They did it to them, so now they’re doing it to them. A sentence with verbs to nowhere and zero proper nouns, and yet entirely specific to the global industry where Joe works. Spy shit. No borders, but there are protocols. And in Episode 2 of Lioness Season 3 on Paramount+, she’s filling in the blanks about the men who took her. “Do not fight,” they command, and switch to Russian as they cut off her clothing. “I don’t wear a locator,” Joe says, understanding most of what they’re saying, and what they’re looking for. Because she knows this crew is only doing to her what her team did to Aleksi Yurimov, the Russian spy they abducted in Ukraine six months before. They cut out his locator, too.
Of course Joe is fitted with one of these beacons, and she finally tells them where to find it before they break out more invasive tools. (“Big toe, left foot.”) But the blinking device is the only thing found by Bobby, Tucker, Two Cups, and the QRF team, once they track their boss’s location. Joe and her captors are long gone.
So in the Lioness Season 3 present, spies, likely Russian, have abducted Joe McNamara. But in the Lioness Season 3 past, it seems like they were already trying. Episode 2 picks up the action there, as Joe has just killed the two guys who tried to break down her front door, after she arrived home from the Ukraine operation. Kaitlyn Meade is on the scene, and she calls CIA deputy director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly). “Romanian passports,” she says of the assailants. But the NSA says they’re actually Belarus nationals. “Which means Russian SVR.” Meade and Westfield consider the attempt sloppy. But it’s also convenient timing, considering the CIA just snatched a Russian operative in Donetsk.
Westfield is on the phone with Meade while eating at the Occidental, one of these fancy restaurants for Beltway insiders, and he decides to do some direct disruptive diplomacy. Byron crashes the table of the Russian intelligence flack dining nearby, and it’s a classic Michael Kelly moment when he helps himself to his counterpart spy’s 1979 Chateau Lafayette. “You targeted a state department official on US soil, you motherfucker. There’s a line, and you crossed it.”
The Russian contingent doesn’t admit anything, but that’s likely because in these circles, admission is pedestrian. There are a few more threats back and forth, arguing over hostages held in various international places. It all gives light to how work gets done in these dark places.
Elsewhere, Cruz Manuelos is decompressing after the mission to Ukraine. She arrives back to on-base housing at Fort Bragg, where Captain Josephina Carillo (Genesis Rodriguez) is waiting for her. Without clothes. Their relationship, which developed during Carillo’s Lioness training last season, is now a full-on thing.
“What we do, it’s gonna be obsolete in thirty years.” In the bath with Josie, Cruz is reflective. She just fought her way across a modern battlefield, where click-to-buy drones from Amazon have impeded Russia’s vast land army. “What the fuck are we fighting the next war with?” Maybe human soldiers, wielding big sticks. Or maybe robots, which won’t even need our permission. But with the attack on their boss, this reverie over the evolving philosophies of warfare is cut short. Back to work.
The team has gathered on site at Joe’s house. “Does any of this shit make sense?” Tucker asks. They agree with Meade that it all feels really amateur, as if it was a sacrifice of low-level assets just to see what shakes loose. And sure enough, Tucker, Randy (Austin Hébert), and Tex (Jonah Warton) find spotters observing from nearby roofs. The attack on Joe proves her cover was blown, but their response at the scene exposes everyone. Tucker takes care of the spotters — pow! — while Bobby, Two Cups, and Carillo drive Neal, Charlie, and Kate to a CIA safe house.
Joe is rattled, driving with Kaitlyn to Langley for debrief. She’s a pro, but her work is done in secret, and taking out two foreign agents on her front lawn is a hit against her family’s forever tenuous home life. “You know who’s traumatized?” she says. “My soon-to-be ex-husband and my daughters.” Nicole Kidman plays Meade with a lot of wonderful sharp edges, and Kaitlyn shuts down Joe’s emotional response. This is the start of something, a new fight, and it’s happening whether the CIA case officer — and wife and mother — is ready or not.
How did she get made? That’s the main question in the situation room at the CIA. Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman) is there, as is White House Chief of Staff Mason (Jennifer Ehle). There are watchers everywhere in the world of spy shit, so Joe’s identity could have been matched, say, when she was moving through any number of international airports. They are at a loss until Joe herself focuses the argument. “The least amount of variables here is the agent from Ukraine.”
She’s talking about the woman we met in Episode 1, the mysterious Ukrainian spy working undercover in Russia’s SVR, who originally fed Yurimov’s location to the CIA. It’s therefore decided. They will bring that agent out of the dark and into the light, and force her to explain what’s going on.
Which is all separate from Joe explaining this to her fam. Or at least it used to be. As Joe told Kaitlyn on the ride into work, “there’s no hiding it now.” She arrives at the safe house late at night, where Neal is holed up in the bar. She’s apprehensive. They have had so many versions of this conversation. But there is only an embrace, and tears together. Joe’s work keeps doing this to them, and she just keeps apologizing.
QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 2 (“No Sorrow Like the Survivor”):
- Carillo, trained as a US Army helicopter pilot, is still pretty new to the Lioness program, and spy shit in general. After the shock of the attack at Joe’s, Cruz gives her a half-sympathetic look. “Welcome to the black side.”
- And this episode also features Bruce McGill as National Security Advisor Monty Hollar. McGill is an all-time, all-time One of Those Guys, ever since he played Hank Weldon in “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” the Emmy-nominated Miami Vice episode from 1986.
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.