As Taylor Sheridan has cleverly written it, Season 3 of Lioness on Paramount+ exists in both the past and the present. He’s done this before, notably with the two-part, timeline-jumbled, high-drama final season of Yellowstone. But inside Joe McNamara’s shadowy, dangerous, politically-fraught world, inside the life and work she’s killed for, it’s a crucible. Knowing she got blackjacked in the present and following the action in the past puts the friction point at the center, where knowns intersect with unknowns. And that goes for everybody, from Joe’s CIA team and bosses, to her long-suffering husband and daughters, to us the viewers. We want proof of life for our girl, but we also wanna know how it all went down.

We’re in the present at the start of Episode 4, with at least a little clarity. Joe’s been getting water-tortured for days by Renat (Dimitry Rozenthal) and his crew of Russians. But when her captor starts referring to her like she’s the embodiment of the West’s downfall, Joe is not only lucid, she’s ready with a string of geopolitical insults (Re: Putin, “You really think that moron’s a pack leader?”).

We love how switched-on Joe has been since the moment they took her, and the way Zoe Saldaña plays this. The second she’s alone in her torture chamber, she’s testing her bonds. And we’re glad to see her in one piece. But the clarity hits when the Russians put her in a shroud and haul her onto a plane. “Once we get home, I’ll show you my job,” Renat says with determined menace. “I am expert.”     

Smarting from the first near-miss rescue, Operation Find Joe is growing more intense. Even as the team tracks the diplomatic license plates any senior SVR agent would use to hide in plain sight domestically, and they assault the airplane hangar outside Baltimore where Joe was taken/tortured, we know they’re still one step behind. The frustration becomes extreme once Kyle executes a Russian to elicit from his counterpart vital information. The plane’s tail number, November-5-6-5-Kilo-Juliet in military radio phonetics, which the CIA still can’t track because its transponder was disabled. 

Kyle’s actions rankle Joe’s team. Everyone wants her back, but killing someone who wasn’t directly trying to kill them is a major hit to their rules of engagement. Back at base, Kaitlyn Meade mediates this argument, then tamps down the heat with one clear directive. “Go get our fucking girl.” The search continues. 

The air is just as frustrated in the halls of power. For Secretary Mullins and the rest of the situation room braintrust, Joe’s abduction is barreling toward diplomatic crisis. As the OG Lioness, she knows the ins and outs of countless clandestine operations. But the bigger danger, politically and to Joe’s very life, is that the Russians offload her to Iran. “Embarrass us back,” is the way Byron Westfield puts it to Mullins. Assuming Joe’s capture is retaliation for the CIA’s Aleksi Yurimov grab, with her knowledge as a senior case officer in the Middle East, Iran could make her a very public political pawn. Mullins and Westfield both take a hard look at the big red phone on the Secretary of State’s desk. It’s time to call the president, who remains unnamed in this Sheridan-O-Verse version of contemporary America.   

A quick check-in on the Lioness past, where Joe has shelved her personal mistrust of Oleksandra in order to use the double agent’s knowledge. Westfield and Meade approve her pitch for an undercover op that will flush out American citizens the Russians turned, and Lioness has some fun — and shows off some skin — as the team changes out of their tactical togs to get into character. Two Cups doesn’t have to shave his signature goatee, because he’s only playing a military arms contractor who’s a fan of strip clubs. He goes one way with Randy and Tex, Amber Whelan and Oleksa go another, and Joe and Bobby repair to a club, where they monitor Cruz and Carrillo as their flirty, touchy dancing ensnares a Russian asset. To Bobby, it feels like spending a lot of human capital on a few small potatoes. But Joe says these people are crucial to the larger project. The team’s gotta fight through the worker bees to find and kill their queen.    

So there are positives in that past, six months before the blackjack. Joe and her team are tracking the knowns to draw out the unknowns. But in the present, it’s just all bad news. Five days after Joe was taken, Meade visits the McNamara home. Neal braces himself, and Kaitlyn lays out the possibilities with a terrible lack of specifics. There is the short-term, where they rescue Joe. The longterm, a protracted negotiation for the spy’s return, which could take months or years. And then there is the third possibility, which has both a freaking-out Neal and the stoic CIA official most on edge. “She doesn’t come back.” 

QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 4 (“Murder Hornets”): 

• “The one thing that made the US so dangerous for so long was that your people believed in the fantasy of freedom.” Renat’s evil speech to Joe, accompanied by a video supercut of unrest and social disorder, sounds a lot like Arnim Zola revealing the true nature of S.H.I.E.L.D in Captain America: Winter Soldier.

• After the Kyle-executing-Russians thing, Meade pulled him aside to make a distinction between his ROE and that of Joe’s team. Basically, it sounds like he has a license to kill.

• We also catch a great scene in the past, at the safe house between Joe and Neal. He says his oath as a physician is to humanity; she says that is naive. It’s not really a fight, though. Neal understands his wife’s role in putting out the world’s most harmful fires, but he also sees the flames advancing to their doorstep. He takes her hand. “I’m scared, Joe.”