Seven episodes, six near-misses, and one badly injured toe later, Special Ops: Lioness Season 3 has finally done it: Joe McNamara is free. Cue the confetti, cue the sigh of relief and then immediately cue the show yanking the rug out from under everyone by revealing the person who’s been “helping” the CIA all season might actually be the reason Joe got taken in the first place.
Episode 7, titled “Kiss the Girls,” premiered on Paramount+ on September 13, 2026, and it’s the rescue episode fans have been begging for since the premiere. It’s also the moment the show finally drops its dual-timeline structure for one straight hour of present-day storytelling, which, frankly, feels like the show is taking a breath right along with its audience.
Here’s a quick recap of Episodes 1 through 6, everything that happened this week, and our predictions for the Season 3 finale, “The Unravelling,” landing September 20.
Quick Recap Of Lioness Season 3 Episodes 1 Through 6
Season 3 opened with Joe (Zoe Saldaña) kidnapped by armed men as she left for work, before rewinding six months to reveal how it started: a Ukrainian spy inside Russia’s SVR gave Joe information about Aleksi Yurimov, a senior Russian intelligence officer, and the mission to capture him in Donetsk went off clean until two men posing as police showed up at Joe’s front door days later. She killed them both in her own home.
The following episodes traced the fallout: the discovery that Joe’s tracker had been surgically removed, the interrogation of suspected double agent Oleksandra Balakin, and a separate recruitment network engineer Cade, handler Rooster, and Professor Richard Ealy that reached deep into American institutions. Episode 4 saw a CIA rescue team arrive at a Baltimore hangar minutes too late as Joe’s captors escaped by jet. Episode 6, “Sugar Land,” delivered two gut-punches: Senator Ryan Olson, exposed as a compromised asset, took his own life rather than face the fallout, and the team learned that Renat, the Russian handler behind Joe’s abduction, had actually sold her out to an Iranian operative named Babat for a payday — using Russian tradecraft specifically to make the CIA think Moscow was responsible. The episode ended with the rescue team finding Joe’s plane but not Joe, as Babat forced her out of a compromised safe house at the last second.
Lioness Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: https://theblinkreview.com/lioness-season-3-episode-6-recap-so-close-yet-so-far/
Lioness Season 3 Episode 7 Recap
A Fifty-Fifty Bet and a Red Light
The hour opens with Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) briefing Secretary Mullins (Morgan Freeman) while Kaitlyn (Nicole Kidman) skips the meeting entirely, choosing to stay glued to the phone during the active rescue operation instead. Byron’s read on the situation is grim but useful: Babat’s crew will likely try to reach Mexico now that their jet is gone, and he puts the odds of the CIA intercepting them at roughly fifty-fifty. He also notices something telling the flight crew at the hangar chose to die rather than surrender, which points toward ideological motivation rather than a state-run operation. That detail quietly reinforces the theory that Russia isn’t really behind this after all.
In the end, it isn’t clever tradecraft that breaks the case open. It’s a red light. Babat’s vehicle blows through an intersection on a Texas road, and when a local patrol officer runs the plate, it comes back flagged with active warrants. A Wisconsin plate showing up in Texas is exactly the kind of small, dumb detail that gets noticed, and it’s enough to reach the Lioness team fast.
The Firefight
When police pull the vehicles over, Babat’s escort car stops too, confirming everyone’s suspicions. Babat forces Joe upright and threatens to kill her and the officers if she moves. She moves anyway.
What follows is genuinely the best action sequence the season has produced. Three of the four responding officers are killed in the initial exchange, but Joe manages to grab a weapon and takes down her captor and another one of the mercenaries herself before running, pursued by three more armed men. Tex and Randy arrive on scene, save the one surviving officer, and give chase. Then the rest of the team swoops in by helicopter and cuts down everyone still coming after her. Bobby and Cruz finally reach her on the ground, and Joe, for the first time all season, actually breaks down.
It’s the release valve the show has been building toward for seven episodes, and it earns every second of it.
The Twist: Suspicion Turns to Oleksandra
Just when you think the hour’s done with its surprises, the episode delivers its sharpest turn yet in, of all places, a quiet conversation between two spouses who normally never talk about work. Kaitlyn’s husband Errol has been asked by the State Department to assess who would actually benefit from taking a CIA case officer, and his conclusion reframes the entire season. Russia and China, he argues, wouldn’t run an operation this loud and messy. Iran and various terrorist organizations lack the money and infrastructure to pull it off cleanly. That leaves a much shorter list: nations with a specific interest in seeing America strike deeper into Russia or Iran.
Kaitlyn starts naming candidates Ukraine, Israel, even the European Union. Errol adds the piece that changes everything: no foreign intelligence service could run an operation this precise without inside help. Someone fed them information. And he asks Kaitlyn directly whether the agency has recently flipped any foreign agents, or had anyone walk in and hand over intel that checked out a little too perfectly.
Kaitlyn already knows the answer. Every single piece of intelligence Oleksandra Balakin has provided all season Yurimov, the recruitment network, the senators has systematically pushed the United States closer to a direct confrontation with Moscow. Which happens to be exactly what Ukraine would want.
It’s a genuinely brilliant reframe. The season’s most trusted source may have been playing the CIA the entire time, and nobody saw it coming because she kept handing them information that turned out to be true.
An Uncomfortable Request
Kaitlyn’s response isn’t to investigate further, it’s to ask Errol whether he might be wrong. When that doesn’t work, she and Byron bring the theory straight to Mullins and ask for permission to eliminate Oleksandra before any official report on the theory gets filed. Byron is blunt about it: this is a guess, not hard evidence, but he believes it needs to happen anyway. Mullins, to his credit, doesn’t rubber-stamp it. He says plainly that he needs time to consider what is, in his own words, a request to authorize a murder.
Meanwhile, the personal fallout from the rescue keeps unfolding. Two Cups sits with Joe on the flight home, quietly insisting she get surgery before anything else, including seeing her family. Kaitlyn visits the McNamara house to tell the kids their mother is safe, but Kate isn’t buying the performance, and both daughters are left visibly shaken by everything they’ve been through.
The Ending: Kiss the Girls
In the episode’s final, quietly devastating scene, Bobby drives Joe to her own front door and she can’t make herself walk through it. Instead, she calls Neal from outside, promising she’ll come home once everything is finished, and asks him to kiss the girls for her. It’s where the episode gets its title, and it lands harder than almost anything else in the hour.
Moments later, Joe tells Bobby and Cruz exactly what “finishing it” means: she’s going to find whoever is actually responsible and kill them. Her team doesn’t talk her out of it. They agree.
What Worked (And What Left Us Rattled)
This is, without question, the strongest hour the season has produced. Ditching the dual-timeline structure for a single, linear hour pays off immediately; the tension never has to compete with a flashback for the audience’s attention, and the rescue sequence benefits enormously from that focus. One review specifically praised the season as “a spectacular pressure cooker of espionage, politics, and personal sacrifice,” and this episode is the clearest evidence yet of why that description sticks.
The Oleksandra reveal is the smartest structural swing the show has made all season. It doesn’t retroactively ruin her earlier scenes, it recontextualizes them, which is a much harder trick to pull off. Every piece of “help” she gave suddenly reads differently in hindsight.
If there’s a wrinkle, it’s that Mullins withholding approval for Oleksandra’s elimination leaves a genuinely thorny moral question dangling right into the finale. That’s clearly intentional, but it does mean the show is now juggling a rescued protagonist bent on personal revenge, an unresolved assassination request, and a shaken family, all at once, with only one episode left to land it.
Lioness Season 3 Finale Predictions
The Season 3 finale, “The Unravelling,” airs September 20. Official details are still thin, but everything the season has built points toward a genuinely explosive final hour.
1. Mullins makes his call on Oleksandra and it’s not simple. Whatever Mullins decides, expect the finale to treat it as a defining moral moment for the show’s leadership, not just a quick plot resolution.
2. Joe goes after the people responsible, on her own terms. She told her team she intends to kill whoever’s behind this, and they backed her. That’s not the kind of promise this show lets quietly fade except Joe’s revenge mission to be a central thread of the finale.
3. Oleksandra gets a final confrontation. If the CIA’s suspicion about her is correct, the finale needs to address it directly, whether that means an interrogation, a chase, or something far more permanent.
4. The Yurimov question resurfaces. Byron floated quietly returning Yurimov to Russia to smooth things over with Moscow, given that six months of interrogating him produced nothing usable. Don’t be shocked if that decision has consequences nobody expects.
5. Joe’s family reaches a breaking point, one way or another. Joe couldn’t walk through her own front door this episode. The finale needs to resolve that, for better or worse, especially with Kate already seeing through the reassurances.
6. Wild card: the finale title is doing exactly what it says. “The Unravelling” is about as blunt a title as this show has used all season. Expect long-running threads, the mole theory, the international players, maybe even Joe’s own future with the agency to come apart at once rather than resolve neatly.
Final Thoughts
“Kiss the Girls” earns its title in the quietest way possible, and it earns its place as the season’s best hour by finally giving both its characters and its audience the payoff seven episodes of near-misses had been building toward. But Lioness wouldn’t be Lioness if it let that relief sit for long; the Oleksandra twist makes sure the finale has just as much to untangle as the rest of the season combined.
Joe’s home. Sort of. Now we just have to see what’s left of her, and everyone else, by the time the credits roll next Sunday.
The Lioness Season 3 finale, “The Unravelling,” premieres September 20, 2026 on Paramount+.
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