Who Do You Work For? - The Diplomat Season 3

The following contains spoilers for the first three seasons of The Diplomat.

Netflix’s The Diplomat is a political thriller about the complexities of marriage. Ambassador to the U.K. Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) has an extremely complicated relationship with her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), and while the two of them have an intense intimacy born of decades of co-habitation and affection and support, it’s long since reached the point where Kate feels the relationship has fallen apart. To complicate matters, the show begins with the revelation that President of the United States William Rayburn (Michael McKean) tapped Kate for her new Ambassadorship amidst a major diplomatic crisis in part to groom her as an option for the new Vice President of his second term.

Meanwhile, Hal’s career has completely stalled out. Most shows would build drama out of his professional jealousy, but The Diplomat paints him as loving and supportive and all-in on his relationship with Kate. He always lifts her up in public and private, though there’s the implication that he loves the idea of being an Ambassador’s husband and (potentially) First Gentleman of the United States. Proximity to power, it seems, is enough for him and he is certainly capable of operating in the space.

The show runs the trials of their marriage parallel to the diplomatic situation Kate has to deal with. It’s not quite metaphorical, but there is the sense of two parties having to work together even when they’re on very different pages about the world and how it should operate. By season three, revelations of illicit United States actions (including by those at the highest levels in Rayburn’s adminsitration) as well as a major shift in America’s politics have started to crack the once strong ties between the two nations. Kate works tirelessly to keep things afloat, though the interests of all these individual parties makes that increasingly difficult.

The third season’s penultimate episode, “PNG”, comes at a moment of diplomatic crisis. Tensions between the United States and the United Kingdom are at an all time high. Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) detonated their relationship in a live joint press conference with him and the President, exposing extremely sensitive information because of his own ego. Trowbridge has always been a defiant, arrogant leader, though a lot of that comes from his work to center his (and thusly the UK’s) interests above all others.

Written by Julianna Dudley Meagher and directed by veteran TV director Alex Graves, “PNG” is the closest thing the show has to a bottle episode, and it’s no surprise it’s the season’s best episode. Almost the entire thing takes place in three locations with minimal extras. It’s a complicated portrayal of interpersonal relationships, where Kate regularly tries to get Hal on the phone while juggling her affair with British spy and informant Callum Ellis (Aidan Turner). It’s electric, proving the show is best when it focuses on politics as not about policy fights, but the individual actions of folk who are only human.

Sex is easy

The third season starts in pure chaos: President Rayburn’s sudden demise in the closing seconds of last season, the ascension of his Vice President Grace Penn (Alison Janney) to the Presidency, and her tapping Hal as Vice President. It leaves Kate directionless. This is the first time in the show that Hal holds a position higher than her, and the prospect of being subordinate to him accelerates the deterioration of their marriage. For all her protestations, there is also the loss of the Vice Presidency itself, something she clearly very much did want only to lose it to a man she loves but who she doesn’t feel has earned it.

It makes her reckless. Almost immediately she makes a move on UK Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), something the show has been setting up since the beginning. He rejects it because of timing (and by the end of the season winds up married to someone else). At some point after that she instigates an affair with British spy Callum Ellis (Aidan Turner) and five months into Penn’s presidency that affair is still going strong.

Early in “PNG” Kate and Ellis find themselves alone in the Ambassador’s residence. While they have been working together previously, they’ve also simultaneously carried on a clandestine affair. It doesn’t take long for them to make the most of their surprise privacy.

It is… easy. The sex part of an affair usually is. But it doesn’t take long for them to realize this is the longest stretch of time they’ve spent talking to each other. Part of that is their own philosophical conversations about the nature of the US/UK relationship and the behavior of both countries in this century. They disagree on basic fundamentals. And they’re both (in macro and microcosm) solid allies.

But it also quickly it devolves into conflict that stems from Kate’s personal quandries. She doesn’t like that Ellis made a judgment call unilaterally about a potential proliferation of seriously advanced nuclear technology. He didn’t pass it up the chain and preferred to handle it himself. She views that as the sort of bullshit Hal would pull and resents him for the macho arrogance.

They each have their own interests, with Kate an avatar for the United States and its interests as director of the world order. Ellis, meanwhile, is still a British citizen and is working back channels with Kate while never losing his pride in UK sovereignty.

They still really like each other. And Ellis plays a major role in the season finale, especially with regards to his intel about the nature of the nuclear technology at stake. But that tension reflects the “this is a terrible idea” of Kate (as Second Lady and Ambassador to the UK) having an affair at all. At least Ellis has the discretion that comes with being a spy. Otherwise…

A public marriage, a private divorce

While this is happening, Kate speaks regularly to the two major players at the White House: Vice President Hal and Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah). Coming off an episode where the two of them regularly tried to ice Kate out of conversations surrounding admitting America’s culpability in the freighter strike, they’re plenty tense any time she calls.

This… challenge for Kate has been happening since Penn tapped Hal for VP, but it’s only gotten worse as more of this America-targeted-a-British-freighter scandal has spiraled out of control. The White House knows she’s a team player, but they also know how dogged she is in her positions. They take her for granted and don’t want her around. It’s worse because Hal knows about Kate’s affair (and has tacitly condoned it) and that’s put a strain on their relationship. A lot of that is because he’s in love with her and that’s never really changed. He loves being married to her and knows the value she brings, but he’s also in a position where he is Vice President and she is not. While he was second fiddle to her Ambassadorship he was always throwing ideas at her; she would consider them but definitely acted on her own. With one request from Penn, that entire dynamic flipped.

Wisely, the show almost never makes any of this text. A lot of it is the writers presenting the characters as they are and the actors reading the subtext and lacing their actions/dialogue with frustration and feelings that bubble under the surface. As a marriage, it fits in with the idea that no one really knows all the ins and outs of a marriage. Hell, there are some marriages where even feelings between partners can go unacknowledged or unrealized for years (if ever). Hal has contempt for the situation, and he has contempt for the way Kate has cuckolded him, but he does not have contempt for her.

Kate, meanwhile, still loves Hal, but the Vice Presidency was a major breaking point for her and represented the moment where she felt the ability to free herself from him. The only reason to keep him around at all was his job. What else did she need him for?

This is truly unsustainable, and it does seem (especially considering the way Kate returns to Hal tearful in the finale) that a lot of Hal’s letting her do what she wants comes from a place of love and adoration. It’s bad enough he’s losing her. It will be far worse if he completely does.

A torrid affair

But even then it’s not clean. In the season’s final moments, Kate realizes the dangerous game that Hal is playing with President Penn and how simpatico the two are. Kate might have been a great VP for Rayburn, but Penn’s righteous arrogance and naked ambition would have made Kate the wrong choice for her.

Because Hal, as it turns out, is the sort of unscrupulous, ambitious, ruthless individual who perfectly fits with Penn’s worldview. And that makes him dangerous.

The show frames this as an affair. First Gentleman Todd Penn (Bradley Whitford) speaks about the way that Penn and Hal work together: late into the night, always talking. He makes jokes about them sleeping together. But the real affair isn’t physical. It’s political. The Penn/Hal intimacy stems from affairs of state and political dynamics. It’s the same dynamic that has so fueled Kate & Hal through the entire series to this point. Kate might have been fucking someone else, but Hal is politically liaising with the actual President and is doing so as her quasi-equal partner in her administration.

This, it turns out, is why Hal has such little patience for Kate and what she’s saying. Why listen to an Ambassador (even if she is his wife) when he has the ear of the actual source of global power. It’s even more dangerous that he himself is a politician skilled enough to finally ram The Law of the Sea Treaty through the Senate. Hell, he’s the sort of dude who will use his marriage to trick his wife into manipulating the Prime Minister of the UK into something that plays right into Penn’s ambitious and dangerous plans regarding that aforementioned nuclear technology. It’s no wonder Penn and her crafty political instincts wanted Hal rather than Kate. Together, they are an incredible, dangerous duo.

While the ending of the season is not nearly as shock value as “holy shit Penn just became the new President”, this is a much richer final note. The last two episodes are Kate trying to prevent the spread of Russian, experimental, borderline apocalyptic nuclear technology. It ends with her husband stabbing her in the back and undermining episodes’ worth of work all in the name of his own naked power while working with a woman who has proven herself ruthless.

If what Hal and Kate have is a marriage, then his closing actions are a cliffhanger wherein they blindside Kate into underestimating what her husband is capable of. The show has spent three full seasons showing that no one knows Hal better than Kate. Now, though, the show has shown that Hal knows Kate better than she even knows herself. In violation of their marriage, he’s started to know a new person on the same level. That new person is a woman who implemented a plan that the United Kingdom nearly treated as an act of war when they suspected it was a hostile nation and not the United States.

And she’s just engaged in what Kate equates to an act of war.

And she has the nuclear codes.

And she’s President of the United States.

And Kate Wyler? Well… this time she might just be screwed.

Man she should have just divorced her husband when she had the chance.