It’s been three years since Lioness premiered on Paramount+, but in that time, it has slowly transformed from a show about female spies sent to infiltrate terrorist regimes to an international spy thriller full of conspiracies and modern warfare. Season 3 of Taylor Sheridan‘s Lioness turns its focus not to a new lioness, as in the previous two seasons, but towards the Russo-Ukrainian war; rather than using a scalpel to extract intel, the team behind the lionesses now feels more like a sledgehammer. While Season 3 offers a fictional window into the bloody war and spycraft at work today, stepping away from the original concept and transforming the series into just another spy thriller is a disappointment for one of Sheridan’s most ambitious shows.
Taylor Sheridan Pulls From a Familiar Bag of Tricks for ‘Lioness’ Season 3
It was clear toward the end of Season 2 that Lioness intended to abandon its initial formula. Although the series introduced Genesis Rodriguez as Josie, the daughter of a high-ranking cartel member, Lioness was already looking beyond the U.S. borders when it comes to the narrative. This meant that Josie’s story often felt like it was taking a backseat to the larger machinations of a multi-season arc. In Season 3, the show completely dispenses with its original concept, introducing no new lioness and instead looking inward at Joe (Zoe Saldaña) and growing threats from Russia and China. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that the show is bad (Sheridan is good at keeping the rhythm of a thriller going), it does make for a blander story. What was once a unique action series has now become just any old spy show.
‘Lioness’ Season 3’s Two Timelines Are Confusing and Messy
The key problem with Season 3, however, is not the romanticization of soldiers or the way Sheridan writes women; it’s the simple fact that it’s narratively a mess. Two timelines are running parallel to each other, which offer plenty of suspense about what exactly happened in the past leading to a major twist in the future. The issue is that the two timelines face the same problem, and the show can quickly get confusing as it jumps back and forth and offers no visual indicator when we’re in the past beyond a slide that indicates a scene is happening six months prior. Tracking events in the show becomes difficult when you try to go beyond the broad strokes.
Things get especially complicated when operatives from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russian sleeper agents, and every other clandestine agency are tossed into the mix. Unlike previous seasons, which had a clear objective, Lioness Season 3 mostly feels chaotic. The team is constantly on the back foot, which ups the thrill factor but makes the story feel disorganized. Although the concept is interesting, the execution renders the season a total mess.
‘Lioness’ Season 3 Takes Taylor Sheridan Back to His Action Roots
Despite these faults, that doesn’t mean Lioness Season 3 is all bad. In fact, it has some of the most thrilling and heart-pounding sequences of the entire series. The action scenes feel distinctly reminiscent of Sicario, Sheridan’s debut script, and the relentless tempo of those moments ratchets up the tension and keeps you invested. Specifically, Sheridan’s look at warfare in Ukraine feels distinctly different than the previous seasons’ dealings with the Middle East or Mexico. From the trenches and barbed wire to the drones and robots with guns, it’s terrifying and a completely new type of combat we haven’t seen before.
While the cast is still the same and the team that Joe works with is still around, Lioness Season 3 is wading into new waters, and there are definitely growing pains. There are still infodump scenes with characters like Martin Donovan‘s Errol Meade, who is always brought in to give the audience some kind of lecture on the state of the world. But rather than relegating scenes like that to the beginning and end of a season, it feels like every conversation is wielded for exposition. The adjustment to a new conflict means these scenes are essential, but they also weaken the story and ultimately prove that sometimes it’s better to just stick to the brief instead of going rogue.
