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Lioness season three will go down in my personal head canon as the moment the How We Got Here flash-forward TV trope hit rock bottom. It’s one thing to start the season with a flash-forward, enticing the audience to follow the season-long trail back to that moment. It’s another to return to the flash-forward each episode with little in the way of narrative or even thematic justification. “Murder Hornets” goes as far as to split its time between the flash-forward and the main “six months earlier” mission almost exactly in half. What results is a clunky viewing experience that tips the scales in favor of neither timeline, each half feeling like the first half of a full episode. All setup, no payoff.
The flash-forward first half picks up where we left off with a captive Joe, revealed to be at a nondescript air hangar in Baltimore, forced to watch the press conference she orchestrated while she and her Russian captor engage in a little crumbling-empire versus crumbling-empire verbal sparring. The Russian makes what you might call a stereotypical Putinite argument that America needs to watch its democracy fall so the people will “throw away their freedom like trash” and submit to the will of an all-powerful leader (as if we don’t already have an authoritarian problem of our own right now).
But Joe, still tied down to a bedframe as water drips on her face, hits back with some all-American Clint Eastwood-ass snark: “You’re getting the shit kicked out of you by the most obsolete, inept, and corrupt army in all of Central Europe.” Damn, Ukraine is catching strays over here. “A failed monarchy, a failed democracy, failing as a dictatorship. The only reason why Russia still exists is because nobody wants to take away that frozen shithole from you.” Translation: our shithole country is warmer and, for the time being, still fiercer than your shithole country. It’s a cheap but entertaining little fash-off that, at the very least, reiterates the carnal futility of two once-great nations hashing out their century-old squabbles in copies of copies of copies of their old Cold War games.
Back in the conference room on the hill, Byron and Kaitlyn explain the situation and discuss next steps with Secretary Mullins, Chief of Staff Mason, and security advisor Hollar. Typically, these overwrought exposition scenes with this crew split a mean difference between relaying the necessary plot-driving information and entertaining moments where one or two or all of the players get a chance to cook. This one’s just kind of a low-energy bummer that lacks propulsion because they can only reveal so much without revealing the earlier plot details to which the viewer is not yet privy. But the crux of the biscuit goes something like this: the Lioness crew found Joe’s tracker, but Joe is still missing. They’re currently cross-referencing the NSA’s database of vehicles entering and exiting the Russian embassy to identify senior case officers who may be overseeing Joe’s movements. As far as they know, Joe’s captors are trying to get her out of the States and onto Russian soil where they can negotiate a trade for Yurimov. Meanwhile, any information they’ve gleaned from Yurimov while in their custody is likely being altered by Russia already, leaving them with virtually nothing to show for this whole fiasco except living, breathing evidence that they played right into the enemy’s hands.
What’s worse, once they obtain knowledge of past Lioness operations from Joe, Russia could publicly release the identities of past Lioness targets — creating, as Byron puts it, “severe diplomatic consequences for us with various strategic partners in the Middle East,” with a cascade of political damage domestically that is “very difficult to predict.” Russia releasing that information publicly would be bad, but there’s an even gnarlier possibility on the table: Russia hands Joe over to Iran, they release the information, then try Joe and find her guilty. Bottom line: they’ve got 24 to 36 hours before Joe is on a plane to Russia, and Secretary Mullins is itching to inform the President, which would mean informing a critical mass of staff members to make this a public issue anyway.
Back at their current makeshift HQ, the Lioness crew picks up a hit from NSA that leads them to the hangar. Queue this week’s mini-action setpiece—a neat little number in which Josie lands a small helicopter on the roof of the hangar, then the crew blows the doors off on the place only to find, once again, that they’ve missed Joe by mere minutes. The main event, though, comes when Kyle murders one of the two Russian soldiers they’ve captured to get the other one to talk. Things usually get exciting, or at least more intriguing on Lioness when a clash of security clearances, clandestine protocols, etc., throws a little wrench in the crew’s activities. It’s also usually a guilty pleasure to watch Kyle go full psychosuperspy on some poor mother fucker, ya know?
Once back in D.C., Bobby tries to impress upon Kaitlyn the severity of their situation, having just been an accomplice to an execution the Lioness team has nowhere near the authority for. Kyle comes back with a barrage of worst-case scenarios that might occur should Joe successfully be flown out of U.S. territory, including *gasp* presidents losing elections and the U.N. starting war crime tribunals. The whole world wants the U.S. weaker, and whether or not that’s justified, Kyle is the exact type of guy you put in the grey zone to act fast, violently, and with impunity to stop the U.S. government’s worst nightmares from coming true.
Kaitlyn tends to see the situational “wisdom” in what Kyle does every time he crosses a line that Team Lioness can’t during a joint operation. It’s usually exactly why she puts him… wherever she puts him in a given clandestine crisis. But she always knows how to pivot her most devious CIA-pilled instincts with the veneer of responsibility that you gotta project to the higher-ups. She reprimands Kyle just enough to cool his and everyone else’s blood a bit, and reminds Kyle not to play outside the lines with the Lioness crew. But don’t worry, the cavalry who does play outside the lines, she promises, will be coming to Kyle’s aid soon.
Mullins takes the news that Joe’s still missing seemingly in stride, but Byron has to remind him that the Russians might want something more than an even trade for Yurimov. They’ve had a series of embarrassments on the world stage, and taking Yurimov was so embarrassing that it hasn’t even been mentioned. “I worry they want to embarrass us back,” says Byron. Joe has operated in the Middle East for her entire career, which means she has a wealth of information more relevant to Iran than to Russia. As Byron puts it to Mullins, “If Russia hands her off [to Iran], it becomes the sole focus of your foreign policy without leverage until it’s resolved. And getting her back is going to be very, very expensive.”
Though Lioness clearly takes place in a parallel world to ours, where America is at least sorta less cooked in the geopolitical or even late-stage imperial realms, I remain unsure whether it takes place in a world where we’re actively losing an open war with Iran. Mostly because the tenor of all these conversations indicates a barrier of admittedly shaky diplomacy that we’ve already blown well past in real life. Plus, everyone in Lioness’s D.C. maintains something of a Biden-era-toned concern about the “public faith in our government institutions” to the extent that there’s still some faith to be won in our relations with Iran. In any case, Byron agrees that they’ve reached a point of no return in this ongoing rescue mission. Time to let the President and his cabinet know that they ran a painfully unsuccessful capture operation in Ukraine.
Finally, we cut back to six months earlier. Only to be subjected to another McNamara family argument around the Camp Peary breakfast table. Joe tries to get Neal to carry a gun again, even asks him to go do some range shootin’ with one of her guys. His incensed appeals to the Hippocratic oath don’t seem to mean shit to Joe, who can’t see anything outside of neutralizing a threat before it’s even a threat. So he finally just tells her he’s scared of the way the world is and how it became that way, especially if it’s a world where fighting fire with fire is the only viable option. Joe retorts with a lesson from her favorite chapter in the Fascism 101 textbook: conveniently oversimplified world history through the eyes of its conquerors. “The very first political assassination was a pharaoh named Teti in the 23rd century B.C. One could argue Christ was also a political assassination.” Not gonna lie, the way Zoe Saldana over-enunciated “Christ” had me howling. By the way, in which country do you think a radical socialist like my man Jesus would most likely be assassinated for starting a grassroots movement today, hmmmmm? “The world didn’t become this way, Neal,” Joe concludes. “It’s always been this way.” Nothing new here in the way of characterization, for Joe or for Neal, but it does provide the only really satisfying thematic parallel between the two halves of the episode —Joe iterating to her husband more or less the same strong-man sentiments expressed by the Russian agent who has her in captivity six months later.
As for today in How We Got Here land, Joe and crew are still working on Oleksa’s dossier of Russian assets. The next steps are to contact these assets and offer them a way out in exchange for identifying their Russian handlers. Naturally, they start with a night at the club where they make contact with a handsome young buck presumably from the University espionage circuit (prefaced with the whole gang getting together to change into clubwear, all giving comically obvious undercover cop while emanating the locker room scenes of Starship Troopers in accidentally-satirical fashion). Kruz and Josie catch the guy’s eye on the dance floor and invite him to join their impromptu grinding session, which is also when Joe catches the pair touching in a way that suggests relationship-level familiarity. Though likely low on Joe’s priority list, you can bet she’s gonna have a few words to say about two of her Lionesses gumming up the works with a mess of unnecessary feels.
Meanwhile, Kailtyn and Byron meet with the Russian Ambassador Byron chewed up a glass of French wine a couple of episodes ago. Same restaurant, same mudflinging tenor of conversation — Ukraine is rightfully ours this/we kicked your asses in, blah blah blah, that gets them about a half-step further in their cryptic negotiations. Some real American versus Russian mental chess going on here: Kaitlyn and Byron shoot from the hip, hoping the ambassador will take the bait and reveal how much he knows about which Russian assets they either have or don’t have in their possession — including Yurimov, as yet unconfirmed that they captured the real Yurimov to begin with. But the ambassador retorts with evasion, keeping the language cryptic. They lost something that was “valuable” to their President, he explains, and he thinks the U.S. will know how to get it back. You’ll know it when you see it, he assured Kaitlyn and Byron. And when they do see it, maybe they can negotiate a trade to get it back. For his trouble, the ambassador gets the last word. “Have fun with your pretend prize,” he says, giving more credibility to the idea that their Yurimov is not the Yurimov they were looking for.
Back to six months later, the Lioness crew are “still a step behind, and time is not on our side,” as Kaitlyn puts it to Neal on his front porch, breaking the news to him in the bluntest of terms. They’re looking down the barrel of three possible scenarios. One, they beat the clock, and Joe is home in a few days. Two, she’s taken out of the country, and it takes months of negotiations and who knows what else to get her home. Three, she doesn’t make it back. “Prepare for the third,” she says. Already coming unglued, Neal asks Kaitlyn which scenario feels most likely in her gut. Even telling him the third is most likely would have been some form of relief from this most hellish of uncertainties, but all she can say is “I don’t fucking know,” leaving Neal in the emotional and physical fallout of his wife’s fatalistic outlook — the same one that keeps us from the truth that history is ours to write.