Can’t remember a time we ever cried during any kind of action thing. But dammit Taylor Sheridan, you got our waterworks flowing with Episode 7 of Lioness Season 3 on Paramount+, and Joe’s harrowing, bullets flying, clinging-to-the-rungs-of-a-chopper rescue by her team. Sheridan-O-Verse? More like sobbin’-O-verse!
When Babat the toe-cutter appeared at the end of last episode, we took a hard look at the prospect of Joe not making it out of this one. Her plight, all bad since since the moment she was abducted, was suddenly even more bad. Which is where this penultimate episode of the season — its best yet — begins.
Joe has been stuffed in an SUV, for transport who knows where. And while her people stand ready nearby, they remain in the dark. The frustration is agonizing. Bobby, Cruz, Two Cups, and Tucker check and recheck their weapons and NODs devices; Josie sits in the cockpit of the MH-6M “Little Bird,” ready to take off. And Kyle and the Delta guys depart the scene of the airstrip showdown, still in search of a target. “My night ain’t over when I get in a gunfight,” he tells a pushy federal investigator. “It’s just beginning. And I highly doubt this was the last gunfight of the night.”
Kyle is correct. Texas PD ends up doing a traffic stop on Babat’s SUV convoy. Joe’s in the back, being warned not to make a sound, but with the shroud removed, she’s immediately calculating variables of escape and survival. She cries out as the local cops approach the driver’s window, and all hell breaks loose. These police have no answer for the automatic weapons of Babat’s crew, but while they’re pinned down, their cruisers getting chewed up by bullets, Joe viciously attacks her captors. The SUV crashes while fleeing, Joe recovers a pistol, kills Babat. She pries open the back door. And as a pitched battle rages between the cops and surviving gunmen, Joe limp-runs desperately into an adjacent soccer field.
“Shit! Looks like you’re down a toe.” Bobby and Cruz are the first to their boss’s side, and Joe, a ball of adrenalized damage, finally breaks down. For as many operations and sticky situations this veteran CIA officer has experienced, the sense is that her terrible ordeal — and everyone’s understanding of how close she really came to a tragic end — is all new material. For Joe’s quick reaction force, for Kyle, the stress of her search and rescue boils off like a burning powder magazine. “We got her.” The boss is back. For us, throughout three seasons of Lioness, we’ve never felt closer to these characters.
So who grabbed Joe? And with what motive? Who was Renat working for? For that matter, who was Babat cutting off toes for? What nation or rogue government or spy world entity had the resources and wherewithal to abduct a CIA officer on American soil, right out of her driveway? Back at Langley, Meade and Westfield have developed a working theory, and it’s a shocker.
With input from Kaitlyn’s husband Errol, a think tank guy, who has “factored all known integers of this equation,” the only answer is Ukraine. He says the radical nature of Joe’s abduction follows no known policies of usual global suspects like China, Russia, or even Iran, and the CIA brass brings the theory to Secretary of State Mullins. “We believe that the double agent who brought us the Yurimov op and orchestrated intelligence raids against foreign assets here was playing a much longer game.”
Oleksandra? Say it ain’t so! We just got done professing that she should join the Lioness team! But Meade and Westfield stress that Ukraine must have run Joe’s kidnapping to stimulate a military response by the US against its traditional enemies. Russia, for example, would not want that. And would be pressured into a ceasefire with Ukraine. A country America financially supports in its war against an aggressor. Mullins tents his fingers. “Where do I move the chess piece?” The secretary wonders. “What is the chess piece?”
For Joe, her next move is more clear. Patched up but still limping badly, and still wearing the other visible wounds from her abduction, she is being driven home to see her family — literally stopped in front of their home — when she tells Bobby to keep going. She will stay in the field. It would do no good to return to them now, to the embrace of her husband and daughters, with so many uncertainties still raging. (Imagine if she were attacked again.) Joe calls Neal instead. Says she’s okay. Don’t worry. She’ll be home soon. Kiss the girls for her. And Neal, like he has so often been through the course of this series, is confused and hurt by his wife’s decision. Work over family. Again. Even after all of this, the most dangerous things have ever gotten.
“When you say you’ll be home soon, do you mean tonight?”
“I mean when it’s over.”
QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 7 (“Kiss the Girls”):
- Another part of Byron’s theorizing concerns the actions of Babat and his men, which could reveal their intent. The flight crew chose to engage, and died for it. The crew in the SUV did the same. None of it was tactical, “which means this is not a Russian operation. This was ideologically motivated.”
- When Westfield and Meade bring their Ukraine theory to Mullins, he cuts to the chase. In not so many words, they are lobbying to silence Oleksandra. Permanently. “Byron, it’s murder. Is it something we must do? Perhaps. But don’t ever delude yourself into thinking it’s anything different.”
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.