What’s Left for Lioness Season 3 After Episode 7?

4 min readLaMonica Garrett summed it up the best this week on Lioness. After chasing Joe’s (Zoe Saldaña) captors and bouncing the responsibility for the kidnapping from Russia to Iran, to Ukraine, and then back to Iran again, his character states halfway through this penultimate episode: “Man, I’m so passed trying to figure out what the fuck this was.” I’m right there with him.For six weeks now, Lioness has basically beat around the bush as the CIA played catch-up. Taylor Sheridan created an intriguing mystery for season 3 and then hid the answer to “Who kidnapped Joe?” in a web of red herrings and potential false-flag operations. That’s how you pad out an eight-episode season of task force espionage. But as we approached this penultimate episode, I found myself still waiting for Lioness to tackle something greater than a simple rescue mission. Thankfully, we’re getting there.Before season 3, Sheridan’s political action spectacle often stood out because he wasn’t afraid to criticize the nation’s policies even as his main characters continued to carry them out. Joe, after all, wouldn’t be a senior CIA case officer in charge of the Lioness program if she didn’t believe in the work. So, season 1 focused on a new recruit, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira). Sheridan could thrust Cruz into the dangerous world of international spycraft and force her to question every action of the Lioness team from the perspective of an outsider. When she learned that her entire mission didn’t accomplish anything but dead bodies and a change in oil prices, she broke.That changed when Cruz decided to stick around, and especially as the plot for season 3 shifted to her recovering Joe from a mysterious kidnapping at all costs. Lioness seemed to stall a bit on the why of it all as it pursued the who instead. Meanwhile, Sheridan had Joe’s team make speech after speech about how their version of freedom meant that it was okay to encroach on others. The irony, of course, is that Joe’s autonomy is immediately taken from her when she’s abducted in her own home. It isn’t until episode 7, when she’s finally found, that our story finally takes a step back to recontextualize how the CIA’s brand of foreign diplomacy never ceases to stop biting itself back in the ass.Ryan Green“So, where do I move the chess piece?” the Secretary of State asks. “What is the chess piece?”Case in point: The highest levels of our national security can’t even figure out which of our enemies kidnapped Joe in the first place because America has nothing but enemies abroad. As LaMonica Garrett’s character says, “figuring out who the fuck this was” has taken up 100 percent of the plot and placed the majority of season 3 in exposition-filled boardroom meetings with CIA Deputy Director Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) and Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman).This episode? Kaitlyn’s (Nicole Kidman) conspiracy-riddled husband Errol (Martin Donovan) implants the idea that maybe Ukraine set the kidnapping up with Russian contract agents to provoke the U.S. into joining the war. I’m so glad Sheridan doesn’t use any more animal logic to explain this like he did in episode 3, because this is the most bird-brained take yet. And still, Kaitlyn and Byron bring the theory to Mullins.“So, where do I move the chess piece?” the Secretary of State asks. “What is the chess piece?” His brain is scrambled. So is mine.That’s why it’s so funny when the Lionesses finally save Joe and kill her captors this week because a local police office pulls the villains over. His team is riddled with gunfire before the Lionesses arrive. When they leave, the officer states, “Those guys saved my life, man... Fucking guardian angels” with full sincerity. Every time I think I have Sheridan pinned down, he busts out some CIA hero worship like that. Then, he turns around and makes them look like the dumbest people on the planet.Despite having no evidence to pin the kidnapping on Ukraine, Byron suggests to Mullins that they take out the double agent they promised to protect.“It’s a lot to think about,” Mullins says. “Forgive me for taking some time to consider authorizing the murder of a woman.”It’s not murder to Byron, he says, “It’s war.”“No, Byron,” Mullins reminds him. “It’s murder. Is it something we must do? Maybe. But don’t ever delude yourself into thinking its anything different.”Ryan GreenWhy won’t Joe just go home?A part of me believes that this is the ideological epiphany this season has been working toward. That as Joe and her team bend every law to justify executing foreign agents, they can’t block out the fact that they’re doing the same dirty work as their enemies. Is Joe’s kidnapping any different than a mission her team would feasibly carry out against Russia, or Iran, or China? Freeman reminds Byron that it’s all the same, no matter what side is pointing the gun.But now that Joe’s free an episode earlier than expected, there’s clearly more work to be done. She calls her husband (Dave Annable) and tells him that she can’t come home until it’s over. “When is it over?” he asks. He can tell that answer may be “Never.”“I’m gonna figure out who is behind this,” she tells her team, “and I’m gonna kill them.”With Mullins’s words in mind, one has to question whether that is the appropriate response here. There’s no doubt audiences want to see that retribution in next week’s finale. But what are all these war games leading to? Are there more revelations to share about how their CIA work often leads to simple stock manipulations and other useless jockeying for power? Because it seems, until possibly next week, that Joe still hasn’t learned anything.