Summary

Lioness finally sticks to a single timeline to handle Joe’s kidnapping and the psychological and geopolitical implications of it, while suggesting a much more sophisticated twist has been afoot.

You can feel the dread, can’t you? Lioness has always been pretty taut and high-stakes, obviously, and Season 3 has been no different, but there’s a specific quality to it following last week’s so-close-yet-so-far instalment. Joe’s predicament is bracingly serious. If she isn’t found, she’ll be transported to Iran and publicly tortured to death. If she is, but too late for a rescue, she’ll be killed by her own government trying to avoid a geopolitical calamity. If she’s found and the rescue goes wrong, she’s also dead. If any of the perpetrators escape, the crisis hasn’t been averted, and she can’t even consider returning to a normal life. And that’s if a normal life is even on the table after what she has experienced. This is the spectre that Episode 7, “Kiss the Girls”, is unfolding under.

Admittedly, not for very long, since Joe is rescued fairly soon into the chapter, but the intensity doesn’t go away. Importantly, neither does the emotion, which Taylor Sheridan is careful to highlight in the aftermath. In fact, Joe’s reaction to being rescued is one of the more powerful scenes in the show’s history, because it upends the ooh-rah vibe of her classic “I’m the highest-ranking officer anywhere I go” vibe and makes her truly vulnerable. But broken? Not quite.

We might as well talk about the rescue scene, since it’s rare you get such an unambiguous fist-pump moment in contemporary TV. This, I suppose, is the advantage of dragging this out for so long – almost the entire season – and making audiences wait. After raiding the jet denied the Iranian transport team their primary exfil route, Babat’s on the back foot, having to transport Joe to the border through quiet Texan backroads, which are fairly easy to monitor, especially when you’re rolling in convoy. We get both sides of the equation: the QRF and local police preparing to make a move on the vehicles, and Joe inside, being told to stay silent under pain of death and, naturally, completely refusing to do so.

The whole thing’s pretty perfect, really. Joe gets herself out of the car, but can’t get away completely without assistance, which comes from the QRF chopper swooping in for an assist. But it isn’t as if Joe gets away unscathed. She’s psychologically ruined, collapsing into Cruz’s arms in floods of tears. It’s the best of both worlds; “best” doing a lot of heavy lifting there, given the context, but you know what I mean.

Without Joe in custody, Lioness Season 3 loses its most pronounced source of tension. But it doesn’t suffer for that since there are plenty of enormous implications swirling around the whole matter, not the least of which being who’s responsible for this whole operation in the first place. Vengeful Iranian maniacs, Belarusian goons, Ukrainian double-agents, compromised college professors working for the Chinese state, and bought-and-paid-for U.S. diplomats taking bribes from the Russian SVR – how does it all fit together?

This becomes Kaitlyn and Byron’s responsibility. You can tell things are desperate, since Kaitlyn and her husband are even willing to discuss work together, which leads them to a working theory – Ukraine was the only nation that stood to benefit from the operation’s success, but wouldn’t suffer if it failed. A lot of salient information came from inside the walls – porous though they might be – of U.S. intelligence, and it just so happens that a Ukrainian double-agent was recently flipped and safely set up in witness protection, where we know she was totally unmonitored for at least six months.

The pieces fit. Russia and China aren’t ideologically inclined, but the big nations that are, including Iran, don’t have the resources and infrastructure to pull off an operation of this scale and precision. Even without concrete proof, Oleksandra seems the likeliest suspect in having orchestrated an extremely complex long con to create geopolitical pressure around the U.S. and Russia that would, by proxy, benefit the Ukrainian war effort. Just in case you didn’t think that Oleksandra was one of the best things about this season, the idea that she might have been pulling the strings this entire time elevates her into pretty serious villain territory. It’s a great arc.

And the consequences are clear. Episode 7 is the only time that Lioness Season 3 hasn’t done the whole dual timeline structure, since it’s all set in the present, so we’re left to linger in the implications of the kidnapping on Joe’s personal life. Needless to say, it isn’t going well. Neal and the kids are already struggling with not knowing anything concrete but knowing for a fact that something is amiss; Kaitlyn’s promise that she’ll be home that afternoon is very much an “I’ll believe it when I see it” affair. And the scepticism is justified. Even when she’s parked right outside, Joe would rather return to the office than the house. The fight isn’t over; her sense of sanctuary has been demolished, and she’ll probably never be the same again.     

This finale can’t come soon enough.