“It’s shocking how many nerve endings are in a pinky toe.” Joe McNamara is at Langley, waking up awkwardly on a couch, in pain from her abduction and torture and experiencing PTSD flashbacks. She chose this, though. Work over home. And in the Episode 8 finale of Lioness Season 3 on Paramount+, there will be a reckoning for those choices. For everything this Lioness, this soldier, this mother and wife has done. To Joe’s enemies abroad, and to Neal and the girls back home.

Still trying to sort out who grabbed their case officer and why, the CIA has tasked Kyle with surveilling a suspicious Russian lobbyist tagged by the analysts. And it’s a solid hunch, because the guy is soon joined for breakfast at Le Diplomate by Joe’s captor. Renat is unknown to Kyle. Only Joe knows the personalities, details, and circumstances of her ordeal. But monitoring all this via the restaurant’s security cameras, as she and the team are en route to Guantanamo Bay — more on that in a second — Joe’s features flash with tension as she clocks Renat. “He’s the one who took me,” she tells Kyle through his earpiece. “Engage. Engage now.”    

It goes bad, and it goes bad instantly. Kyle, Randy, and Tex identify themselves as federal agents, but Renat, seeing he’s cooked, pulls out a gun and kills his Russian contact. Then he is shot, and falls dead into someone’s omelette. And then a completely separate security team starts shooting, who were only on site to protect their African diplomat. Randy and Tex are both badly wounded, and Kyle is left standing in a fancy Washington brasserie with seven corpses and no more answers than he had seconds before. 

“Look how many died this time,” Joe says, because of her impulsive order. And what for? It’s a facet of the same frustration she felt in Episode 1 of this season, after the joint op with Delta Force to capture Aleksi Yurimov incurred numerous casualties. 

The team has traveled to Guantanamo to pick up Yurimov and return him to the Russians. These are orders from Meade and Westfield, who still think Joe’s abduction was a false flag operation run by Oleksandra and Ukraine. (Yurimov, a soldier like Joe, reminds her there is a cost to what they do. “Never underestimate how many hate you.”) But while they’re at Gitmo, Alex (Sandi Todorovic) calls out from his cage. This is the operative swept up during Episode 5 — “Have you ever had dengue fever?” — and he’s an unexpected font of hard intel. “I know you,” Alex says of Joe. “Special Activities. You were shopped. They shopped you to me. Not enough money for the risk.” Joe’s abduction was offered on the open (black) market to any ex-SVR, ex-Wagner Group, ex-government agency spy shit type who thought they could pull the brazen job off.   

Alex’s story doesn’t identify who put out the contract, but it shifts the glare off Ukraine, not to mention Russia. Brought back to CIA HQ, the man explains to Kaitlyn Meade that the job was to grab Joe in Virginia, get her to Houston, and deliver her to representatives of Kata’ib Sayyid ul-Shuhada, or KSS, a paramilitary group loyal to Iran. Which is essentially everything we saw happen to her in the past-present format of Season 3. Meade recognizes Alex’s story as legit; it’s further strengthened when he names Renat as the shopper who took the job. “You spy for your flag. I spy for money. Shopper was both.”

The CIA’s determination that Ukraine ran Joe’s abduction, their sniffing out of some international actor behind the plot, was bullshit, and it got Oleksandra Balakin killed. The Delta dudes took the double-secret agent from witness protection and made her death look like a robbery-assault. It’s more red in Joe’s ledger, after her wish for instant vengeance sparked the collateral damage at the restaurant shootout, which included her team members getting shot. And neither her nor the agency where she works are any closer to discovering who paid for her to be taken.   

Meade sends Joe home, and when they roll up at the house, Bobby sends Cruz and Josie to check around back. Armed. “There’s nobody left to come after me,” Joe protests; Bobby says there’s always somebody. And that’s when they all notice the For Sale sign posted on the lawn. The team respectfully recedes as Joe enters her home, which is now empty of her family’s love and energy. There is a note on the counter. Joe reads it, already knowing what Neal wrote, and she wanders into the girls’ bedroom, where she collapses, weeping, in raw waves of emotion. The room is now empty, just like her.  

But this season does not conclude with Joe’s anguish over her hubris and work-life imbalance. In a glittering Doha, Qatar high-rise, inside a sumptuous palace-like penthouse, a man answers the phone, and reports to his boss. Those they hired got close, but the abduction didn’t work out. What does she want to do?

“Try again. Maybe third time’s the charm. We have to get her out. If we get her out, the others will come to save her. And then we have them all.” Aaliyah Amrohi (Stephanie Nur) gets out of the bath. She was running Joe’s kidnapping this whole time. There will be a reckoning for what the original Lioness did to her. The program’s infiltration, to get close to, target and kill her terrorist financier father — and in turn, her own seduction by Cruz Manuelos — will be avenged. Season 1 of Lioness has come roaring back to punch Season 3 in the face.  

Never underestimate how many hate you.

QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 8 (“The Unraveling”): 

• Joe’s post-Gitmo conversation with Aleksi Yurimov is interesting, especially with the reveal of Aaliyah’s vendetta. First, Joe apologizes. “What I did to you was done to me, but different.” But Yurimov dismisses that. She took him from a battlefield. So be it. They are both soldiers. That’s the game. But attacking Joe at home, in front of her family? “That’s no war. That’s kidnapping. That’s criminals.” 

• And after a cliffhanger ending like this, we just want Lioness Season 4 to deploy right now. While there is nothing yet official from Paramount+ or the Taylor Sheridan camp about a renewal, there is chatter that says it’s happening, and even more chatter that says Zoe Saldaña is leaving.

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.