There are two things happening at the outset of Lioness Season 3 on Paramount+. One we could totally predict, and one we kinda never saw coming. Unlike recent joints in the Sheridan-O-Verse, prolific TV creator Taylor Sheridan handles all the writing himself in Lioness. And as CIA case officer Joe McNamara (Zoe Saldaña) hits the weights and trains hard in cardio, Sheridan fills the airspace around his main character with the bad news of overlapping cable news chatter. This we could predict. The world remains on fire in Lioness, which over time has expanded from its original mandate, the training and deployment of women sleeper agents, into a kind of global techno-thriller. 

But Joe isn’t working out at some government facility. She’s in her garage, at home in Fairfax, VA, and after showering with her husband, Dr. Neal McNamara (Dave Annable), we find her family, which also includes daughters Kate (Hannah Love Lanier) and Charlie (Celestina Harris), together and all smiles over breakfast. Nice to see. And unexpected, since it’s the first instance of this ever happening in our history with Joe and the all-consuming nature of her CIA work. Lioness Season 2 concluded with her not even knowing if Neal and the girls would welcome her home. 

Don’t get used to the 9 to 5 schedule, Joe warns Neal, adding a furrow of the tension their marriage has weathered. She still butters her daughters’ waffles with a Glock strapped to her belt. But Joe did not mean this as literally as what happens next. She’s in her car, on the phone with CIA spy chief Kaitlyn Meade (Nicole Kidman), when she is pinned in by two vehicles. Speaking of not seeing things coming. She’s trained for exactly this scenario, though — Joe’s done it herself, while on the job. Attacked mere yards from her family driveway, she engages Work Mode. “I’m blackjacked! I’m blackjacked!” Joe shouts into her phone, the line still open to Meade. And the undercover CIA officer is very publicly targeted and abducted. 

SIX. MONTHS. EARLIER. Joe is inserted into Donetsk, Ukraine, where she’s tasked with grabbing Aleksi Yurimov (Jack Dimich), a high-value CIA target. He’s part of SSD, the Russian military’s covert intelligence and sabotage unit, and right now Yurimov’s chilling in a tunnel complex underneath an active battlefield. “What’s he doing at the front with amateur protection?” Joe asks of Yurimov, whose security detail are North Korean conscripts. Joe’s also got all our favorites on back-up. There is Bobby (Jill Wagner), her team leader; Cruz (Laysla De Oliveira), the original Lioness; Tucker (LaMonica Garrett); and of course, Two Cups. Respect the goatee. Two Cups is played by James Jordan, our favorite Sheridan-O-Verse utility man. (He’s also Dale in Landman.)

But you can’t ever forget who the real star of the Sheridan-O-Verse is, because he won’t let you. Taylor Sheridan, aka Travis Wheatley, appears again in Lioness as Delta Force operator Cody Spears. And as hundreds of drones swarm above and contested trenches stretch for twisty kilometers, Cody and his guys are running Joe’s operation. The team advances through a hazy, deadly landscape of contemporary warfare. They take out a baker’s dozen of enemy soldiers. They secure their package, hack Yurimov’s tracking beacon from his armpit, and return to their side safely. But the whole sequence is a harrowing example of what Joe’s CIA colleague Kyle McManus (Thad Luckinbill) calls “World War I and Star Wars, slammed into each other.”    

“Pretty fuckin’ nutty right there,” Cruz tells her boss afterward. She’s been a door-kicker since the beginning. But Joe is more thoughtful. “We just killed a bunch of people for a chess piece in a war that has nothing to do with us.” The sense here is that while Ukraine has every right to defend itself against Russian aggression, the war that has torn the country apart is also a proxy theater for the moves and aims of external global adversaries.

In the middle of the night, the ubiquitous black SUV with dot gov plates drops Joe at home in Fairfax. Remember, this is still six months before the last time we saw this place. She whispers a quiet greeting to Neal, who returns to dreaming. And she settles on the couch downstairs with a few fingers of bourbon. Call it an after-action report in liquid form, given what she witnessed in the drone temple. But then there’s a knock on the door. “State police,” they say. Is that a Russian accent? “Outside, please.” You don’t have to be a veteran CIA case officer to know these dudes are lying, and Joe dismisses them. But they barge in, and she kills the first one before tracking his partner outside, where she shoots him dead, right there on the lawn. Fuck! “I need FBI to my house,” Joe says into her phone. “I’m blown.”   

Joe is standing over the two dead men who tried to attack her when Neal appears in the doorway in his pajamas. He looks at his wife, mouth agape, and she looks back at her husband. But Joe doesn’t apologize for bringing the war home.

QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 1 (“The Spider and the Fly”):

• Kaitlyn Meade’s investment banker husband Errol (Martin Donovan) is in his usual position for the opening of Lioness Season 3, the veranda at their spacious DC-area home, where he delivers a lecture that’s like if Tommy Norris worked at the American Enterprise Institute. Foreign governments controlling domestic thought via university funding, and a cowed national press writing clueless “End of Democracy” headlines. “AI,” Errol tells Kaitlyn. “That’s the real end of democracy.”

• And hey, is that a Bunkhouse Boy in that bunker in Ukraine? Former Yellowstone cowboy Ian Bohen joins Lioness as Grady, a Delta Force K-9 operator on Cody’s team. Grady’s combat-trained dogs prove more dangerous than all of the drones combined.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.