Lioness Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: What Does the SVR Want With Joe?

Special Ops: Lioness returns with Murder Hornets, and the title pays off a codename the team hands out in this very episode. Episode 3 closed with a captive Joe McNamara, played by Zoe Saldaña, being forced to watch the press conference she herself engineered. This hour picks up from there and finally answers where her kidnappers are taking her.

It also delivers the most frustrating sequence of the season so far, as her team gets close enough to touch her and still comes away with nothing. Meanwhile, the CIA works through what Russia could actually do with a woman who knows every Lioness operation of the last decade. Here is everything that goes down.

Joe’s Team Is One Step Behind the Kidnappers

The episode opens in the present, with Joe tied up and trading barbs with the Russian agent holding her. It turns into a heated argument about their two countries, and it also gives away the one detail about the abduction. They are in Baltimore, and there is a private plane waiting. Joe is dragged out to it, and the aircraft rolls out of the hangar.

Her team eventually gets there, but they are too late. With help from the NSA, they pin down the hangar and plan an airborne assault, dropping in from a helicopter and moving in. It is a terrific sequence, right up to the moment they clear the room where Joe was being kept and find it empty.

What follows is an ugly scene. The Russians left behind give up nothing, and Kyle executes one of them on the spot. A second man breaks and provides the plane’s tail number, but by then it has already departed. Amber Whelan works the problem from her end and cannot locate the flight. Byron later tells Morgan Freeman‘s Edwin Mullins they missed her by ten minutes.

The killing does not go unnoticed. Bobby takes issue with what Kyle did, and Nicole Kidman‘s Kaitlyn Meade warns him about it directly before assigning him to bring Oleksandra Balakin back in. Privately, her instruction is narrower than it first sounds. She does not tell Kyle to stop. She tells him not to do it in front of the Lioness team again.

The jumps between the present and six months earlier are becoming harder to track. The episodes shuffle them more aggressively with each episode, and the narrative structure is something the show should reconsider.

What Does the CIA Think the SVR Wants With Joe?

Nicole Kidman’s Kaitlyn and Michael Kelly’s Byron meet with Morgan Freeman’s Secretary of State to discuss Joe’s kidnapping. When Mullins asks if they were able to get anything out of Yurimov, Byron tells him that his information cannot be trusted.

What worries them is the fact that Joe carries the details of every past Lioness operation. If the SVR extracts that and makes it public, the targets become a diplomatic catastrophe, with allies exposed and the UN forced to take a position.

The worst case Kaitlyn lays out is bleaker still. Russia hands Joe to Iran, which puts the program on trial, tries her for it, and convicts her. Byron also later suggests that Russia could use her to bring embarrassment to the U.S., after their extraction of Yurimov embarrassed them.

Byron floats the idea of a straight trade with no other options. Mullins says that decision belongs to the President. Later, Kaitlyn drives to the McNamara house and tells Neal to prepare for the possibility that his wife does not come home.

The Lioness Team Sets a Plan in Motion in the Past Timeline

In the six-months-earlier timeline, the McNamara household is still raw from the drive that terrified the girls. Neal decides not to send them to school, and he and Joe argue over it. During the argument, Joe reiterates the demand that Neal has to go to a range and learn to shoot a gun. Afterwards, the two finally make peace. He admits he is frightened for her and for their daughters.

At the operation briefing, everything gets a codename. Kyle’s team becomes Hornet, and Balakin becomes Badger. The plan is to use the assets Balakin handed over to them in a document and to trace their handlers. The Lioness team will be working undercover to bring in the assets.

It goes live on two fronts. At the hotel, where Kaitlyn and Byron meet Russian diplomats to discuss the press conference, Balakin marks one of the assets for Amber Whelan. Meanwhile, the Russian diplomats also hint at the Yurimov situation and demand that the U.S. hand him back. Simultaneously, at a club, the Lioness team looks for other assets. Josie pulls a marked asset onto the dance floor with Cruz.

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

What did you think of Murder Hornets? Let us know in the comments!

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