Lioness Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: Why Did the Russian Spies Target Joe?

Special Ops: Lioness Season 3 follows up its brutal premiere with an episode called No Sorrow Like the Survivor, and it deals almost entirely with the mess left behind. Last week ended with Zoe Saldaña‘s Joe McNamara killing two men who came to her front door pretending to be state police, while her husband watched from the hallway.

This hour picks up after both the present timeline and past timeline set up in the premiere episode. Minutes after she dropped the bodies, the agency floods her quiet neighbourhood with operators. Her team starts asking the most important question of the hour: how did the Russians find her at all? Here is everything that goes down.

What Happens After Joe Kills Two Men at Her Home?

The new episode of Lioness Season 3 takes its time to drop back into the six-months-earlier timeline. We are briefly taken to Fort Bragg, where Cruz and Josie get a steamy romantic moment together, before word arrives from Joe’s house. Every member of the team, including those two, is pulled straight back on duty.

Nicole Kidman‘s Kaitlyn Meade arrives at the scene, and the bodies on the floor give up their first clue quickly. Both men were carrying Armenian passports, but they are Belarusian nationals. For Kaitlyn, that is close enough to an answer. She tells Michael Kelly’s Byron Westfield that Russia could be behind this, then takes Joe away to the office for briefing.

What follows is the most purely entertaining stretch of the episode. Joe’s Quick Reaction Force floods the surrounding streets. The team is convinced Russian surveillance is still watching, and they are right. Tucker climbs onto a roof for a high-ground view and picks out a spotter sitting in the neighbourhood.

Two Cups and Randy go after him, while Tucker finds a second man possibly working with the rooftop spotter. Both are taken, and the team determines that there would be a getaway car nearby. Randy baits the driver out into the open and kills him.

There is something genuinely strange and exciting about watching these elite operators hop suburban fences and clear rooftops past manicured lawns in the early morning. The gunfire eventually wakes the whole street and further traumatizes Joe’s family.

Meanwhile, Kaitlyn and Joe have a brief and plain conversation en route. Joe’s family finally knows what she really does, and her two children have been traumatised. Joe can only assume that her husband will want to divorce her over it.

What Is Joe’s Theory on How the Russians Found Her?

The theory takes shape in a debrief with Morgan Freeman’s Secretary of State, Edwin Mullins, who wants to know how Joe was identified in the first place. Kaitlyn’s first guess is a double agent somewhere in Ukraine, though she admits it is thin. Byron floats a different possibility that Joe was only made once she was back on American soil.

Joe lands on something colder. What if the informant who handed them Aleksi Yurimov is the same person who handed them Joe? She suggests that the entire Donetsk operation may have been bait, with a high-value target dangled to pull the team into the open. She even puts forth the possibility that the man they know as Yurimov could be an actor.

Acting on that, Cruz and Tex are diverted mid-task. Both were part of the group escorting Joe’s family to a safe house, and both were peeled off halfway through and sent after the informant instead. Kyle arranges a meeting with Elizaveta Neretin’s Oleksandra Balakin, and the three of them take her.

Meanwhile, Joe comes home to her family (to a new safe house). When she meets her husband, she breaks down and apologizes, which emotionally wraps up the episode.

Joe’s Present Storyline in Lioness Season 3 Takes a Much Darker Turn

All these things happen after an intense opening that continues the events of Joe’s present timeline, where she is kidnapped. Joe is driven to a safe house, and she fights the whole way. Once inside, she is stripped of everything and searched inch by inch for a tracking device.

The scene runs long, and deliberately so, though some viewers will find that it holds on to the cruelty longer than it needs to. Eventually Joe breaks and tells them where the locator is. Her team follows the signal to the first safe house and finds an empty room and a tracker that has already been cut out of her body. Whoever has Joe is now completely invisible.

Kaitlyn is back at Joe and Neal’s doorsteps, and she informs Neal of the situation. They don’t want Joe’s kids to know about the situation, so he takes them to school on another route. The episode leaves the family distressed in both timelines.

M.N. Miller of FW gave the show a 9/10 in our review of Lioness Season 3 and praised the show as “a spectacular pressure cooker of espionage, politics, and personal sacrifice.”

What did you think of No Sorrow Like the Survivor? Let us know in the comments!

The second episode of Lioness Season 3 is now available for streaming on Paramount+.