Some television moments have a way of outlasting the episodes that contain them. A white-knuckle border crossing in the second season of Lioness has done exactly that — lodging itself in the cultural conversation well after the finale’s credits rolled, and reigniting a debate that had been quietly building all season: Is this show, in some essential way, a continuation of Sicario?

The answer, it turns out, may be less a matter of interpretation than intention.

The Scene Everyone Is Talking About

The sequence at the center of the debate arrives in the episode Beware the Old Soldier, when Joe McNamara — played by Zoe Saldaña — leads her CIA task force across the U.S.-Mexico border on a rescue mission targeting a kidnapped American congresswoman. What begins as a tactical extraction collapses swiftly into chaos.

Mexican authorities close in almost immediately. The mission pivots from surgical to desperate. With threats converging on multiple fronts, the team is left with one exit: drive off a cliff and into the river dividing the two nations. The outcome hangs in the air long enough to feel genuinely uncertain — the kind of scene that earns its place in a viewer’s memory not through spectacle alone, but through the weight of consequence.

For viewers who came to Lioness through Taylor Sheridan’s broader body of work — or who remember the stretch of borderland tension that defined his 2015 film Sicario — the familiarity of the scene lands with particular force.

Why Sicario Keeps Coming Up

The comparison extends well beyond one chase sequence. The central mission of Season 2 involves infiltrating cartel networks linked to the congresswoman’s abduction and leveraging that access to enable the targeted assassination of a high-profile cartel leader. The strategic rationale — eliminate one figure so that a dominant cartel can consolidate power and become a more manageable adversary for U.S. interests — echoes the operational logic at the heart of Sicario almost point for point.

Sheridan wrote both projects, and the structural DNA reveals itself at nearly every level: the border as both geography and metaphor, the cartel as the unseen hand shaping American policy decisions, a female protagonist drawn deeper into moral compromise the further she advances through the mission. The similarities feel less like coincidence than like a writer returning to ideas he has not yet exhausted.

Joe’s arc in Season 2 also invites comparison to Kate Mercer, the FBI agent at the center of Sicario played by Emily Blunt. Both women operate inside institutions that are nominally committed to justice while pursuing outcomes that quietly hollow out that commitment. Both find themselves serving a machine whose full purpose they’re permitted to understand only after the most consequential decisions have already been made.

Saldaña Makes the Lioness Connection Official

What distinguishes this from the usual cycle of fan-driven pattern recognition is that Saldaña herself has framed the relationship openly and deliberately. Serving as an executive producer on the series alongside co-star Nicole Kidman, she has described Lioness publicly as a spiritual sequel to Sheridan’s film, and has credited Sicario directly as the catalyst for her involvement with the project. Her interest, by her own account, was born from Sheridan’s ability to ground political violence in human cost without flinching from either side of that equation.

That framing reorients the conversation entirely. The chase scene in Season 2 is not merely reminiscent of Sicario. According to the show’s own creative logic, it is part of the same imaginative project — a continuation, in spirit if not in narrative, of a story Sheridan began more than a decade ago and has never truly stopped telling.

The Franchise Question

Despite the depth of the creative connection, a formal crossover between Lioness and the Sicario film franchise remains a remote prospect. A third installment in the film series remains in development, but the two properties are held by different studios, and the logistical barriers to merging them are substantial. For now, their kinship exists in the register of theme, tone, and authorial obsession rather than shared continuity.

What Season 2 makes unmistakable is that Sheridan has no interest in stepping back from this territory. By placing the conflict squarely on the U.S.-Mexico border — a setting that carries a different charge in the current political climate than it did even three years ago — he is actively leaning into the most contested terrain in American public life.

Saldaña at the Center of Sheridan’s Universe

Saldaña’s position in all of this is notable on its own terms. As both lead actor and executive producer, she occupies a different kind of creative ownership than the protagonists of Sheridan’s earlier work — less subject to the machinery of the story and more responsible for shaping it. The result is a portrayal of Joe McNamara that feels like something more than a successor to Kate Mercer: it’s a reconsideration of that archetype through the lens of someone who helped build the world she’s navigating.

The show’s Season 2 arc, with its cartel infiltrations, cross-border chases, and assassination mandates, pushes Joe into territory that is morally tangled in ways the first season only gestured toward. The comparison to Sicario is no longer subtext. It has become the text — and Saldaña, it seems, was counting on viewers to notice.