Welcome back, fellow diplomacy connoisseurs, to The Diplomat, season three, the show where the most outrageous thing is almost guaranteed to happen in every episode.
Since the third season overlaps the second by about ten seconds, let’s refresh our memories about what happened before we see Kate (Keri Russell) racing across the Winfield House back lawn following the news of President Rayburn’s (Michael McKean) death. It was a doozy of machinations and intended next steps, all thrown into chaos by the abrupt loss of one president and the ascension of another. Kate’s attempts to convince Grace Penn (Allison Janney) of anything — chiefly, that she’s not gunning for the vice-presidency and that she’s not going to leak any information to anyone about Grace’s role in the attack on the HMS Courageous — were not successful. On the British side, Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) had agreed to launch a secret investigation into a conspiracy in his own government but hadn’t yet done so, and Dennison (David Gyasi) had re-hitched his wagon to Trowbridge’s star, such as it is.
This episode’s two biggest plot threads involve significant twists. The journey Grace goes on from considering Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell) one big walking liability to offering him the job as her second-in-command is quite something. (And my congratulations to the trailer-editing wizzes at Netflix for concealing that pivot in all the promotional work for this season.) Margaret Roylin’s (Celia Imrie) decision to take her own life via medication overdose (with properly steeped and served tea, naturally; she still has standards to maintain) is similarly shocking, but that moment is shot in such a hushed, almost reverential way that its significance and the devastation it’s likely to unleash are easy to overlook at first. Each one leaves us with a lot to unpack and resets the board for the season.
We don’t get a clear rationale for Grace’s change of heart/mind/survival instinct regarding Hal since Kate is both the main character and has such intense main-character energy, but I have some initial hypotheses on President Penn’s thought process: Hal, who has a longer and higher-profile service record than Kate, should be a pretty easy sell to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. If the Wylers will be nipping at her heels anyway, she may as well make Hal the one with real power and keep Kate within eyesight. Hal is also, to put it bluntly, a man, and the 2016 and 2024 presidential-election results suggested American voters aren’t all that enthusiastic about the idea of a female president. Hal has both gravitas and swagger, and who knows, if things go well, he might make a good running mate for Grace in a couple of years.
Hal’s also a raging loose cannon, something we’re reminded of in the first lines of the season premiere. As she sprints across the back lawn toward a safe room in Winfield House, Kate’s mind is racing but her thoughts are clear; she urges Hal to be as reticent and uninformative as possible in his debrief with Rayburn’s doctors and an FBI agent.
I hate that she has to be plunged into a dire crisis situation to bring out this aspect of her personality and character. Still, Kate seems at her best in a crisis, instructing her staff to lock down the embassy perimeter, requesting more Met police on-site, and reminding everyone the safe room at Winfield is not a SCIF. Hence, they need to set up a temporary one to make secure phone calls.
Is there an Emmys performance category for inanimate objects? I’m asking on behalf of the SCIF, which itself is quite dignified and workmanlike, but the business of characters repeatedly throwing its tent flap open to exit and reenter a secure room to have private sidebar conversations outside that secure room is so funny. Janney and Russell are both gifted physical comedians, and I would love to see more little moments of screwball silliness this season.
Almost as soon as everyone is assembled in the SCIF, Grace insists on learning exactly whom Rayburn was with and whom he was speaking to when he died, so Kate has to pipe up about Hal. She shares this detail as neutrally as possible, pivoting quickly to “pulling Hal from his debrief would be to everyone’s advantage right now” when Grace pulls her out of the SCIF for a quick tête-à-tête. Shortly afterward, she presses Eidra to get Hal out of his debrief, and I’m struck by Kate’s loyalty to Grace here. Sure, Hal would find himself in the soup if the subject matter of their conversation were to become more widely known, but the brand-new president of the United States of America could face treason charges. I’m not a legal expert, but that seems like a way worse outcome.
Once they’re all back at the embassy — another win for Kate thanks to her relentless real-time fact-checking about its many security and visual-messaging advantages over Winfield House — we get a series of glimpses into Hal’s role in everyone’s very eventful morning and Kate’s many efforts to protect him, placate Grace, and get through the rest of the day as uneventfully as possible. We also see Grace taking in all his information while processing her sudden new reality as POTUS.
Hal is flustered and blames himself for Rayburn’s death, but at base he’s unrepentant about informing his recently former commander-in-chief that his chief deputy had gone spectacularly rogue. For all his Cool Girl Diplomacy ways, he takes oaths to uphold the Constitution very seriously, and as Kate points out to Grace, she can exact vengeance on the Wylers but has many other issues to deal with at the moment.
In the episode’s remaining minutes, it’s clear that both Kate and Hal assume she will be Grace’s VP, and Hal in particular is running around shamelessly campaigning for her as only a devoted wife guy/impresario/power broker in his own right can. He instructs Stuart to make sure Kate is on Air Force One when Grace flies back to Washington and delivers quite a speech to Grace about how essential Kate will be to her administration.
This episode is full of little moments supporting Hal’s argument — from Kate’s relentless encouragement to decamp to the embassy to the best scene between her and Grace as they improvise an elegantly draped cowl-neck dickey with a shirt Kate fishes out of a desk drawer. Grace’s asking for help is a big deal, and Kate’s furnishing it with minimal fuss or chitchat is too. Grace needs something to wear for her swearing-in that doesn’t “look like a maître d’!” and whatever her feelings about Grace, Kate knows the president looking her best is a win for everyone in the building and for the country’s standing internationally.
Scenes like this are the mortar of the show. The dickering over where to hold the swearing-in; the significance of the visuals; the prickliness and earnestness of Billie, Grace’s Secret Service detail; and Nora, her chief of staff, Stuart, and Neil racing around to secure a judge, robes, and a Bible — the plot twists prompt headlines and fevered group texts, but the little moments are what ground the show in its heightened, soapy reality.
The current MVP of little moments is Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge. Nobody in this episode tears into their lines with more relish or lands more laughs than Kinnear. He delivers the two funniest bits of the season premiere through his total commitment to the recitation of “Cleopatra’s Lament” as a thoughtful reflection on Rayburn’s death and his wholly sincere delivery of “Jesus did not write the Bible.” Combining total earnestness with profound silliness is a high-wire act not many can pull off, but I’ve watched this episode three times now and these moments have only gotten funnier with each viewing.
Trowbridge offers the most humane assessment of Grace’s predicament, saying if she appears steady, she’s a monster, but if she betrays so much as a hint of her grief, she’s hysterical. That bracing shot has a bombshell of a chaser: He’ll take custody of Margaret after all. She spent about two-thirds of last season in unofficial (highly questionable) CIA custody, and while Kate and Eidra would love her to be off their hands, leaving her to Trowbridge’s tender mercies isn’t as desirable as it was just hours before. Both Nicol and Lydia Trowbridge, Austin Dennison, and Tom Libby from MI6 all know about Margaret’s role in the bombing of the Courageous, and the one card she has to play is Grace’s involvement in that misbegotten plan. What incentive does Margaret have to keep quiet about it now?
Kate getting a quick approval from Grace to offer Margaret asylum is the smart move, until it’s not. I understand why, tactically, she can’t read Eidra into the real reason for the asylum offer, but urging her to make the offer to Margaret before clearing it with Langley feels risky and callous. Margaret’s no fool, and even with Hal present for the conversation, she finds the developments of the day, including the unexpected asylum offer, horrifying. She would rather take her chances in the U.K., which is saying something. It’s been a year between seasons for us, but in the timeline of the series, Trowbridge tried to wring Margaret’s neck just a few days ago, and she would still rather stay put. Her choice to stay put forever, choosing death by suicide, is the most extreme — and perhaps the only — way to exert her will. Her self-annihilation is grisly and impossible to misinterpret as a final repudiation of her role in the HMS Courageous bombing and, until Grace announces she’d like Hal to be her vice-president, is the most intense and far-reaching twist of the episode.
Intrigue and Crumpets
• Is the portable SCIF The Diplomat’s answer to The Americans’ mail robot of blessed memory?
• Kudos to Janney on her performance of Grace’s shock, followed by her swift metabolizing of the news of Rayburn’s death and her asking, in effect, “What’s next?” It’s an eight-second master class in embodied acting.
• There’s a second West Wing resonance here courtesy of the massive 15th-century Gutenberg Bible that Trowbridge brings to the embassy for Grace’s swearing-in. It’s an amusing callback to a similar bit of Bible business around Jed Bartlet’s second swearing-in in the fourth season of that show.
• At the swearing-in, Eidra takes Stuart’s hand. Aw, I love love, and I love Ali Ahn and Ato Essandoh together, so let’s do this!
• We get exactly one brief scene with Bradley Whitford playing Grace’s husband, Todd Penn.
