Summary
Lioness shifts the action to Joe’s front door, collapsing the boundary between her work and personal lives and positioning the true threat much closer to home than she’s used to.
Just in case you’d forgotten, Joe has been kidnapped. The Season 3 premiere of Lioness opened with this as its hook, and Episode 2, “No Sorrow Like the Survivor”, also returns to it as a kind of mission statement. In the initial moments, Russian goons relocate her, strip and search her, and eventually cut the locator out of the big toe of her left foot. By the time her team arrives to look for her, she’s long gone, with only the tracker and a pool of blood on the floor suggesting she was ever there.
With the context having been established in the previous episode, this one gets to really lean into the idea of what Joe’s kidnapping means, not only in the sense of who might be responsible and why, but also the geopolitical implications. Joe’s a senior CIA official. She knows things. And while Kaitlyn and Byron are obviously concerned about her, they’re more concerned about what she might spill under torture. As tough as she obviously is, everyone has a breaking point.
But there are personal consequences, too. As soon as Neal spots Joe’s smashed-up car, he knows something is amiss, and Kaitlyn silencing him isn’t what he needs to hear. He has to say something to the kids, who’ll notice the damaged vehicle too, and “nothing” isn’t a good enough option. Kaitlyn can keep the situation relatively contained for the time being, but the illusion of normalcy is exactly that – an illusion. Neal has always survived as Joe’s husband by keeping her career at arm’s length. We’ve always seen her show uncharacteristic emotion in front of him not just because he’s her husband and she loves him, but because he’s safely removed from her work. Well, he was.
It’s not just Joe, either. Cruz gets home and gets to enjoy Josephina’s birthday gift – even though it isn’t her birthday – for all of five minutes before she’s called back into action. She and the rest of the team are to set up in Joe’s home, where at the end of the premiere she gunned down a couple of attackers pretending to be state police. This is happening before her actual kidnapping, of course, picking back up from the end of the first episode. Because of how they’re presented, it’s easy to conflate the two attacks.
This attack, by all accounts, is still ongoing. The working theory is that it’s revenge for the operation in Ukraine, but it wasn’t an impulse job. Joe realises immediately that she has been watched for some time; that if she didn’t make a slight change to her usual routine, she and her family would all be dead. The gloves are firmly off. Whatever separation existed between her professional and personal lives has disappeared.
There’s a slightly petty undercurrent to Lioness Season 3, Episode 2. Byron’s confrontation with a Russian official during a government dinner is a real threat; the U.S. are in possession of two Russian operatives – the two who were left behind at Joe’s place – and they’re going to be quietly tortured and interrogated for everything they know. If it turns out Russia was behind the attempted assassination of a State Department official on home soil, there’ll be hell to pay geopolitically speaking.
But all this requires proof, which means an investigation into how Joe was exposed in the first place. As well as excusing the season’s first appearance of Secretary of State Edwin Mullins, it also hints at a wider conspiracy involving the “honeypot” double-agent we met in the premiere. Joe theorises that maybe the man they thought was Yurimov wasn’t actually Yurimov at all, and instead the whole operation was designed to flush Joe out and expose her. And it worked. With the kids safely relocated and watched over by Josephina, and Neal beside himself about his new reality, Joe can only weep at the fact that she has inadvertently endangered everyone she loves.
In this way, “No Sorrow Like the Survivor” works as a counterpoint to the all-action spectacle of the premiere by dissolving the barrier between Joe’s work and her family. Her kids might have been relocated, but they’re still clearly under threat, and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. The high-tech new war Joe was worried about seems to be playing out on the home front.
