Summary
The ending of Lioness Season 3 very much takes its time in a near feature-length finale that doesn’t reveal the Big Bad until the closing scenes. But can simple revenge really be all that’s going on here?
A feature-length finale feels just about right for Season 3 of Lioness. After everything it has put Joe — and by extension the audience — through, we needed plenty of time to unravel the remainder of the conspiracy and linger in its implications. This isn’t the typical bombastic ending you’d expect from a Taylor Sheridan show. Instead, it’s a patient, dour, bracingly serious hour-and-a-bit of grown-up political espionage and character drama, or at least it’s that first and foremost.
It also builds to what, by all accounts, is a disappointing conclusion, or at least one less twisty and conspiratorial than I was expecting. I entered the finale looking for every small clue and detail in every margin, building up theories about who might really be responsible, and the implications it might have for Joe and her family. But it turns out straight-up revenge is the real answer. It’s a bit less interesting than I necessarily wanted, but at least it’s on-brand.
Implications
“The Unravelling” seems to begin with a stroke of good fortune, at the very least. Basic surveillance turns up a lobbyist named Dimitri Sokolov with a focus on energy exploration in Africa who fits the double-agent bill. Byron asks Errol Meade about him, and you can see that Kaitlyn doesn’t like the cosy chit-chat, only lending validity to the suspicion that she might be playing both sides. But she ends up with Sokolov’s file either way, since that’s the position she’s in, and puts Kyle on him.
Oleksandra, meanwhile, finds CIA agents in her home with intentions to “relocate” her, and tries to flee, only making herself look guilty, which is very much what was implied by the previous episode. So, you can see what the finale is doing here. We’re proceeding along the lines we intended, focusing on the suspects that make the most sense, but it isn’t as if the broader political picture has become any less fraught in the meantime. Errol sees Kaitlyn lurking. And so do we.
As it happens, we needn’t worry too much about it. Oleksandra’s corpse is later, unceremoniously found by a jogger’s dog, right after Joe had independently determined that Ukraine weren’t responsible for the operation. It’s the cost of doing business. Kaitlyn is made to look suspicious all throughout, but nothing ever comes of it.
Making Moves
The U.S.’s play is to release Yurimov, which is seen to be doing the Russian state a favour — that’s how Byron and Edwin present it to Max over breakfast, anyway — to “cool things down”. Joe doesn’t love that justification, though. As far as she sees it, they’re releasing the only person who can fill in the gaps of what she went through and why. There’s no wonder she isn’t ready to talk about her future, which Kaitlyn is pushing for. As far as she’s concerned, the mission isn’t over. The fact that Edwin has the same sixth sense should say a lot. However things might appear, how they actually are is another matter.
Hence, Sokolov. When Kyle follows him to a diner, he witnesses him meet with a contact, but can’t overhear what they’re saying, which is perhaps just as well, since they’re talking about a mole. Joe is monitoring the same feed, though, and recognises the other interlocutor as one of her abductors, Renat, so the decision is immediately made to snatch them both. Renat executes Sokolov when he realises he’s rumbled; Kyle and the gang open fire, and several people, including what later turns out to be an African diplomat and her security detail, and two of Kyle’s guys, Randy and Tex, get shot. Joe, watching from her plane, realises immediately that her lust for revenge prompted her to make the wrong decision and got people killed. Perhaps she should think about that desk job, after all.
Friends In Low Places
Joe, Cruz, Josephina, Bobby, and Two Cups are on escort duties. It’s their job to take Yurimov from Guantanamo Bay to wherever he’s going, as per the U.S. government’s promises. Again, though, there’s sleight of hand afoot. One of the other prisoners, seemingly unrelated to anything, recognises Joe: “Skin is black, but last name is Irish”, or at least that’s how she was shopped by the Russian SVR — namely, Renat — to drum up the personnel for the kidnapping.
It doesn’t go unnoticed — at least not by me — that Kaitlyn is waiting at the hospital for Randy and Tex to wake up so she can debrief them before anyone else has a word, nor that she instructs Joe to report directly to her before anyone else with what she has learned at Gitmo. On the plane ride back, Joe has a conversation with Yurimov that implies the same thing that the rest of the finale has been suggesting. Russia aren’t the bad guys here, or at least not in the way everyone thinks. These are the rules that the Iranians play by. And if Iran has a reason to seek vengeance against Joe, or to fear her, which we know they do, then the mystery is seemingly solved.
Or is it?
Revenge Is Sweet
When Kaitlyn debriefs Joe’s new Gitmo friend, he lays out the facts. Sokolov was a broker of deals who worked for Renat. Renat sold the capture mission of the HVT (Joe), and as per the mission’s parameters, she was to be handed off to the KSS, or Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada (Battalions of the Masters of Martyrs), an Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite paramilitary group. They earn their money, apparently, but only if the job abides by their beliefs. Given Joe’s status in the Middle East, snatching her definitely did.
The big question, then, is who hired the KSS? Initially, it seems like Lioness Season 3 isn’t going to answer it. We’re left to assume it was probably the Iranian state, but then Kaitlyn forces Joe to go home to an empty, for-sale house, since Neal and the kids have peaced out, evidently having had enough of Joe’s refusal to understand work-life balance. That’s a sad scene, and Zoe Saldana’s great in it, but it hardly qualifies as a resolution.
It’s only in the ending’s final scene that we discover who the real Big Bad is — Aaliyah Amrohi from all the way back in Season 1. She’s determined to kidnap Joe and take her out of the U.S. to draw the rest of the Lionesses — including, one assumes, Cruz — into the open. It is a revenge play after all. And since Joe now has no reason to stop working, she’ll be more susceptible to it than ever.
Perhaps we’re doing Season 4 after all.