Season 3 of Strike Back continues to up the ante with last week's capture of an ailing Stonebridge while he, Scott and Locke's FSB cover agent Piragova attempted to make a daring escape from a maximum security Russian prison that just so happened to house a piece of stolen NATO equipment, somehow tied into al-Zuhari's nefarious plans to launch a large-scale terrorist attack.

Making things worse was the news that Stonebridge's recent physical troubles didn't stem from stress (like he kept telling everyone), but rather from exposure to a deadly neurotoxin that's slowly working its way through his system. And now that he's fallen into enemy hands, the race is on for Locke, Richmond and Martinez to recover their comrade before he can be used as a guinea pig in a series of experiments intended to test a devastating chemical agent.

While the rest of Section 20 is presumably busy dealing with Stonebridge, al-Zuhari's plans and the increasingly distrustful and paranoid Leo Kamali, Damien Scott is still in his prison duds, trying to escape Russian authorities with deep-cover FSB officer Nina Piragova (Tereza Srbova) riding shotgun. As the above clip demonstrates, in the world of Strike Back, there's always time for some witty banter and the exchange of ideas on the cultural differences that define Americans' sense of humor and, in Scott's case, his theory on how even the obvious beauty of his equally lost co-pilot is fleeting – thanks to generally held beliefs of superficial people prone to making sweeping generalizations.

Tereza Srbova and Sullivan Stapleton in Strike Back Episode 8

But that's the sort of thing that happens when Scott takes a new friend with him to test drive a Mercedes. It's a crash course in the delicate social sciences of a globetrotting series for which a high-speed car chase on a gravel road is likely only the precursor to a far more explosive confrontation, pitting two against seemingly insurmountable odds.

At any rate, season 3 of Strike Back has turned up the heat on its characters in what is the show's customarily entertaining fashion. It's not whether Scott and Stonebridge will get out of their respective predicaments, but how, and with what kind of explosive results.

Be sure you tune in to find out, and then come and discuss in the comments of Screen Rant's weekly analysis of the show.

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Strike Back episode 8 airs Friday night @10pm on Cinemax.