The Diplomat Season-Finale Recap: No Fools In This Chain

The Diplomat

Warships

Season 4

Episode 8

Editor’s Rating

5 stars

Grace’s power trip has gone too far, leaving Kate with no choice but to resort to the only tactic she has left.
Photo: Nick Wall/Netflix

The thing about abusive people is that they’re constantly testing everyone around them. They’re pushing buttons; they’re poking at boundaries and psychological sensitivities. They’re blowing past limits and squeezing through loopholes. It’s compulsive and repugnant, and can make for great TV, especially when the main abusive character gets what could be (at last!!) something resembling comeuppance. In this corker of a season finale — which caps off a season that’s re-energized The Diplomat top to bottom — Grace turns out to be a victim of her own success, getting behind the wheel while very drunk on power, and taking one autocratic turn too far.

Things start out ordinarily enough for another day in her leadership team. Kate is once again explaining to Hal something very obvious about his own psyche and routine behavior. Yes, my guy, you are an inveterate liar and norm-breaker! The one thing you and I are going to agree on in this episode is that she should have left you long ago! They must work together to prepare Todd for his meeting with Palmer, but Kate will have to do so silently, as she’s been ordered not to speak, lest speaking lead to interference (or, as we used to call it, doing her job).

Holding her tongue is not Kate’s forte in general, and the severity of Todd’s avalanche of blunders in their meeting with the British foreign secretary tests the outer limits of her ability. Should we be laughing at a scene where the First Gentleman/Special Envoy’s incompetence and inadequate preparation to respond to pesky little follow-up questions about whether or not American warships will fire on British and/or Russian vessels as they make their way towards the Russian submarine? Perhaps not, but Bradley Whitford is so good at playing overconfident yet increasingly aware of being far out of his depth that it’s hard not to. (This scene re-created some of the delights of one of my favorite scenes in The West Wing where Josh Lyman had to step in for CJ Cregg at the press room briefing podium as she recovered from a root canal, to hilarious, near-catastrophic results.)

Todd, but a little lost lamb in the woods that he is, manages to suggest several times that the U.S. would engage militarily with Russian vessels, and that shooting at any British ships in the vicinity is not off the table. Upon hearing him say that any British citizens caught between the sides “should make every effort to go somewhere else”, Kate first tells him to stop talking, then stands up to announce that she’s “having unusually sharp womanly pains”. Awkward, yet effective! Great to have that one in your back pocket. I enjoyed those laughs, and also, shame on Grace for putting Todd in a position to end NATO, and a bit of shame on Hal and Kate, too, for not insisting he prepare for Palmer’s predictable follow-up questions.

Fortunately for Kate, she isn’t forced to deal with the immediate fallout of Todd’s debacle, because MI6 has arrived (in the guise of “Rolf”, who would love to introduce her to the German Chancellor’s wife) to extract her to a secondary location for a quick check-in with Vaughn. Sadly, a substantive and enduring friendship between Kate and Vaughn may now be off the table. Vaughn isn’t thrilled by Kate’s initial decision not to inform her of Grace’s ultimatum, and is hopping mad at Todd’s delivery of the details on the U.S. deployment of warships, so much so that now she, too, is deploying ships to follow through on her commitment to provide safe passage to the Russians’ ships.

What’s more, she’s seeing Grace’s bid of warships and raising her the threat of being expelled from the G7 and consequences involving both Articles 4 and 5 of the NATO charter. I looked this up; according to the NATO website, Article 4 allows any NATO member to call for consultation with the North Atlantic Council when “the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened”. I’ve heard Article 5 referred to as the mutual defense provision, summarized as “an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against them all”. In other words, this could become a gigantic shitshow that would destabilize international relations globally, which is one of the outcomes all responsible diplomats and heads of state, with the glaring exception of Grace Penn, work constantly to prevent.

Hal will be up next with Vaughn, and of course, he’ll deliver Grace’s message with more finesse than Todd did, but it’s hard to imagine it going over well. What could work out better is an idea Stuart floats on Kate’s behalf: at this point, why not just tell the Russians that the Americans have the Poseidon? Hal counters with a reminder that everyone in the U.S. government who weighs in on such things believes the Russians would launch a massive cyberattack on the continental U.S. Kate argues that they would not do so, “because then we’ll tell the world that they had an epic technological fail again; that while they’re getting pantsed by Ukrainian teenagers and homemade drones, we picked their pocket!” (The Diplomat’s timeline differs from ours in a number of ways, but it turns out that the Russians invaded Ukraine in their world, too.) Poor Stuart’s capable and patient efforts come to nothing, because Hal is in a snit and seems to be suffering an acute case of sunk cost fallacy-itis. He’s thrown in his lot with Grace, has a seat at the table, and doesn’t want to risk it, because he still half-believes he can influence Grace for the greater good. Not even Kate’s direct intervention works here, which is quite something. She finds him unrecognizable. She remembers a Hal Wyler who “talked ears off heads until people rethought, who said loyalty, by definition [is] and abdication of judgment”.

Where is that guy now? Off carrying the president’s contaminated water, sadly. His message delivery is no more successful than Todd’s, and now the entire conference is in danger of collapsing. Gannon and Billie’s attempt to convince Grace to back off actually backfires, as they aren’t quite smooth enough to prevent her from deducing that Stuart has filed a cable in the State Department’s Dissent Channel. He’d taken such care to compose a thoughtful, professional alternate perspective on the fuckery he’s been witnessing. It’s such a non-confrontational mechanism that Billie and Eidra laughed at him for doing it, and Kate encouraged him to file so that his perspective would become part of the historical record. Guess who is so thin-skinned and vengeance-minded that she retaliated by punching down and having Stuart recalled from his post? She demands loyalty, and all I can hear ringing in my mind is Kate quoting Hal’s disgust at the notion of abdicating independent judgment.

It’s painful to witness Stuart in particular being punished like this. Kate was right to read him into all of the messy and highly questionable decision-making that’s been going on for the last year and change! He’s got subject-area expertise, a good head on his shoulders, and a strong, finely calibrated moral compass, and should be an ambassador in his own right in the next few years. Instead, he’s being shipped back to D.C., unable to return to the hotel or his home in London, and thanks to her security clearance, Eidra is the one who will have to supervise the whole curtailment of his mission. Everything about this makes my stomach turn, most of all Grace’s smug, cat-that-got-the-cream face when she tells Kate that her DCM undermined her policy in a high-stakes situation, and then tells her to watch herself. Perhaps it’s only metaphorically possible for human blood to run cold in our veins, but I did feel it literally just then.

Kate’s last-ditch effort to get Grace to back off comes to nothing when she learns that if she continues to push back on her “them or us” doctrine, which Grace has neatly swathed in faux-righteousness and magnanimity, the next to lose their jobs will be her and Hal. As Hal puts it the next morning, the chilling effect is very effective. It seems, for a few minutes, as though Grace has this one in the bag. In her remarks to the day’s first full session of G7 nations, she pre-empts Vaughn’s post-session Article 4 consultation by laying out her version of events since the Russian submarine ran aground, and urging her colleagues to consider a bleak future of the group without the U.S. among them. Once again, nobody seems to have the stomach to stand up to her, and the Italian Prime Minister begins to deliver his speech. Kate, bless her, does the exact right thing by resigning in the most public way possible, saying she can no longer support the actions of the Penn administration. She’s followed by Billie, then Gannon, then, yes, it’s him! It’s Hal! Outside the venue, the four of them walk up to the gates, where a scrum of press awaits them, and Hal begins to make a statement. Whew! Let’s go!

As is usual for me at the end of the season, I am overflowing with questions. If four of the most consequential members of Grace’s staff/cabinet quit en masse, what will become of her administration? The U.S. lacks the votes of no confidence and the ability to call a snap election that parliamentary governments operate under, so there can’t be any immediate electoral consequences for her. Will there be more mass resignations? Will we take a time jump to the next in-universe presidential election? Will the title of the series change? Could The Diplomat pivot to being about the British Foreign Office? Or Bethan Vaughn’s unfolding premiership? Can we speed up time to get to the next season by, say, June 2027?

• Just a little smorgasbord of seasonal wrap-up thoughts here: The show seems to have moved on from any thoughts of the investigation into Grace’s assassination attempt, but I would love to see that thread picked up again down the line, preferably bringing Tom Libby back into the story.

• Yes, I did Shazam the song Stuart and Eidra were singing as they got dressed for the musical performance; it’s another Prince song, “Girls and Boys” from his album Parade (most famous for “Kiss”). I love that he’s their artist.

• I really really really hope Stuart gets reinstated at Embassy London ASAP, on both general principles and because I, an avowed sentimentalist, would love for him and Eidra to have some very cute (and tall) babies.

• When Vaughn refers to Todd as “Mr. Pickles”, does she mean the mass-murdering border collie in the Adult Swim series of the same name, former British MP Eric Pickles, or another being altogether, real or fictional?