Lioness spent an entire season asking who wanted Joe McNamara dead, and as I watched the twists unfold, it became clear the answer was never really about Russia at all. The Season 3 finale, “The Unraveling,” reveals that the woman who financed Joe’s abduction is someone the show introduced all the way back in its very first year, and for me, the reason has nothing to do with politics.
Most of the season points investigators toward Dmitri Sokolov and a shadowy Russian-to-Iran pipeline, a trail that ends in a bloody D.C. restaurant shootout. But that entire thread turns out to be a smokescreen. The person who actually put a price on Joe’s head is Aaliyah Amrohi (played by Stephanie Nur), and to understand why, I think the story has to go back to a wedding in Mallorca.
How Season 1 Ended for Aaliyah
Aaliyah first appeared as the target of Cruz Manuelos, a Marine recruited into the Lioness program to infiltrate her social circle under the alias Zara Adid. The real mission was never about Aaliyah herself. Her father, the billionaire Asmar Ali Amrohi, was a major financier of terrorism, and Cruz’s access to his daughter was simply the fastest way to get close enough to kill him.
Cruz’s assignment worked too well. She and Aaliyah fell into a genuine relationship, and Cruz earned an invitation to Aaliyah’s wedding to Ehsan, the event the CIA had been building toward the entire time.
When Ehsan grew suspicious and confronted Cruz alone in the kitchen the night before the ceremony, she killed him and then Amrohi with a knife before Joe’s extraction team pulled her out under fire. Aaliyah was left with both her father and her fiancé dead, and the discovery that the woman she loved had been lying to her from the very beginning.
Why Aaliyah Targeted Joe
The Season 3 finale reveals that Aaliyah never stopped being angry, and she had the resources to do something about it.
Now operating as a billionaire in her own right, she quietly put a contract on Joe out on the open market, offering contractors $250,000 per man to capture the senior CIA officer alive. The Sokolov investigation, the restaurant firefight, all of it traced back to hired hands working that contract, not a state actor with a political agenda.
The finale’s closing scene moves to a mansion in Doha, where Aaliyah learns the latest attempt on Joe has failed and coldly instructs her people to try again. Her real target was never Joe alone. Taking her was designed to pull in the entire Lioness team, and especially Cruz, the one person Aaliyah still hasn’t let go of.
That’s what makes this reveal land so hard for me, hitting way harder than a typical villain twist. Cruz has spent the years since Season 1 rebuilding a quiet life with her partner Josie, finally putting Mallorca behind her.
Aaliyah’s endgame threatens to drag her straight back into it, reopening the show’s oldest wound as the engine for everything to come, assuming Paramount+ greenlights Season 4, which currently remains unrenewed.
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