Season 3 finale and waiting for season 4?

The final episode of the third season of Lioness was more or less exactly what I expected it to be. The reveal of who was behind Joe's kidnapping did not particularly surprise me, nor did the confirmation that was not actually the person everyone had been looking for. The latter, in particular, leaves a rather strange taste because she essentially died for something she did not do. The CIA believed she was responsible, made the decision to eliminate her, and only later did we understand that they had been hunting the wrong person.

And that is perhaps the most interesting part of Oleksandra's story. There was no final major revelation that justified her death, nor some heroic last stand. The information was simply wrong, and the decision was made based on that wrong information. Lioness once again shows how easily a person can disappear inside the machinery of a covert operation, especially when everyone is working with incomplete information and nobody has the luxury of waiting until they are absolutely certain.

Elizaveta Neretin, who played Oleksandra, revealed after the finale that Taylor Sheridan had told her in advance that her character would die. She also did not consider the death completely unexpected, since Oleksandra knew that once she had found herself in the position of a double agent, becoming expendable was always a possibility. The way her death is presented is also characteristic of the season. We do not get a huge action sequence or some spectacular final moment. Oleksandra realizes that something has gone wrong and, shortly afterwards, she is dead.

Meanwhile, Joe and her team’s investigation begins to take the story somewhere else. The information they get from Guantánamo changes the picture we had up to that point. Joe’s kidnapping was not a direct operation by a government, but a job that had passed through a network of people and contractors. Kata'ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, the Iran-backed Iraqi militia connected to the operation, is behind it, while Renat and the Belarusian contractor Sokolov are pieces of a much larger network that has been hired to carry out the job.

Somewhere in the middle of all this comes one of the most important scenes of the episode, the one at the restaurant. The CIA has located Dmitri Sokolov and Kyle is assigned to follow him. The initial objective is essentially surveillance and intelligence gathering. Sokolov is not the man who kidnapped Joe, but an intermediary connected to the network who could potentially lead them to the people behind the operation. Kyle follows him to the restaurant, while Tex and Randy assist with the surveillance and placing a tracker on his car.

The situation changes the moment Renat appears. Joe is watching the operation remotely and, as soon as she sees him on the feed, she recognizes him as one of the men who held her captive. Up to that point, the operation is controlled. There is a target, there is time to watch him and there is the possibility of following the network and finding out more. Joe, however, is no longer looking at this as a simple target. She is looking at the man who tortured her.

Tex asks whether they should continue watching them or move in, and Joe gives the order to proceed. It is a decision that comes more from her need to get her hands on one of the people responsible for what happened to her than from the cold logic of the operation. That is precisely what makes the scene so important to the rest of the episode. Joe is not simply making a tactical mistake. For the first time, we see clearly that her personal trauma is beginning to affect the way she operates.

The team moves into the restaurant and Renat realizes almost immediately that something has changed. He does not try to escape or surrender. He turns back toward the table and shoots Sokolov, killing him before he can talk and give the Americans the information they were looking for. Tex and Randy open fire on Renat, and the situation gets out of control within seconds.

The operation then turns into a full-blown bloodbath. An African diplomatic delegation with armed security is also inside the restaurant, people who have absolutely nothing to do with the CIA operation. They see gunfire, armed men exchanging shots and react as any security detail would if they believed the person they were protecting was under attack. They open fire as well, and within the chaos there are casualties on all sides. Tex and Randy are wounded, the diplomatic security detail becomes involved in the firefight and a man who was there for an entirely different reason ends up dead.

The scene works even better because Joe is watching it all from a distance. She is not there to see events unfold in front of her and react. She gave the order from behind a screen and now has to watch the consequences unfold without being able to stop them. Kyle is on the ground trying to deal with the chaos, Tex and Randy are wounded, the police are beginning to arrive, and an operation that was supposed to give the team a crucial piece of the puzzle has turned into a diplomatic nightmare.

And this is where, for me, the whole point of the scene becomes clear. Kyle is not the one who made the mistake. He followed Sokolov, did the job he was assigned to do and then found himself trying to contain an operation whose parameters had changed at the last moment. Yet he is the one who has to deal with the immediate consequences. Later, he is confronted by his superiors over how badly the operation went, while Joe knows perfectly well that the decision that set the entire situation in motion was hers. Kaitlyn also knows what happened and chooses not to let Joe openly take the blame.

That makes the scene much more important than just another impressive Lioness shootout. It is essentially the first real proof that Joe, after her kidnapping, is no longer the same operationally controlled person we saw before. Her obsession with finding out who took her and why is completely understandable on a human level, but once that need starts determining her operational decisions, the result is disastrous. And the series uses it as a direct setup for what follows with Oleksandra: Joe has already made one wrong call and has already paid a heavy price for it.

Then comes the revelation that connects the entire third season back to the first.

Aaliyah Amrohi.

The familiar face from the first season is revealed to have orchestrated the story behind Joe's kidnapping. Aaliyah is now a completely different person from the woman we met in Season 1. Her life was destroyed by Cruz's operation, her father was killed and her fiancé was also lost in that story. Years later, Aaliyah has returned, and revenge is no longer simply something she carries with her. It has become her entire plan.

And that explains the real cliffhanger of the episode.

Toward the end, Aaliyah orders her assistant to try again, so that they will come to rescue her and she can capture them all. That is when we understand that Joe's kidnapping was never the final objective. Joe is being used as bait. Aaliyah wants to bring the entire Lioness team close to her and trap them. The scene is essentially the first clear indication of where the story could go from here and, if there is eventually a fourth season, it provides a very obvious starting point.

To be honest, though, the cliffhanger was both a cliffhanger and not really a cliffhanger. The revelation is important and changes our understanding of the story, but I never felt that the episode ended with that “oh, shit, what happens now?” feeling I was hoping for. Lioness had all the material for a much more explosive finale. We had Joe's kidnapping, Oleksandra, the Russians, Iran's involvement, the chaos in Waddington and an entire season that had been building toward this point. I was expecting something that would blow everything apart in those final ten minutes.

Instead, the episode chose to leave pieces on the table and show us where the story could go next. I did not dislike the choice of Aaliyah, quite the opposite. I much prefer the fact that the series took a character from the first season and brought her back with a genuine reason to be part of the story, rather than creating yet another new “big bad” simply to keep the franchise going. I just wish the ending had carried more intensity.

And through all of this, Joe ultimately pays the biggest price.

When she returns home, she finds an empty house and a “For Sale” sign outside the door. Neal has left with the children and has left her a letter. It is one of the most important moments of the entire season because, for the first time, Joe is faced with something she cannot solve with an operation. There is no team to call, no weapon, no extraction plan. Her family is gone.

The series had been preparing this development throughout the season. Neal had already reached his limits, he was afraid for Joe and the children, and he was beginning to see more clearly that her job is not simply a profession she leaves behind when she walks through the front door. Joe may have returned alive from the kidnapping, but the life she had been trying to protect had already started falling apart.

And this was one of the parts of the finale I liked the most. The third season gave Joe more personal weight, and Zoe Saldana had the opportunity to play a character who is not constantly one step ahead of everyone else. Joe carries the trauma of the kidnapping, makes mistakes, makes decisions that have consequences and eventually returns home only to discover that her greatest loss was not the one she expected.

The season overall seems to have found a much stronger reception than the first. Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 86% from critics and 78% from audiences, with several critics highlighting Saldaña's performance and the greater emphasis placed on Joe's internal conflict. There have also been criticisms of the show's large-scale violence, with some arguing that in certain moments the series could spend more time with its characters instead of repeatedly returning to major shootouts.

Personally, I find myself somewhere in the middle. There were quite a few things I liked about the third season, particularly the fact that it expanded the espionage side of the story instead of limiting itself to another Lioness mission with a single target. The story became bigger, more agencies and interests became involved, and Joe herself found herself at the center of an operation she could no longer control. There were moments when the political and intelligence side became a little too complicated, but that is part of the game the series chose to play this year.

One of the most interesting elements of the finale is precisely this return to the first season. Aaliyah is not a character who has simply been brought back for a cameo. Her return shows how far the consequences of an operation can reach, even when the CIA considers that operation finished years ago. For Aaliyah, it never ended. The story of Cruz and Aaliyah from the first season has now come back to Joe, and the series effectively closes one circle while opening the next. Stephanie Nur, who returns as Aaliyah, has spoken about how important the character's return was for her and how Taylor Sheridan personally told her that Aaliyah would be coming back.

There is also a small detail worth mentioning. The finale is dedicated to producer Rajeev Malhotra, who worked on the final two seasons of Lioness as well as several other Taylor Sheridan productions. Malhotra died in July 2026, and the series honored him with a memorial card during the end credits.

As for Season 4, there is one important detail here. As of September 23, 2026, Paramount+ has not officially announced a renewal of Lioness for a fourth season, so there is no release date either. There have been statements from cast members suggesting that they expect the series to return, while the finale has left Aaliyah's storyline so clearly open that the continuation already feels mapped out on a story level. There is still no official announcement or release date, however.

And so I reach the end of the third season with a feeling that fits quite closely with where I started. It was more or less what I expected. Oleksandra was not the person responsible and died because of a wrong assessment, Joe lost her family, and Aaliyah was revealed as the person pulling the strings from behind the scenes. All of that is interesting and gives the show plenty of material to work with. After everything the season had built, though, I wanted one stronger final punch.

Lioness closed its third season with the door wide open for whatever comes next. Aaliyah wants to use Joe as bait again, the team has already paid a heavy price and Joe returns to a house that is no longer really her home. If that is the setup for a fourth season, there is certainly material there. For the finale I had just watched, though, I was expecting a little more fire.