3 ‘Lioness’ Hidden Clues That Set Up Season 3’s Ending Twist

Taylor Sheridan loves dropping a line into the action thriller Lioness and making you wonder if it will ever matter again. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the show moves on to the next international crisis before you have time to process what just happened. Season 3, Episode 8, “The Unraveling,” pulled off something truly satisfying. However, the reveal that Aaliyah Amrohi was behind the operation targeting Joe didn’t come out of nowhere. Season 1 had already left behind some very specific clues that suddenly made more sense.

While the Lioness Season 3 finale left me with several questions, it reveals that Joe’s kidnapping was ultimately part of a revenge plot connected to Season 1’s important character Aaliyah. The CIA spends most of the season looking in the wrong direction. The actual chain shows middlemen running from an Iran-backed militia, a D.C. broker, and a contract agent who all attempt to hurt Joe. Aaliyah paid for it, and she wants Joe to stay alive, so the others come to save her. But let’s think about how we got here in the first place. Here are three clues Taylor Sheridan left in Lioness Season 1 that make everything fall into place.

Why You Should Trust Me: I’ve been writing about film and television for almost four years as an entertainment journalist at MovieWeb. I’ve followed Lioness closely across all three seasons, including covering the Season 3 finale and conducting exclusive interviews with Lioness stars Thad Luckinbill and LaMonica Garrett. That experience has given me a good excuse to obsess over Sheridan’s recurring characters, mission details, and little pieces of Season 1 that connect to Season 3.

Cruz Basically Predicted Aaliyah’s Revenge on the Boat in Season 1

The biggest clue is right there in the Season 1 finale, and it’s glaringly obvious when you know where Season 3 is going. After Cruz kills Asmar Amrohi and Aaliyah’s fiancé, Ehsan, she swims out to the team’s yacht, punches Joe, and rejects the clean version of the mission. Joe tries to justify the operation by reminding her that Asmar was responsible for years of violence and that killing him saved lives. Cruz fires back, telling Joe that someday Aaliyah’s children will hear how their grandfather died, and warning her that they have created “the next generation of terrorists.”

At the moment in the Taylor Sheridan series, it sounds like Cruz’s guilt talking. The line works as her rejection of the Lioness program, since she has just killed the father of the woman she fell in love with, and she can’t accept Joe’s argument. However, Season 3 gives this scene a new weight. Cruz talked about Aaliyah’s future children, but the show skips the kids and focuses on Aaliyah. She survives the wedding massacre. The show leaves her story open-ended, and she resurfaces as the financier behind a meticulously layered revenge plot against Joe. No one higher up needs to know who signs the checks. Cruz saw the fallout of the mission long before Joe did, and she called the twist two seasons early.

The Oil Business Connects Season 1 to the Black Market

This one is a theory because Lioness hasn’t explicitly confirmed that Aaliyah inherited her father’s empire. Still, when I look back at Season 1 and Season 3, I can see some suspiciously similar pieces.

When Cruz becomes closer to Aaliyah in Season 1, Aaliyah pushes back against the way Americans describe her father. She says people call him a terrorist, while he sells himself as a businessman who sells oil outside sanctions. She also admits that she doesn’t understand the oil business well enough to say why he lives in so much danger. However, the show spends a lot of time connecting Asmar’s wealth to terrorism and the international oil market. Then, Cruz kills him and tells Joe, “All we did was change oil prices.” That line sounds like bitter sarcasm at the moment, but it’s a layered comment.

If we jump to Season 3, we can see the oil connection coming back into focus. The Gitmo informant tells Joe that Sokolov, the D.C. broker, moves human cargo, black-market oil, and stolen goods onto international cargo ships, and that Joe’s contract passed through several layers before it reached the field team. I know that doesn’t prove that Aaliyah took over her father’s business, but it puts the same ingredients on the table: oil, militias, international intermediaries, and deniable operations.

Aaliyah Trusted Cruz Until Cruz Destroyed Her World In ‘Lioness’

Paramount+
Lioness Season 1
Paramount+
Paramount+

This is the clue that matters most to me, mainly because it makes the plot twist personal. Cruz spends Season 1 undercover as Zara Adid, and Aaliyah falls for the woman she thinks Zara is. The night before the wedding, Aaliya sneaks into Cruz’s room and admits she doesn’t want to marry Ehsan. She asks Cruz to hold her because she wants to feel loved one last time. Although Cruz knows exactly why Aaliyah is vulnerable, she can’t tell her the truth. Aaliyah tries to kiss Cruz; Cruz pulls away and leaves the room to get water. Minutes later, she kills Asmar and Ehsan. Aaliyah walks in, sees her fiancé and father on the floor, and screams. The finale shows her sitting there, trying to figure out who Cruz really was, and leaves her story there.

That makes her Season 3 return so meaningful. The woman Aaliyah trusted and loved helped destroy her family. In Doha, she no longer looks like the sheltered bride from Mallorca. She has money, connections, and patience, and she wants to lure Joe’s team into a trap.

This also gives Cruz a bigger role in what comes next. Laysla De Oliveira told MovieWeb that if Lioness returns, she wants the story to “reflect the structure of season one a little bit more.” She also wants to see more of Cruz’s home life. After this finale, that wish seems closer to coming true. It’s also interesting to think about how Sheridan didn’t invent a new enemy. He went back to the woman on the other end of Cruz’s first mission and made her more dangerous.

Bonus Clues

Ehsan dug into Cruz’s past: That night, he finds an old online photo tied to Cruz’s real name and figures out she’s a Marine. While Cruz kills him in the kitchen, he has already discovered the truth about her. The show hasn’t explained how Aaliyah traced Joe’s team, but I think this is the closest breadcrumb.
Season 1 left Aaliyah alive: Joe’s team picks off Cruz and the guards and sails away. Surprisingly, the finale never shows the agency worrying about the bride who found the bodies, considering she’s an eyewitness. In Season 3, Mullins admits that he feels the way he did a week before 9/11. I’d argue that the blind spot started with Aaliyah.