Men's Lifestyle August 30, 2026 0 Comments

Why Lioness’s New Honeypotting Strategy Could Be a Game-Changer — But Not in a Good Way!

So, what does the average person really know about the CIA? Honestly, not much—and yeah, that’s hardly shocking. I mean, someone’s dad can clock four decades there, and you’re still left clueless about what he actually did. Kinda eerie, right? Now, jump into the chaotic world of Joe, played by Zoe Saldaña in Lioness season 3, where the stakes aren’t just secretive whisperings but a full-blown “find our girl” mission unfolding amid espionage and dangerous honeypot schemes. It’s part spy thriller, part family drama—and let me just say, the mix is as wild and unpredictable as trying to nail that perfect SEO algorithm update on the first try! From dodging Russian spies to decoding a flood of government code numbers (no, I had no clue what those meant either), this episode is a relentless maze of intrigue and raw emotion. Ready to dive into the madness that’s got everyone talking? Trust me, this ride is worth every minute. LEARN MORE

4 min read

What does the average person really know about being in the
CIA? The answer—not much!—shouldn’t surprise you. As a reader commented on our recap of Lioness episode 4 last week, their father-in-law was in the CIA and they never learned anything. “Worked there 40 years and he died without me (or his daughter) know[ing] anything he did,” they wrote. Scary!

That’s no longer the case for Joe (Zoe Saldaña). The war came knocking on her front door in Lioness season 3, and now her family waits to hear if the CIA actually has her back when shit hits the fan. I couldn’t tell you if screaming “I’m blackjacked!” or running one honeypot setup after another are CIA norms—though I didn’t read about either from the real-life Lionesses who complained about how Taylor Sheridan’s version of their CIA unit is Hollywood-ified. But if Lioness can fully commit to the plot of “find our girl” now that Joe is kidnapped, then it shouldn’t be too hard to fulfill the kind of high-energy action that launched a thousand Taken films from here on out.

Season 3, episode 5 is titled “The Idiot Army,” and I imagine that’s not because we call ourselves that. But after seeing the operations that the Lioness team pulls off in the first ten minutes, I can’t say what we did was anything more than two quick honeypot schemes. Neither of which, by the way, felt like the quickest options available. The visual of this software engineer caught with his pants down was a nice touch, sure. But there’s no reason why Joe and her team couldn’t have just skipped the threesome farce and interrogated him other than the fact that Lioness probably wanted the sexy opening.

So, they slap around this poor failson named Cade who had no idea what he was getting himself into when he started leaking NSA information to foreign agents. Elsewhere, ol’ Two Cups (James Jordan) pulls off nearly the exact same operation. Despite having a wife and four children, he takes home a stripper and has sex with her. The plan? Well, when she calls her Russian handlers to entrap him the next morning, the Lioness team can bust down the doors and apprehend them. Like I said, there wasn’t a simpler solution here? Or did Two Cups just really want to cheat on his wife “in the name of national security?”

Somehow, all this literal fucking around will eventually lead to Joe’s kidnapping. We’re still in the past here in Lioness season 3’s timeline, even though we have a far more exciting plot ahead of us.

l r michael kelly as byron westfield and nicole kidman as kaitlyn in lioness, episode 5, season 3, streaming on paramount, 2026 photo credit ryan greenparamount

Ryan Green

Instead, we spend the first half of episode 5 in interrogations as our characters threaten our new honeypotted detainees with prison time, torture, rape, and every horrible thing imaginable while they smirk in their faces.

There are so many numbers flying around this episode. “You’re gonna be charged with 18 U.S. Code 1831 and 18 U.S.C. 793-794,” Kaitlyn tells one of the suspects they apprehended. “I don’t know what those mean,” he responds. Neither do we! Same goes for when an FBI head questions why the CIA violated “the National Security Act of 1947 and Executive Act 12333.” Joe later states that since they’re acting in the interest of national security they don’t need to read them their “Miranda rights, fourth, fifth, or fourteenth.”

Morgan Freeman’s secretary of state character is the only person in this episode who feels like he’s on our side. “Can we pause the dick-measuring here?” Freeman says. If only the numbers were that simple.

So, Joe explains that some professor at an unnamed university coerced and blackmailed their suspects into leaking information to Russia and China. He’s a communist sympathizer with a $270,000 annual salary and a beach house, so he doesn’t sound very communist to them. But when they show up to one of his classes later, he’s spouting so much boilerplate communist ideology that a baby could understand what was going on. “I guess you’ll be surrendering your money and your property to the U.S. government after all,” Joe jokes. Guys like these, she says, are the real idiot army.

Back during their meeting with the secretary of state, Kaitlyn also invokes “T.S. clearance” and states that the information she is about to provide is “Yankee White Only.” (It’s insane how much my brain is working overtime this episode.) Apparently, the CIA possesses knowledge of several Russian sources in the U.S. working as executives of TV networks, senior editors at The Washington Post, court judges, members of the House of Representatives, and two senators.

This is the real meat here—and where we likely should’ve started this whole plot. Joe suggests flipping them back to our side instead of arresting them, and one of the Cabinet members flat out says: “Explain that.” I’m surprised. I thought she would try to honeypot them, but this episode isn’t anywhere near done its lengthy exposition dumps. Because we can’t forget that, back in the present, Joe is still being held hostage by Russian agents. That’s what all this is leading toward, after all, despite a stream of espionage distractions filled with codebook arrests and a clear lack of basic human freedoms. Before we learn why any of this is important, however, it seems this split timeline might continue all the way until the finale.

Maybe one more honeypot sting will do the trick.