Summary
Season 3 of Lioness gets things started with a bravura action set-piece and a compelling enough plot hook that brings the action to Joe’s doorstep quite literally.
War is changing. At one point in the Season 3 premiere of Lioness, the conflict in Ukraine is described as World War I meets Star Wars, part people jumping out of trenches with bayonets, and part high-tech drones darkening the sky. Taylor Sheridan being so flagrantly opposed to modernity hasn’t defined this show like it has some of his others, like Yellowstone and The Madison, but we do seem to be making our way there.
Granted, “The Spider and the Fly” isn’t really about this modernisation of warfare beyond the point it’s making about Joe’s CIA wet-work team not being cut out for the frontlines of a conflict they haven’t trained to fight. It doesn’t really seem like the conflict itself is going to be of principal concern, either. It’s more of a pretext to kick-start a plot that is clearly going to imperil Joe and her team on their home turf, and indeed the season itself with a really well-rendered and engaging extended action sequence.
The dramatic season-opening setup is Joe being snatched from her own home after a workout session set to ceaseless breaking news alerts about global conflicts. It’s like a bricklayer working out to the sound of walls being knocked down. She gets into her car like any other day, and promptly finds herself being jumped and kidnapped by unknown operatives who seem to be rather annoyed with her.
The genesis of this annoyance seems to be the aforementioned conflict in Ukraine. The premiere wheels back six months to show us how we got to this point, which involves a Ukrainian/Russian double-agent at Georgetown University tipping Joe off that the head of Russia’s Special Task Force, Aleksi Yurimov, is going to be on the front lines at Donetsk and represents a prime target of opportunity for the CIA. It’s a risky – politically and physically – snatch and grab, but the chance to pick up a key Russian player is too good to ignore.
And thus, the premiere spends most of its time in Donetsk on a wide-ranging and very effectively intense operation that has Joe on-site to identify Yurimov, Commander Cody’s no-nonsense team to carry out the extraction, and Joe’s QRF to provide overwatch. Getting everyone together creates a lot of interpersonal friction, and the particulars of the mission, which involves dogs, locust-like drone fleets, and questionable legality, really allow Sheridan – who is once again stunt-casted as Cody – to flex his muscles. This might be a streaming show, but its calling card is proper big-screen action set-pieces, which “The Spider and the Fly” proves it’s still able to pull off with panache here in Season 3.
You’re probably wondering what this snatch-and-grab has to do with anything. Even by the end of Lioness Season 3, Episode 1, so are Joe and her team. Joe makes such a big deal out of identifying Yurimov that something makes me think the guy they pick up isn’t Yurimov at all, but sometimes that’s how things go in the intelligence game. The pointlessness of the whole thing isn’t lost on the characters, who know they’re pawns on a chessboard that doesn’t belong to them. Much like how they never get the appropriate thanks when they save the day, they’re also denied the satisfaction of knowing how most of their work influences global geopolitics. They just assume they’re doing the right thing, at least for their side.
The climactic scene, which is the second attack on Joe herself on her home turf when two Russkies show up posing as state police, suggests that the point of this season might be the erosion of the helpful distance that typically exists between the team’s work overseas and their lives back at home. Joe went to Ukraine under sufferance and then went home to forget all about it. But what she did there has followed her back to the U.S. and knocked on her door. Her long-suffering husband and kids are suddenly in the crosshairs. And that should raise the stakes pretty considerably.
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