We have no idea if “signing out” a dancer from a strip club is actually a thing. But that’s how far Taylor Sheridan’s writing goes for Episode 5 of Lioness Season 3 on Paramount+, as the team’s undercover work to expose and flip Russian assets in America continues. Two Cups, in his guise as a married defense contractor, ends up spending the night with Shila (Madison King) at her place, and in the morning we see it’s wired for surveillance. Downstairs, he meets the men who will blackmail him into becoming a patsy for Russians, because he just got honeypotted. But Two Cups isn’t worried. The front door explodes and backup bursts in, followed by Kaitlyn Meade. The CIA official’s suit is in powerful tones of cream and pink. “I have rights!” Shila, the Russian asset honeypotter, shouts as everyone is being detained. Meade fixes her a look. “No you don’t. Not anymore.”
It’s the latest iteration of the Lioness spy game, where one side does to the other side the same shit that side did to them. The undercover op continues at the fancy (Russian-funded) condo of the guy from last episode’s club sequence, who still thinks he picked up Cruz and Carrillo. Until Joe, Tucker, and Bobby materialize in his bedroom. Joe wonders out loud what a Georgetown grad with anesthesiologist parents is doing taking money from foreign agents. Then she tells Tucker to toss this dude out the window if he doesn’t reveal the identity of his Russian handler. “What did you sell them?” Joe demands. “What trade secret of Booz Allen did you sell?” Spluttering from where Tucker has dropped him in a heap, the guy says it’s not even about money. He is a prisoner of this information war. “He owns me,” he says of his handler. But that’s old news. Joe clarifies it’s the CIA that owns him now.
The Company’s heavy hand coming down on Americans creates interagency squabbles. A new face in the high-level conference room meetings is Francine Wexler (Jessalyn Gilsig), director of the FBI, who stresses that the CIA is not supposed to operate domestically. But Byron Westfield is adamant his agency has only acted in the national interest. (“These are enemies of the state, actively seeking to weaken us.”) Secretary Mullins seems to agree. He cares less about disputes over jurisdiction than disrupting this covert commerce of secrets Russia has methodically established on American soil. The spies in the room speak up. Joe and Kyle will take further action by switching the hooks. Take out the Russian ones and put in their own.
Whatever the show, we tend to be annoyed with scenes shot in blank grey interrogation rooms. It’s always so one-sided and samey. But in this instance we’ll make an exception for Lioness, because Thad Luckinbill really relishes being Kyle McManus at the case officer’s boldest. “What I’m gonna do is send you to Guantanamo,” he tells one of the detained foreign agents with a manic twinkle in his eye. “Have you ever had dengue fever?” At Joe’s prompting, Kyle also asks the guy about the attack at her home, of which he denies any involvement. But we know spies interrogating spies is just lies being told in circles. Oleksandra the double-secret agent made that clear in Episode 3.
Maybe the endgame here is not even exposing this network of informants. That could backfire on the US by exacerbating an already fragile public trust of the government and today’s siloed information environment. As Joe explains to her bosses and her bosses’ bosses what the team’s undercover has exposed, it’s clear this isn’t just about bribes and payoffs. Something simple to be prosecuted. She uses the example of a Georgetown professor, Richard Ealy (Brandon Bales), who receives no financial compensation for helping foreign governments flip his more morally-compromised students for asset-mining. “It appears that our professor believes that our government and our economic system are fatally flawed.” Which could be Ealy’s own fatal flaw, because Joe and her team are gonna roll him up.
This episode of Lioness spends a big chunk of time listening in on Ealy’s latest university lecture. As the professor muses over AI destroying the US job market and driving people’s productivity and collective will toward state control, he validates what the CIA has learned about his ideology. But lectures in the Sheridan-O-Verse can also sound a lot like Sheridan speaking his own truth to power through his characters. The most viral example of this is Tommy Norris’s Landman lecture about wind turbines being terrible for clean energy. But within Lioness, Sheridan already has an embedded mouthpiece: Errol, Meade’s husband. Ealy’s lecture in this episode builds on themes Errol already lectured Kaitlyn about earlier this season.
We’ll have to see what Joe and the team can get out of Professor Ealy or any of the compromised Americans their dragnet uncovered. But they’ve definitely scored a few swishes on domestic Russian influence. For now.
Because you gotta remember, that’s all in the past. Six months into the Lioness future, Joe remains a captive. Her bonds were loosened aboard the private jet that flew her out of Baltimore. Until Renat stuffs a gag in her mouth. The plane is landing, the main hatch is opening, and Joe’s eyes dart from detail to detail. Despite their efforts to break her, she is still a spy on the job. But even Joe is confused as the tarmac where they’ve landed comes into focus. This isn’t some desolate patch of foreign airstrip owned by a military unfriendly to the US. As Joe is hustled from the jet to a fleet of waiting vehicles, she catches a glimpse of a big Texas flag flying nearby. At least for now, her Russian captors have only transferred her from one American area code to another. Joe’s prisoner’s journey continues as the CIA, her team, and even her family fumble around in the desperate dark.
QRF for Lioness Season 3 Episode 5 (“The Idiot Army”):
- Westfield and Meade reveal to Mullins and the brass just how serious the information breach has become. Jaws drop as they detail a list of prominent names on the Russian SVR’s asset list. “Executives at multiple television networks. Senior editors at the Post and the Times. Four district judges, two circuit court judges. Seven members of the House, and two in the Senate.”
- Joe’s explanation to Neal, back at the safe house, also highlights the insidious nature of this war for information, which makes the work to determine who attacked their home even more difficult. “Every enemy we have has been waging a 50-year covert war against us.”
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
