![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/0ba457bfee8b4415a280fc17ad5a5e0294-Lioness.rsquare.w400.jpg\")
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\n The team\u2019s job in Ukraine reveals a potential new Lioness, but it comes at a huge cost.
\n Photo: Greg Lewis\/Paramount+\n <\/p>\n
\u201cNo Sorrow Like the Survivor\u201d opens with another flash-forward, picking up where the previous episode\u2019s cold open left off. Joe has just been abducted from her car, right in front of her house. A briefly harrowing scene follows where armed assailants take her to a nondescript suburban location, hold her down on the ground, strip her clothes off, and threaten to \u201ccut her in half\u201d to find the tracker they know she\u2019s got sewn into her somewhere. With no other option, Joe relents and lets them cut the tracker from between her toes. Just a bloody shard of metal on the ground in an empty house by the time the Lioness team gets to it. It\u2019s an awkward, hat-on-a-hat-ass tension-baiting opener as we cut back six months earlier to the first attack on Joe\u2019s home. Not much in the way of new or novel information from the previous opener, but it does provide visceral emphasis on the fact that, by taking the Ukraine job, the Lioness crew has unwittingly opened a Pandora\u2019s box of clandestine counterassaults on home turf.<\/p>\n
Cruz has just arrived home at Fort Bragg and settled into a sexy bath with maybe-girlfriend(?) Josie when the call to report to Joe\u2019s house comes in. Before the whole scene of domestic bliss is cut short, Cruz and Josie discuss their looming irrelevance as human foot soldiers in a future of wars fought by machines, finding brief solace in each other\u2019s out-of-uniform bodies. In any case, the burgeoning Cruz-Josie relationship should make for a welcome change-up in relationship drama from the endless and, at this point, aimless Joe-Neal domestic saga.<\/p>\n
Speaking of which, Joe is exhausted and sitting in her stairwell when Kaitlyn arrives at her house and rushes her out to report to the bigwigs before she even gets a chance to say good-bye to her family. Thankfully, the rest of the Lioness cavalry has arrived, complete with those Spirit Halloween\u2013lookin\u2019-ass FBI windbreakers and caps to blend in with the other Feds, and bring the remaining, non-special-ops-trained McNamaras to safety. \u201cWe got \u2019em, boss,\u201d Bobby tells Joe as the team passes her at the door. Honestly, could you think of another badass you\u2019d rather leave your vulnerable family with? Gotta say, Jill Wagner\u2019s singular swag still makes her the No. 1 candidate to star in the next Die Hard or Lethal Weapon remake or John Wick spinoff or whatever.<\/p>\n
En route to HQ for the debrief with Morgan Freeman\u2019s Secretary Mullins (always a welcome presence, but already looking a little checked out in this quick-paycheck role here), Joe starts to put the pieces together. Her assailants \u2014 now identified as Belarus nationals and contract hires \u2014 knocked on her door and identified themselves as state police (without badges) not because they\u2019re amateurs, but because they had to improvise their approach. Joe was in her living room with a drink at the same time she\u2019s usually upstairs taking a shower, which means these contract agents have had eyes on her for a while. Kaitlyn rebuts with a classic bit of demonic America-first CIA wisdom: \u201cYou\u2019re a senior case officer. You\u2019re untouchable, especially within our borders. Because if you aren\u2019t, the whole world knows it\u2019s open fucking season on every asset they have, wherever we find them.\u201d But the old adage of \u201cmight is right\u201d under the American empire\u2019s thumb becomes a bite in the ass in the new age of imperial decline. Whoever was behind the invitation to the Ukraine operation did so as a pretext for an open-season situation on American soil. Eye for an eye. Chaos at home for chaos abroad.<\/p>\n
The whole case as it stands is laid out in Secretary Mullins\u2019s briefing room with the usual murderer\u2019s row of HQ participants. Chief of Staff Mason (Jennifer Ehle) comes in particularly hot, pouring herself a coffee at breakneck speed. \u201cI was on my fourth glass of Champagne, so I am going to need information delivered in very brief, very precise phrases,\u201d she admonishes. Jennifer Ehle always brings the heat bordering on camp to lines like these, and every season, she appears just enough to make me go, \u201cOh, yeah, Jennifer Ehle\u2019s in this \u2026 HELL yeah.\u201d Anyway, Mullins opens the meeting by dangling the promise of a near-future desk job in front of Joe. \u201cThen all of these obstacles you\u2019ve overcome will be the reason people don\u2019t argue with your recommendations. Because your understanding of the consequences is not theoretical.\u201d Joe seems to appreciate the acknowledgment, but the desk-job offer has come too late to save her family from torment and her from a war-torn path that\u2019s already hollowed her out, body and soul.<\/p>\n
As for the present, Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) enters the conversation hot off this week\u2019s gold-medal Dum Clancy scene where he chews out a Russian head of state in the middle of a restaurant. \u201cThere\u2019s a line, Byron, and you crossed it,\u201d the Russian says. \u201cAnd now there is no line.\u201d Byron responds with a lot of hot air about the \u201cass whoopin\u2019\u201d the Russians have been taking in Ukraine and how they\u2019re gonna feed the operatives in their possession to the \u201cwolves at Gitmo,\u201d etc. But he and the rest of U.S. intelligence have already played into their hands. As he debriefs Mullins & Co. on the situation, Byron theorizes that Joe was spotted in Ukraine, then officially identified via airport security footage but not yet directly tied to the Yurimov-abduction operation. Byron also brings word that the Lioness team has captured the remaining contract agents. Joe cuts through the noise and lays it all out in plain English: The Russians have had ample opportunity to make her in the field, and they never have. Then they meet a Ukrainian double agent who offers a giant unsolicited prize in Aleksi Yurimov. Two weeks later, still minutes after landing back in the U.S., Joe is attacked by contract agents in her home in Fairfax. Occam\u2019s razor: They were set up by the Ukrainian agent, and Joe\u2019s guess is Yurimov is still on the Russian front while they\u2019re stuck with \u201csome actor from the fucking Mossovet Theatre\u201d in his place.<\/p>\n
Following the debrief, Kyle and Cruz pick up Ukrainian agent Oleksandra Balakin (Elizaveta Neretin) at a club, where all the powerful D.C. people seem to be hobnobbing with all the spies like some kind of shadow embassy where the real diplomatic moves are made. The apparent breach of protocol is enough to lure Oleksandra out into the big black SUV. In the immediate future, they\u2019re taking her in for what\u2019s sure to be some gnarly questioning. In the long term, we may be looking at the origins of this season\u2019s unofficial \u201cnew Lioness.\u201d The episode closes out on Joe\u2019s arrival at the base camp Peary, where Neal and her daughters are staying. (\u201cIt\u2019s a nice house,\u201d notes Kaitlyn in the debrief. \u201cThe last resident was a four-star, you know how those guys like to live.\u201d Nice.) Joe falls apart in Neal\u2019s arms, apologizing over and over between sobs, a more heightened version of the same place we\u2019ve seen these two end up like at least twice every season. The episode\u2019s more compelling end note comes in the scene right before. Josie is watching over the sleeping McNamara sisters in the darkness. Call my bias on account of my Sicario and, well, Lioness fandom, but I\u2019ll be damned if Taylor Sheridan\u2019s neo-western-tinged scenes don\u2019t go hardest when women are at the center of them. Kate asks Josie if she \u201clike, knows karate or something?,\u201d playing sarcastic teenager while trying to get a read on the type of women that do what her mom does and, by extension, the type of woman her mom is. \u201cYou got a gun?\u201d Kate asks. Josie nods in silence with a steely Eastwood stare. \u201cGuess that beats karate.\u201d\u00a0It\u2019s the new Wild West for the warrior queens of the Lioness crew \u2014 a Starship Troopers\u2013esque vision of the future where the next generation of analog girlboss-soldier is already under recruitment to fight the next world war alongside machines.<\/p>\n
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