The drama surrounding Joe, and the realization that rescuing her has become virtually impossible — even while she remains on American soil — is both frustrating and terrifying. Frustrating because, for the second time, her team arrives only minutes too late. Terrifying because her kidnappers seem to know every CIA move, anticipating routes, operations and decisions with a precision that turns the most powerful country in the world into a spectator of its own failure.

“Murder Hornets,” the fourth episode of Lioness Op’s third season, does not need to kill Joe to create the impression that she may never return. It seems unlikely that the series would sacrifice the protagonist played by Zoe Saldaña, but Taylor Sheridan is working very hard to convince us that no amount of plot armour will be enough to save her.

The “problem” — in addition to the jumps back and forth in time, which continue to interrupt the urgency of the present — is that the situation has become so impossible that I have already adopted the third scenario suggested by Kaitlyn. Not exactly because I expect to be tortuously surprised by Joe’s death, but because the knot appears impossible to untangle. Even if she is found, intercepted and removed from that plane, what exactly will remain of the woman we knew?

Joe was already at breaking point before the kidnapping

When the episode begins, Joe is still being tortured by the Russians. Her captors combine physical violence, exhaustion and political provocation in an attempt to weaken her. She reacts as she always does: with sarcasm and defiance, attacking Russia and refusing to give the men the pleasure of seeing her fear.

Zoe Saldaña is particularly good in these moments, when Joe’s strength stops looking like courage alone and begins to resemble a compulsion to resist. She cannot show vulnerability because she has built her entire identity around her ability to survive.

But Joe was already at breaking point before she was kidnapped. She was exhausted, paranoid and haunted by the certainty that her work would eventually reach her home and endanger her family. All the signs of impending burnout were there — although, in the world of Lioness, collapse is acknowledged only when the body can literally no longer continue.

Now she is being tortured, taken out of the country, and threatened with something she may fear even more than death: giving up information. If she emerges alive from this nightmare, she is unlikely to emerge psychologically intact.

Joe tries to leave her own blood behind as a trail for the team. It is a clever gesture, entirely characteristic of her, but also painfully inadequate. When Kyle, Bobby and the others storm the hangar, they find only confirmation that they were once again very close. The plane has already departed.

Kyle’s private war

Kyle’s frustration immediately explodes. Faced with three captured Russians, he executes one of them and uses the killing to force another to reveal the aircraft’s identification number.

They get the information. The method is obviously indefensible. But Lioness likes placing us in precisely this morally unpleasant territory: Kyle crosses every possible line while we, too, are desperate for someone to tell them where Joe is.

Bobby reacts to what she has witnessed and reports it to Kaitlyn. Kyle, meanwhile, shows no remorse. He treated it as war, he argues. To him, it is war.

This reasoning is recurrent in Taylor Sheridan’s universe. War exists not merely as a circumstance but as a ready-made justification for any violence. If the danger is sufficiently great, rules begin to look like a luxury. And at that moment, Kyle is convinced that losing Joe would mean exposing agents, operations, addresses and the entire clandestine structure of the Lioness programme.

Kaitlyn reprimands him but postpones any more serious judgment. Finding the plane is the priority. The contradiction is obvious: the clue that might save Joe was extracted through an execution. Condemning Kyle would also mean admitting that everyone intends to use the information he obtained.

Save Joe or stop her from arriving alive?

The aircraft number leads them to a Challenger 300, but it does not solve the problem. Its transponder has been switched off and the plane is flying low, making it difficult to track. Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela emerge as possible destinations, although no one knows whether any of them is the actual final stop.

The Russians may be taking Joe in order to exchange her for Aleksi Yurimov, captured by the CIA during the operation in Ukraine. They may also deliver her to Iran, where she would become an intelligence source, a political prisoner and a propaganda weapon all at once.

Kaitlyn’s order reveals how far the United States is prepared to go. If the plane is found while still in American airspace, fighter jets must force it to land. If it has already entered international airspace, the instruction is to “engage.” In other words, shoot it down even with Joe inside.

It is the episode’s most frightening moment because it completely changes the definition of the mission. Initially, the priority is to rescue her. But if that becomes impossible, the objective shifts to preventing the information stored inside Joe from reaching the enemy. Alive, she is an agent to be recovered. Beyond American reach, she becomes a threat to be eliminated.

The operation that created the deadlock

The trips into the past explain how Operation Treasure helped create this crisis. Joe planned to use Oleksandra Balakin, the Ukrainian double agent, to identify people recruited by Russian intelligence and, through them, reach the officers controlling those assets.

The strategy involved placing a Lioness close to each asset, offering them a way out in exchange for information and eventually detaining or deporting the Russian handlers. It was a way of turning Russia’s own methods of seduction, blackmail and manipulation against its intelligence services.

The conversation between Kaitlyn, Byron and Maxim, the Russian deputy ambassador, confirms Yurimov’s value. Maxim never says his name. He refers only to “something” extremely important to the Russian president that has supposedly been stolen and must be returned. Byron, in turn, never acknowledges that the Americans have him.

It is espionage reduced to the art of discussing something everyone knows about without allowing its existence to be officially admitted. Maxim also leaves a recording device hidden beneath the table, hoping to capture Kaitlyn and Byron’s conversation after his departure. Diplomacy remains a performance — only now with hidden microphones.

The episode wants to demonstrate how Joe’s operation set in motion the forces now holding her captive. The device works as an explanation, but not always as storytelling. The more desperate the search becomes in the present, the less patience we have for returning to the past. Not because Operation Treasure is uninteresting, but because Joe is aboard a plane that could be shot down at any moment.

Neal is also reaching his limit

The past clarifies another fundamental tension. Living with his daughters on a military base, Neal is supposed to feel protected. Joe, however, wants him to learn how to use a gun. He immediately recognizes the absurdity: if the base is truly safer, why does a doctor need to learn how to kill?

Neal took an oath to preserve life. Joe replies that the rest of the world uses violence as currency and that, after the attack on their family, that world has arrived at their door. But it was not simply “the world” that arrived. It was Joe’s work.

Neal does not seem capable of tolerating much longer how little he is allowed to know and how much he is forced to risk — not only his own life, but those of their daughters. Their marriage already depended on a very fragile pact: he accepted not knowing about Joe’s work because he needed to believe that she could still keep the danger away from their family. The attack on their home destroyed that illusion.

In the present, Kaitlyn visits him. She has no comfort to offer, only three possibilities. In the first, the CIA beats the clock and Joe returns within days. In the second, the search continues for months or longer. In the third, Joe does not return. Kaitlyn tells Neal to prepare for the last one. If it does not happen, relief will be his reward.

Nicole Kidman plays the scene without sentimentality, but Kaitlyn’s apparent coldness does not mean indifference. She simply understands the machinery to which they have all surrendered their lives. Expecting the worst is how she continues to function.

At this point, I have also adopted scenario three. Not necessarily because I expect Joe to die, but because I cannot see how the series can untangle this knot without resorting to a very convenient solution. Her kidnappers are always one step ahead, the plane has disappeared from radar and the CIA itself admits that it may kill her to prevent her from being delivered to the enemy.

Even if the inevitable plot armour works, the real question is no longer simply how Joe will escape. It is what she will be like afterwards.

She was already unable to separate the agent from the wife and mother. Now her family knows it can be attacked, Neal knows he may become a widower without ever receiving an explanation, and Joe knows that her own team has been authorised to shoot down the plane in which she is being held. Survival may still be possible. Returning to her former life is not.