Lioness Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: Who Is Behind Joe’s Kidnapping?

Special Ops: Lioness returns with its sixth episode, Sugar Land, where we finally learn more about Joe’s kidnapping. It is directed by D.J. Caruso and written by Taylor Sheridan. Episode 5 ended with a captive Joe spotting a Texas flag through a car window, confirming she never left the country.

This hour finally answers the question about Joe’s kidnapper, and it is not the one everyone in the CIA assumed. It also closes the past timeline out with a senator taking the “coward’s way out” on a Virginia highway, before handing the rest of the runtime to her rescue operation. Here is everything that goes down.

Who Kidnapped Joe in Lioness Season 3?

For six episodes, every character has worked on the same assumption that Russia took Zoe Saldaña‘s Joe as payback for Aleksi Yurimov. However, this episode reveals that assumption is wrong. The episode squarely points to Iran as the culprit behind the operation.

And we learn exactly who in the closing minutes of the episode. Renat, the SVR man attached to the Russian embassy, was offered a large sum to blackjack a CIA senior case officer (Joe), and he took the money. He then used his own contacts to hire Belarusian contract agents, the same crew that came to Joe’s front door in the premiere.

They ran the abduction using a standard Russian exfil playbook, thus keeping the CIA in the dark about Iran’s involvement. By the end of the hour, Renat’s job is finished. He hands Joe over to Babat, the Iranian agent who will take her the rest of the way.

Babat explains exactly what waits for her, promising to keep her alive through it so she becomes an example. Then he cuts off one of her toes. As the episode closes, we see her taken away in a car.

How Is Oleksandra Balakin Helping the Team Find Her?

Elizaveta Neretin as Oleksandra Balakin in Lioness Season 3 | Credits: Paramount+

The episode wraps up the past timeline, with the espionage ring completely rounded up. Secretary of State Edwin Mullins calls Senator Ryan Olson to a breakfast meeting, where he is confronted by Joe, Kaitlyn Meade, and Byron Westfield.

Byron gives him two options. Resign the next day and stay free but permanently barred from any post that could help a foreign power, or refuse and face prosecution and the seizure of everything he owns. Once the others leave, Joe offers a third option. He can kill himself, and that’s what Ryan took.

The arrests keep spreading in the background, past thirty-seven people, and the FBI even moves on the Russian embassy itself. In a meeting afterwards, the team discusses Oleksandra Balakin, now in witness protection. Kyle argues that protection is meaningless because Russian intelligence can reach into those databases anyway. Mullins tells him to find her first.

That is where the present timeline picks it up. Kyle tracks her to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she has been living as Paige Weaver, and arrives with Cody J and Grady. She is told about Joe’s kidnapping situation, and it is Balakin who offers some helpful insights.

She reads the situation immediately. Any aircraft flying without a filed plan would have been intercepted, so Joe never left American airspace. An operation on this scale costs upwards of a hundred million dollars, which narrows the list of possible paymasters.

Balakin puts out Iran as one of the top possibilities, and understands from Kyle’s expression that Joe has led a major operation against Iran previously. She explains the playbook used by the Belarusian contract agents. She guesses what the team needs. Joe will be taken to a private terminal in Houston, even suggesting the exact one (Kleberg County), and that she will be taken in a Global 8000.

The Lioness Team Is Running Out of Options to Find Joe

Zoe Saldaña and Laysla De Oliveira in Lioness Season 3 | Credits: Paramount+

Amber Whelan lays out the brutal maths to the team on the flight to Texas. There are three windows left for them to retrieve Joe safely. They are the safe house, the transit between vehicles, and the moment Joe is walked into the private terminal. Once that aircraft is airborne, she is as good as dead.

Kyle’s team finds the jet, and the interrogation of the first officer is going fine until three more men in pilot uniforms start walking towards them. They are the transit crew, and Grady and Cody J put all three down. The pilot takes his own life rather than talk. The aircraft is neutralised, but so is the team’s clearest shot at an intercept.

The worst near-miss belongs to Tex and Randy, working through the safe house list. They pull up outside the very house where Joe is being held. Randy wants to clear it. Whelan tells them to work the suspicious locations first and circle back. They drive on, and Babat moves her out not long after.

Now that Babat has changed plans, we are just not sure how the team will find her in time. We have two more episodes this season, which means the mission is far from over.

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 Sugar Land? Let us know in the comments!

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