Three seasons into Lioness, Joe McNamara has survived missions designed to test how far she can go for her country. The Season 3 finale leaves her facing a different question: What remains when the job follows her home?

The Paramount+ thriller ended its latest season on September 20 by connecting Joe’s current crisis to the operation at the heart of the show’s first season. After spending much of Season 3 trying to determine who ordered her abduction, Joe learns the plot was driven by revenge. Aaliyah Amrohi and her husband, Ehsan Al Rashdi, are connected to the effort to capture her following the death of Aaliyah’s father, Asmar Ali Amrohi.

Cruz Manuelos killed Amrohi under Joe’s orders during the first season. Years later, the consequences of the operation have returned directly to Joe. Zoe Saldaña, who stars as Joe and serves as an executive producer, appreciated seeing the series revisit a story viewers might have assumed was finished.

“Sometimes everything in life comes back full circle,” Saldaña told ESSENCE. “What happened in season one was very powerful. And I just appreciate the fact that it’s coming full circle.”

Joe discovers the motive while already dealing with the aftermath of her kidnapping. Her pursuit of answers leads the team to Russian national Dmitri Sokolov. During surveillance at a restaurant, Joe recognizes one of the men involved in her abduction and orders her team to engage. The decision results in a deadly shootout, adding another consequence to an investigation Joe refuses to abandon. 

Her trademark determination also costs her at home, because when Joe finally returns, Neal has left with their daughters. A note awaits her inside, bringing the conflict between her career and family to its most severe point yet. Saldaña saw the difficulty of occupying both lives as fundamental to understanding Joe.

“She’s a mother at war with herself,” Saldaña said. “She leads a covert unit that sends young women into impossible danger and then has to come home to her own family and she feels that distance, the gap that she creates because she has to live in these both places at once all the time.”

Playing Joe for three seasons has also made Saldaña increasingly aware of the women whose work inspired the series. She says portraying a CIA operative carries a responsibility beyond making the character convincing on screen. “We’re telling a story, but there are people and families living a version of this, and I just want to try to do right by them,” she noted. “I never lose sight that we’re honoring real people, that the series is inspired by actual female operatives.”

Saldaña has also watched viewers become deeply invested in Joe. When the character disappeared during the season, fans filled social media with reactions and theories about her fate. Saldaña saw many of the posts herself.

“I can’t tell you how happy it made me,” she said. “My heart was filled with so much gratitude that people were really living in real time, just the suspense and the thrill of the show, of the arc of this season.”

The finale provides answers about Joe’s kidnapping but offers little relief. Aaliyah’s involvement reveals how far the consequences of Joe’s work can travel, and another attempt to capture her is already being discussed. Meanwhile, Kaitlyn still wants a conversation with Joe about what comes next. Saldaña believed that returning to the first season gave the actors something substantial to explore after three years with these characters.

“I think that the big reveal to fans was also probably a big reveal to Taylor [Sheridan] who was writing this season, and then inherently to us as we were receiving his pages, is that what happened in season one was very powerful,” Saldaña said. “I just appreciate the fact that it’s coming full circle, that it came back full circle giving a lot of us as our characters, but also as our actors, as actors playing these characters, it was great.”

The first three seasons of Lioness are available now on Paramount+

Author: Okla Jones

Read the original article on Essence.