Lioness Season 3 Ends On A Major Cliffhanger That Brings Back An Old Enemy

Spoilers follow.

After hitting viewers with twist after twist, "Lioness" Season 3 delivered the coup de grâce in its finale, which finally reveals who was behind the kidnapping of Zoe Saldaña's Joe McNamara. In the final episode Joe returns home following her ordeal and tells Jill Wagner's Bobby, "There's nobody left to come after me, Bobby," to which her trusted QRF team leader replies, "There's always somebody else, Boss." Turns out, Bobby couldn't have been more right as we soon learn that the architect of all Joe's recent trauma is none other than Stephanie Nur's Aaliyah Amrohi.

In case you somehow missed it, Aaliyah was a main character in Season 1 of "Lioness," which maintains its standing as one of the best Taylor Sheridan shows following a thrilling third season. During that first season, Laysla De Oliveira's Cruz Manuelos was sent undercover to ingratiate herself to Aaliyah in order to get close to her terrorist financier father, who ultimately died a violent and swift death at the hands of Cruz in the Season 1 finale. Since then, we've heard nothing more about Aaliyah and the fallout of Joe and Cruz's mission. Now, we know the entirety of Season 3 has been just that: fallout.

Fans have been speculating for some time that Aaliyah could return, and now Sheridan has confirmed as much, leaving viewers with a bombshell of a cliffhanger that not only brings back Nur's character in a major way but has also left Joe without her husband and children, who have moved out of her home following a season full of endless trauma and heartache. "Lioness" is yet to be renewed for a fourth season but there's absolutely no way Sheridan and Paramount+ can leave things hanging after such a shocker of an ending.

The "Lioness" Season 3 finale is fittingly entitled "The Unravelling," and sees pretty much everything do just that. A CIA surveillance team identifies a person of interest in Joe McNamara's kidnapping: Dmitri Sokolov (Gene Farber). Thad Luckinbill's Kyle McManus, Austin Hébert's Randy, and Jonah Wharton's Tex then tail Sokolov to a restaurant where he meets Renat (Dimitry Rozental), the Belarusian handler who led the abduction of Joe. Blinded by her rage, Joe orders her men to engage and the result is a public bloodbath in which innocents are killed and Tex and Randy are hit. If only Taylor Sheridan's Cody Spears had been there...

In Washington D.C., Secretary of State Edwin Mullins (Morgan Freeman) suspects he and the CIA have made a crucial error. After a meeting with Russian ambassador Maxim Petrov (Lev Gorn), Mullins turns to CIA deputy director of operations Byron Westfield (Michael Kelly) and says, "We missed something," adding "Wanna know the last time I had this feeling? About a week before 9/11." Mullins is right. Everybody on the United States side of this season has missed something and that something is Aaliyah. 

In "Lioness" Season 1, Joe recruited Cruz Manuelos to get close to Aaliyah Amrohi, the daughter of Saudi terrorist financier Asmar Ali Amrohi (Bassem Youssef). Cruz got a little too close, falling in love with Aaliyah before ultimately killing Amrohi and Aaliyah's fiancé Ehsan Al Rashdi (Ray Corasani) the night before their wedding. After that, we never saw any kind of reckoning beyond seeing Aaliyah screaming at the sight of her slain father and fiancé. Now, we know the entirety of Season 3 has been Aaliyah's payback.

"Lioness" worked its way towards the Season 3 finale in a somewhat convoluted fashion, using a dual narrative approach that suggested the Russians were responsible for Joe McNamara's kidnapping. "Lioness" Season 3, Episode 6 supposedly revealed the season's main villain: an Iranian operative named Babat (Kamyar Jahan) who promised to make a grand show of Joe's death. But "Lioness" Season 3, Episode 7 delivered yet another twist, wherein it looked as though Ukrainian agent Oleksandra Balakin (Elizaveta Neretin) was responsible for orchestrating Joe's capture.

In the Season finale, Taylor Sheridan changed course one final time, confirming that Oleksandra was innocent and that Aaliyah Amrohi was the one responsible for not only Joe's kidnapping by Renat, but for the original attempt by two Belarusian contractors to capture Joe at her home in Season 3, Episode 1.

The final moments of "The Unraveling" take place in a penthouse in Doha, Qatar, where a man approaches Aaliyah as she bathes by candlelight. "They were close but it didn't work out," he says in reference to Renat and his team losing Joe. "They missed for the second time." Aaliyah tells him to try again, but the man insists it would be easier to simply kill Joe. "The difficulty isn't getting to her, it's getting her out," he says. Aaliyah then reveals the full extent of her plan for revenge. "We have to get her out," she says. "If we get her out the others will come to save her. And then we have them all." Aaliyah doesn't just want Joe, she wants her entire team. "Lioness" Season 4 hasn't yet been confirmed (though there are several positive signs). But, like Aaliyah, fans simply won't take no for an answer on this one.