Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Episode 7 of Lioness Season 3, “Kiss the Girls.”

After spending almost the entire season building toward Joe’s kidnapping, Lioness makes a smart choice in “Kiss the Girls”: she doesn’t wait until the finale to rescue her. Joe reunites with her team relatively early in the episode, Babat gets the fate we have been waiting for, and just when it feels like we can finally breathe again, Taylor Sheridan changes the question. The problem is no longer “who took Joe?” but something potentially much bigger: what if this entire war involving Russians, Iranians, and Americans has been manipulated by someone who appeared to be on the United States’ side?

The episode begins exactly where “Sugar Land” left us. With the plane that was supposed to take Joe out of the United States disabled, Babat is forced to improvise. Instead of a discreet extraction, he begins moving her across Texas by road, in a convoy, while Kaitlyn, Byron, Kyle, and the rest of the team mobilize practically everything they can to find her. For the first time this season, Lioness also abandons its two-timeline structure and stays entirely in the present. It makes a difference. The urgency is no longer interrupted by flashbacks.

Joe’s rescue

Everything explodes when police officers try to intercept the convoy, and what should have been a traffic stop quickly turns into a shootout. It is exactly the kind of sequence Lioness knows how to do very well: chaotic, loud, full of people trying to figure out who is shooting at whom, while Joe immediately realizes the confusion may be her only chance.

She manages to get out of the vehicle and run. There is something particularly important about this. Joe is not simply “rescued” by the men and women who came to save her. Even injured, after six days in captivity, tortured, and with one of her toes amputated by Babat, she is still actively involved in her own escape. But she also does not emerge as the indestructible superwoman we have seen so many times in the series. She needs help.

And before that help reaches her, Joe gets a small but extremely satisfying moment of revenge: she kills Babat. After all his threats, everything he promised would happen to her once she reached Iran, and the brutality of the previous episode, his time on the series ends surprisingly quickly. Joe shoots him before finally being reached by her own team.

Then comes, for me, the best scene of the episode. Cruz reaches Joe, and Joe collapses. She is no longer the CIA officer, not the boss who always has an order to give, not the woman who walks into any room reminding everyone that she is the highest-ranking officer there. She is simply a woman who spent six days believing she would be taken to Iran, publicly tortured and killed. She falls into Cruz’s arms crying, while Bobby and the others finally allow the tension around her to ease. It is a short scene, but perhaps one of the most human moments Zoe Saldaña has had in the entire series.

But who actually organized all of this?

This is where “Kiss the Girls” becomes genuinely interesting.

Until now, we have been led through a succession of answers. First, Russia. Then we understood that Russians and Belarusians were carrying out the operation, but perhaps were not the ones who ordered it. Oleksandra helped Kyle identify the extraction method and concluded that Iran was paying to get Joe out of the United States. Babat confirmed that the Iranians wanted Joe because of everything she had done against the country’s interests.

It seemed solved. It is not.

Kaitlyn and her husband begin looking at the operation differently. Who actually benefited from all of this? Russia lost agents, saw its American network destroyed, and created an enormous diplomatic crisis with Washington. Iran spent a fortune, lost its operatives, and failed to get Joe. The United States had its intelligence system practically exposed in front of its enemies.

But there is one country that could potentially benefit from the deterioration of relations between Washington and Moscow and that, at the same time, had access to enough information to put the first pieces in motion: Ukraine. And that inevitably brings us back to Oleksandra Balakin.

The theory raised in the episode is disturbing precisely because Oleksandra was essential in helping the Americans find Joe. She provided clues, explained Russian procedures, identified routes, and practically mapped out for Kyle how the extraction would work. But what if she knew all of that because, somehow, she was connected to the operation from the beginning?

“Kiss the Girls” does not confirm this. That is important. The episode turns Oleksandra into the main suspect and presents the possibility that she may have used Russians, Belarusians, and Iranians to create a major crisis between global powers while protecting Ukrainian interests. But it is still a theory, and precisely because it feels so convenient, I suspect the finale still has another hidden layer.

And what about our Aaliyah theory?

I have to admit, this is where Lioness got me. Over the last few weeks, all the Iranian clues seemed to be taking us back to Season 1. The Russian woman who recognized Cruz, the references to the operation in which Aaliyah’s father and husband were killed, and, most importantly, the fact that Cruz was effectively the Lioness on that mission made it possible to imagine that Joe’s kidnapping would finally reconnect Season 3 to the first season.

“Is Aaliyah alive?” remained a delicious question. “Kiss the Girls” apparently moves us away from that possibility. Babat dies, Iran appears to have been just another piece on the board, and the story shifts toward Oleksandra and Ukraine. Even so, there is still one phrase that keeps bothering me: Joe is treated as the original Lioness. If Sheridan is going back to the origins of the program and the consequences of everything Joe has done over the years, perhaps Season 1 has not disappeared from this story after all.

Joe comes back, but she does not come home

And perhaps the most important scene for understanding Joe comes after the rescue. Neal and the girls are waiting. Kaitlyn promises that Joe will come home. She does, technically, make it there. But she does not go inside. After everything that happened, home no longer represents safety to Joe. The war reached her doorstep, her children were placed in danger, she was abducted from her own life, and when she can finally return, her reaction is to seek out once again the only thing she knows how to do: work. Joe chooses to go back to the CIA.

It is devastating for Neal, but completely consistent with the character. For three seasons, Lioness has been asking whether Joe will ever be able to separate the agent from the woman, the wife, and the mother. “Kiss the Girls” may finally give us the answer: she no longer knows how.

Even the title hurts because of that. “Kiss the girls for me” is something Joe has said to Neal before leaving for missions. In Season 2, there was even a moment when he refused to do it and told her she could kiss the girls herself when she decided to come home. Now Joe survives the worst nightmare imaginable, reaches her own house… and still cannot bring herself to walk inside.

And there is also an irresistible little coincidence: Kiss the Girls is the title of the 1997 thriller starring Morgan Freeman, who now plays Secretary Mullins in Lioness. It may be nothing more than coincidence, but with Sheridan I would never completely rule out the wink.

Only one episode remains. The finale, “The Unraveling,” arrives on September 20, and the title alone suggests that everything that seemed resolved is about to begin falling apart.

Joe is alive. Babat is dead. Iran has been exposed. But now Oleksandra may be the one at the center of the target. And knowing Lioness, we are probably still aiming at the wrong person.