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“No Sorrow Like the Survivor” opens with another flash-forward, picking up where the previous episode’s cold open left off. Joe has just been abducted from her car, right in front of her house. A briefly harrowing scene follows where armed assailants take her to a nondescript suburban location, hold her down on the ground, strip her clothes off, and threaten to “cut her in half” to find the tracker they know she’s got sewn into her somewhere. With no other option, Joe relents and lets them cut the tracker from between her toes. Just a bloody shard of metal on the ground in an empty house by the time the Lioness team gets to it. It’s an awkward, hat-on-a-hat-ass tension-baiting opener as we cut back six months earlier to the first attack on Joe’s home. Not much in the way of new or novel information from the previous opener, but it does provide visceral emphasis on the fact that, by taking the Ukraine job, the Lioness crew has unwittingly opened a Pandora’s box of clandestine counterassaults on home turf.
Cruz has just arrived home at Fort Bragg and settled into a sexy bath with maybe-girlfriend(?) Josie when the call to report to Joe’s house comes in. Before the whole scene of domestic bliss is cut short, Cruz and Josie discuss their looming irrelevance as human foot soldiers in a future of wars fought by machines, finding brief solace in each other’s out-of-uniform bodies. In any case, the burgeoning Cruz-Josie relationship should make for a welcome change-up in relationship drama from the endless and, at this point, aimless Joe-Neal domestic saga.
Speaking of which, Joe is exhausted and sitting in her stairwell when Kaitlyn arrives at her house and rushes her out to report to the bigwigs before she even gets a chance to say good-bye to her family. Thankfully, the rest of the Lioness cavalry has arrived, complete with those Spirit Halloween–lookin’-ass FBI windbreakers and caps to blend in with the other Feds, and bring the remaining, non-special-ops-trained McNamaras to safety. “We got ’em, boss,” Bobby tells Joe as the team passes her at the door. Honestly, could you think of another badass you’d rather leave your vulnerable family with? Gotta say, Jill Wagner’s singular swag still makes her the No. 1 candidate to star in the next Die Hard or Lethal Weapon remake or John Wick spinoff or whatever.
En route to HQ for the debrief with Morgan Freeman’s Secretary Mullins (always a welcome presence, but already looking a little checked out in this quick-paycheck role here), Joe starts to put the pieces together. Her assailants — now identified as Belarus nationals and contract hires — knocked on her door and identified themselves as state police (without badges) not because they’re amateurs, but because they had to improvise their approach. Joe was in her living room with a drink at the same time she’s usually upstairs taking a shower, which means these contract agents have had eyes on her for a while. Kaitlyn rebuts with a classic bit of demonic America-first CIA wisdom: “You’re a senior case officer. You’re untouchable, especially within our borders. Because if you aren’t, the whole world knows it’s open fucking season on every asset they have, wherever we find them.” But the old adage of “might is right” under the American empire’s thumb becomes a bite in the ass in the new age of imperial decline. Whoever was behind the invitation to the Ukraine operation did so as a pretext for an open-season situation on American soil. Eye for an eye. Chaos at home for chaos abroad.
The whole case as it stands is laid out in Secretary Mullins’s briefing room with the usual murderer’s row of HQ participants. Chief of Staff Mason (Jennifer Ehle) comes in particularly hot, pouring herself a coffee at breakneck speed. “I was on my fourth glass of Champagne, so I am going to need information delivered in very brief, very precise phrases,” she admonishes. Jennifer Ehle always brings the heat bordering on camp to lines like these, and every season, she appears just enough to make me go, “Oh, yeah, Jennifer Ehle’s in this … HELL yeah.” Anyway, Mullins opens the meeting by dangling the promise of a near-future desk job in front of Joe. “Then all of these obstacles you’ve overcome will be the reason people don’t argue with your recommendations. Because your understanding of the consequences is not theoretical.” Joe seems to appreciate the acknowledgment, but the desk-job offer has come too late to save her family from torment and her from a war-torn path that’s already hollowed her out, body and soul.
As for the present, Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) enters the conversation hot off this week’s gold-medal Dum Clancy scene where he chews out a Russian head of state in the middle of a restaurant. “There’s a line, Byron, and you crossed it,” the Russian says. “And now there is no line.” Byron responds with a lot of hot air about the “ass whoopin’” the Russians have been taking in Ukraine and how they’re gonna feed the operatives in their possession to the “wolves at Gitmo,” etc. But he and the rest of U.S. intelligence have already played into their hands. As he debriefs Mullins & Co. on the situation, Byron theorizes that Joe was spotted in Ukraine, then officially identified via airport security footage but not yet directly tied to the Yurimov-abduction operation. Byron also brings word that the Lioness team has captured the remaining contract agents. Joe cuts through the noise and lays it all out in plain English: The Russians have had ample opportunity to make her in the field, and they never have. Then they meet a Ukrainian double agent who offers a giant unsolicited prize in Aleksi Yurimov. Two weeks later, still minutes after landing back in the U.S., Joe is attacked by contract agents in her home in Fairfax. Occam’s razor: They were set up by the Ukrainian agent, and Joe’s guess is Yurimov is still on the Russian front while they’re stuck with “some actor from the fucking Mossovet Theatre” in his place.
Following the debrief, Kyle and Cruz pick up Ukrainian agent Oleksandra Balakin (Elizaveta Neretin) at a club, where all the powerful D.C. people seem to be hobnobbing with all the spies like some kind of shadow embassy where the real diplomatic moves are made. The apparent breach of protocol is enough to lure Oleksandra out into the big black SUV. In the immediate future, they’re taking her in for what’s sure to be some gnarly questioning. In the long term, we may be looking at the origins of this season’s unofficial “new Lioness.” The episode closes out on Joe’s arrival at the base camp Peary, where Neal and her daughters are staying. (“It’s a nice house,” notes Kaitlyn in the debrief. “The last resident was a four-star, you know how those guys like to live.” Nice.) Joe falls apart in Neal’s arms, apologizing over and over between sobs, a more heightened version of the same place we’ve seen these two end up like at least twice every season. The episode’s more compelling end note comes in the scene right before. Josie is watching over the sleeping McNamara sisters in the darkness. Call my bias on account of my Sicario and, well, Lioness fandom, but I’ll be damned if Taylor Sheridan’s neo-western-tinged scenes don’t go hardest when women are at the center of them. Kate asks Josie if she “like, knows karate or something?,” playing sarcastic teenager while trying to get a read on the type of women that do what her mom does and, by extension, the type of woman her mom is. “You got a gun?” Kate asks. Josie nods in silence with a steely Eastwood stare. “Guess that beats karate.” It’s the new Wild West for the warrior queens of the Lioness crew — a Starship Troopers–esque vision of the future where the next generation of analog girlboss-soldier is already under recruitment to fight the next world war alongside machines.
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