated postcard from a life the series does not have time to honour.

What “let down” means here

The frustration is not a demand that a CIA thriller become a romance. It is a demand for parity of narrative respect: if the show can linger on male banter, agency turf wars and Byron Westfield’s dinner-table threats, it can also let two women complete a bath without treating their desire as the button that summons the next extraction. Season 3 may yet deepen Cruz and Josephina. Episode 2, by design or reflex, told a familiar story instead—one where LGBTQ+ women on prestige TV are permitted to almost have something, and then reminded that the mission, as always, comes first.