Lioness viewers react to Taylor Sheridan’s ‘totally nuts’ ending to season 3 premiere

Tom MurrayMon, August 3, 2026 at 11:24 AM UTC

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Zoe Saldaña as Joe and Laysla De Oliveira as Cruz in ‘Lioness’ season 3 (Paramount+)

The season three premiere of Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness was only ever going to end with a bang — and it didn’t disappoint.

*Warning — Major spoilers ahead for ‘Lioness’ season three, episode one.*

The series from the Yellowstone creator — which follows an elite, all-female unit of the CIA — opens with a flash-forward that sees Zoe Saldaña’s Joe McNamara abducted outside her house in Fairfax, Virginia, by a group of armed men.

The episode then jumps back six months to explain how she got there. In season three, Lioness is taking on the war in Ukraine.

Joe and her team are pulled into a mission outside their usual counterterrorism work. Instead of the Middle East, they’re sent into the war in Donetsk, where the CIA is trying to exploit a Ukrainian double agent with access to Russia’s intelligence service (SVR).

Saldaña and Nicole Kidman’s characters work for the CIA’s ‘Lioness’ initiative, which embeds women undercover with the wives and families of suspected terrorists. Season three sees them head to the war in Ukraine (Ryan Green/Paramount+)

The objective is to capture a senior Russian intelligence official and — as fate would have it — only Joe can positively identify him.

Happily, Joe succeeds in capturing the agent and she and her team return home to Virginia. It’s here, in the final scene, that two men knock on the door of her home, claiming to be state police.

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“You’re not the police, but you’re two minutes from meeting them,” Joe says before trying to slam the door shut. However, the man jams his foot in the door, stopping it from shutting, before slamming it open and knocking Joe to the ground.

Joe quickly recovers, though, and shoots the man dead with a pistol. She then runs outside and shoots the man’s accomplice dead as he attempts to escape. The episode ends with Joe on the phone — presumably to Nicole Kidman’s CIA office, Kaitlyn Meade — saying, “I need FBI to my house right now. I’m blown. And I have two down.”

The identities of both the armed men and Joe’s eventual abductors remain a mystery, but it’s clear the fallout from the Ukraine mission has caught up with her — and she’s now firmly in someone’s crosshairs.

“The ending scene of episode 1 was totally nuts,” one fan shared on X alongside a clip of the final 42 seconds.

“Episode one far exceeded my expectations,” another commented.

“Just wow! #lioness!!! If this show doesn’t start winning awards all around I’m going to lose my mind. What an incredible opener for season 3,” raved a third.

“Episiode 1 of season 3 is 100x’s better than any episode of the first 2 seasons,” another fan opined.

New episodes of Lioness are airing Sundays at 3 a.m. ET / 12 a.m. PT on Paramount+.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”