Lioness Finale Recap: Engage and Destroy

Special Ops: Lioness
The Unraveling
Season 3 Episode 8
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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Lioness has always been a mess of contradictory political signifiers and anachronistic pop-cultural touchpoints, amounting to a 20th-century-style espionage adventure wrapped in 21st-century military-industrial dystopia. Taylor Sheridan doing his best John Milius since Sicario, to be precise. If you’re anything like me, you’ve found yourself periodically asking whether the show has lost grip on its own admittedly fractured worldview and gone all in on the militant mad-dog fascism of its title character. But every season thus far — not only including but especially this one — has concluded as a perverse, whack, and certainly damning portrait of American war games in an era of steep imperial decline.

The great American “unraveling” (from which the season-three finale ultimately derives its title… in my head canon at least) is made manifest in a series of unravelings that make up the episode’s 70-minute runtime. The extra 15 minutes over the average Lioness runtime doesn’t feel a whole lot justified, nor does it rectify the season’s shoddy How We Got Here-sploitative non-linear structure, but there’s a little of everything the show does best throughout, and the dramatic resolve (or discordance, depending on how you look at it) is sound — even if the final twist is knee-slappin’ vintage-TV nonsense bordering on legitimate camp.

More on that later. First, let’s check in with our friendly neighborhood NSA surveillance center where the good folks behind the army of screens that make up the U.S. government’s cyberpunk Eye of Sauron have lucked into a lead on Joe’s abductors. So while Kyle, Tex, and Randy suit up to track this Russian-national lobbyist IRL, Kaitlyn wakes Joe from a fitful sleep in the office lounge and fills her in on their ongoing theory, courtesy of Errol’s firm’s private data analysis: the abduction plan originated with Ukraine, who used double-agent Oleksa to set the plan in motion in the hopes of escalating US involvement in the war. It remains just a theory, but one they’re already running with at full speed, and Kaitlyn’s pawning the responsibility on Joe to disprove it — either break down the engine of their operational vehicle as they race toward a pre-fabricated conclusion or confirm the target and blammo! Bad guys vanquished… or at the very least, viable scapegoats neutralized.

What’s more, Kaitlyn informs Joe that they’re also giving Aleksi Yurimov back to Russia in hopes of cooling things down between nations, and it’s up to the Lioness herself to see what information she can extract from Yurimov on the flight from Guantanamo to D.C. Speaking of which, our final fancy-breakfast-table showdown of the season, in which Byron and Secretary Mullins manage to win the ever-begrudging Russian ambassador Maxim Petrov over to their plan. Not without the usual late-stage imperial dick-swinging and seeing who can beat who to accusations of world-shattering hypocrisy. Lioness has always operated in a parallel world where the president is a nameless, faceless cipher, with occasional references to world events that sheepishly mirror the actions of ours, but the configuration reaches its schizophrenic breaking point when Petrov makes vague references to Trump’s recent tyrannical squabbles with Venezuela and Greenland as evidence that the U.S. is well past the days of feigning moral arbitration on the world stage. Granted, this is a fictional world in which everyone hates the U.S., even their allies, as Petrov puts it. But off-hand, barely examined references to the real shit show that is current U.S. foreign relations only serve to take one out of the thriller intrigue and fictional facsimiles of spycraft within a fictional U.S. government that isn’t quite so far gone as our own. In any case, the offer to deliver a (mostly) unharmed Yurimov while asking nothing in return seems to seal the deal for Petrov, leaving Mullins with a nagging feeling he hasn’t felt since a week before 9/11. They’ve missed something.

Joe seems equally suspicious of their conclusions, both about Ukraine’s masterminding of and Oleksa’s involvement in her abduction, and she’s particularly unenthused at the prospect of returning Yurimov to Russia after having paid for his capture by going to hell and back several times over. But, as Kaitlyn reminds her, they can’t denounce her abduction without first rectifying the one they did first, and Yurimov will be more than motivated to give Joe information if Ukraine did have anything to do with the operation. Seems like enough to get her back on her feet (still freshly sans one pinky toe) and on another private jet to Guantanamo Bay. 

Our final action scene isn’t the biggest or brashest, but certainly the most nail-biting and, pound for pound, the most consequential of the season. While Joe and most of the Lioness crew head to Guantanamo, Kyle, Tex, and Randy track the Russian energy lobbyist Dimitri Skolov down to a restaurant in D.C. Tex and Randy hang back outside while Kyle watches Skolov’s meeting from the bar, a security camera hacked by the NSA watching over his shoulder. Tapped into the camera feed via laptop on the plane to Guantanamo, Joe recognizes Sokolov’s contact as Renat, her lead abductor. Up until now, the plan had been to keep following and surveilling both Sokolov and his accomplice out of the restaurant. But, in a clear interior fight-or-flight moment, mere hours from the hell she suffered under this guy’s watch, Joe reacts like a missile. “Engage,” she orders Tex and Randy, her faithful boots on the ground, setting off a full-blown shootout in the restaurant that ends in multiple civilian casualties, including a security detail who opened defensive fire once the shooting started. The firefight also lands Tex and Randy in the hospital, with Tex looking touch-and-go for a minute there. It’s a devastating “I am become death” moment for Joe — a moment that only ever comes after you’ve set off the bomb — sealing her fate as the personification of American military bloodlust turned inevitably inward to wreak havoc on the lives it purports to protect. 

Queue the Always Sunny theme as “the gang goes to Guantanamo Bay” in true sexy-stormtrooper-squad fashion, complete with a slow-mo catwalk between rows of caged prisoners that goes on just long enough to also border on camp. Just as they’re arranging the Yurimov transfer to their custody, another prisoner speaks up — the Belarus contract agent they picked up in the Two Cups/call-girl sting operation. Upon further interrogation, this guy identifies both Sokolov and Renat as key players in her abduction. As he frames it, he’s one of many former Wagner Group operatives who scrambled for mercenary work from any source after the organization fell, and one of many to whom Joe’s abduction was “shopped.” He turned down the offer on its face — too much risk, not enough money. But he knows the deal originated with Sokolov, who then brokered it to Renat to carry out with other hired hands. As for who put Joe’s abduction out on the proverbial black-market bulletin in the first place, they’re still only acting on theories. But this guy presents a theory that leads them, however incrementally, away from their working Ukraine one and closer to the truth. Whoever hired Sokolov and Renat “is seeking revenge,” he says. “For what? I don’t know. You figure out the what, you know the who.”

Joe’s fateful conversation with Yurimov en route to D.C. for his handoff produces similar theories. This wasn’t a Ukraine operation. It was someone or some national entity not only motivated by revenge but willing to act on it at great risk. “Iran is only criminals,” Yurimov suggests, appealing to a fellow soldier’s xenophobic, conveniently oversimplified view of an enemy from far across the battlefield. “Their government thinks like criminals. Acts like criminals. Motivated by fear, revenge. Does Iran have reason to seek vengeance against you? Do they have reason to fear you?” 

Since all these fools are still thinking of this operation in terms of nation-states vs. nation-states, Iran does seem like the most likely arbiter of the abduction — at least, more likely than Ukraine. Too bad they’ve already orchestrated the murder of their scapegoat, Oleksa. Back in D.C., Joe barely has time to react to Oleksa’s demise when Kaitlyn sweeps it aside and urges everyone into the next steps of their investigation. “We couldn’t take the risk,” she admonishes. “She had too much information. What’s done is done.” 

Kaitlyn is good at her job because she’s a shark — always moving forward, teeth bare, until a crisis is devoured. Collateral chum be damned. Joe has always been ruthless, but never quite as tunnel-visioned in her motivations. A mission is only successful if it ends with returning to a warm home and family. But this mission ends with the unjust, unceremonious murder of a sister in arms and an empty home to return to. In the place of her husband and daughters, Joe finds a for-sale sign in the front yard and a note on the kitchen counter. Its contents aren’t divulged to the viewer, but there’s no need. Neal’s utterly defeated aura at the end of the previous episode already said it all. Their family life has been broken beyond repair, all in the name of preserving the illusion of a “way of life.” For the Lioness, every order to “engage is an order to engage and destroy. 

So where does that leave Lioness the show? As of now, no official renewal for a fourth season has been announced, but that doesn’t stop Sheridan and Co. from orchestrating a cliffhanger ending that’s both delightfully pulpy and thematically appropriate. Via the show’s signature ass-focused male-gaze visual motif, Aaliyah — the subject of season one’s Lioness mission that ended with the assassination of her terrorist-financier father — emerges from a luxurious bath at her penthouse in Qatar, having just received the news that her second attempt to abduct Joe has failed. She’ll try again, she suggests; third time’s the charm and so forth. If they succeed in nabbing Joe, the rest of the Lioness crew will follow. On the surface, the notion that all of this was orchestrated by a season one protagonist-turned-antagonist who’s got personal beef with Team Lioness and not the counter-espionage games of an actual nation-state feels akin to a Marvel-movie post-credit stinger. Still, there’s some serious potential here for an entertaining redemption (or final damnation) arc for Joe, and the other cats of Team Lioness should a fourth season materialize. Plus, our captive Russian agents were right about one thing: this was an act of vengeance. Clandestine action begets retribution, which begets chaos — the only status quo Central Intelligence has ever known.