Rating: 8.5/10
Spoilers ahead.
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After spending much of Season 3 pushing Joe McNamara to the brink, Lioness finally gives its central character a way out in “Kiss the Girls,” the penultimate episode of the season. The 44-minute installment premiered September 13 and places Joe’s rescue at the center of an increasingly volatile political and military crisis.
The result is one of the season’s strongest episodes—and perhaps its most emotionally revealing.
Joe’s Escape
The episode’s centerpiece is Joe’s escape from captivity.
After enduring days of brutal treatment, Joe finds herself being transported by her captors when a routine traffic stop unexpectedly erupts into a violent shootout. In the chaos, Joe seizes her opportunity, kills Babat and escapes before ultimately being recovered by her team.
What makes the sequence work isn’t simply the violence. It is the vulnerability.
Joe has spent much of Lioness as the person everyone else depends upon—the commander who has the answers, makes the difficult calls and keeps moving when everyone around her is falling apart.
Here, she is simply trying to stay alive.
Zoe Saldaña plays the sequence with exhaustion rather than superheroic bravado. Joe doesn’t emerge from captivity victorious. She emerges damaged.
And that distinction matters.
The Joe and Cruz Reunion
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The emotional centerpiece of the episode comes after the rescue, when Joe is reunited with Cruz.
Their relationship has evolved considerably since the first season. Cruz began as a volatile and inexperienced operative; Joe was the hardened professional responsible for turning her into something capable of surviving the world she had entered.
Now, the roles feel subtly different.
Cruz is no longer simply Joe’s protégé. She’s become a formidable operative in her own right—and someone who genuinely cares about the woman who recruited her.
Laysla De Oliveira brings an understated emotional intensity to the reunion. The episode doesn’t need an extended monologue to explain what these two characters mean to each other.
The look on Cruz’s face does the work.
De Oliveira herself has described the helicopter embrace between Joe and Cruz as their “first moment of true tenderness,” emphasizing how far their relationship has evolved.
It’s one of the rare Lioness moments where the series allows its characters to simply feel something.
Joe Comes Home—But Doesn’t Stay
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The episode gets even more interesting once Joe returns to her family.
She has survived captivity. She’s been rescued. She’s finally home.
But the reunion doesn’t feel like a happy ending.
Her husband, Neal, wants her to step away from the danger. After watching what her work has done to her—and to their family—his position is understandable.
Joe simply can’t do it.
Despite everything that has happened, she remains fixated on the mission and the people responsible for what happened to her.
That’s the tragedy of Joe McNamara.
She is exceptionally good at her job.
And her job may be destroying her.
The Political Story Gets Complicated
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While Joe’s story provides the episode’s emotional weight, the Washington storyline pushes the larger conspiracy toward its endgame.
Kaitlyn Meade and Byron Westfield begin examining the possibility that Joe’s kidnapping is connected to a much larger geopolitical maneuver involving Ukraine, Russia and attempts to manipulate American policy.
It’s classic Lioness: every answer creates another question.
Nicole Kidman’s Kaitlyn remains particularly effective because she operates in a completely different world from Joe. Joe fights wars in the field; Kaitlyn fights them in conference rooms.
Both women, however, are increasingly forced to confront the consequences of decisions made far above their pay grade.
The Episode’s Biggest Weakness
The geopolitical storyline remains the show’s biggest weakness.
The Joe material is immediate. It’s personal. We understand exactly what she has lost and what she wants.
The Washington plot is considerably more complicated, requiring the audience to keep track of multiple intelligence operations, political agendas and competing international interests.
At times, Lioness seems more interested in explaining its geopolitical chessboard than allowing its characters to breathe.
Fortunately, the episode keeps returning to Joe.
And that’s where the series is strongest.
A Story About Sacrifice
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For all its gunfights, intelligence briefings and international conspiracies, Lioness has always been fundamentally interested in sacrifice.
Joe sacrifices her safety.
Cruz sacrifices her emotional distance.
Kaitlyn sacrifices personal morality for what she believes is the greater mission.
And their families are left to absorb the consequences.
“Kiss the Girls” makes that theme particularly clear.
Joe has technically survived.
But survival isn’t the same thing as winning.
By the end of the episode, she is already preparing to return to the fight. Her family wants her home, her body is badly injured and her mind is still consumed by the people who took her.
The mission isn’t over.
And neither is Joe’s willingness to sacrifice herself for it.
Final Verdict
“Kiss the Girls” is Lioness operating at close to its best.
The rescue sequence delivers the expected tactical intensity, but the quieter scenes are ultimately more effective. Joe and Cruz’s reunion gives the episode genuine emotional weight, while Joe’s inability to simply return to normal life reinforces the tragedy at the heart of the character.
The political storyline remains overly complicated, and the series occasionally struggles under the weight of its own mythology.
But when Lioness focuses on its characters, it remains exceptionally compelling.
With only one episode left, the biggest question isn’t whether Joe will survive.
It’s whether there will be anything left of her when the mission finally ends.
Final Rating: 8.5/10
The bottom line: “Kiss the Girls” delivers the season’s most consequential rescue while making Joe’s survival feel less like a victory than another chapter in her personal tragedy. The action is sharp, the Joe-Cruz relationship finally gets the emotional payoff it deserves, and the stage is set for a potentially explosive finale.
Season 3 finale: “The Unraveling” is scheduled for September 20, 2026.
