The Diplomat Is Testing the Limits of My Feminism Again

Photo: Netflix/ALEX BAILEY/NETFLIX

Spoilers follow for the second season of The Diplomat, all six episodes of which premiered on Netflix October 31. 

It makes perfect sense that Kate Wyler spends the final minutes of this season of The Diplomat frowning as she faces off against new foe Grace Penn, the American vice-president with razor-sharp tailoring on her pantsuits and acid-burn contempt for Wyler. Keri Russell is great at grimacing in disapproval or bemusement, a skill honed over six seasons as principled Soviet spy Elizabeth Jennings on The Americans and resuscitated here as Wyler, the American ambassador to the U.K. whom the president is eyeing to replace Penn. As the two women argue over which one of them should ascend to a higher position of power, Russell provides Wyler with a put-upon weariness that matches her glower. What Wyler is frowning about, past this threat to her own ambition — that’s less coherent.

Two seasons in, The Diplomat has established itself as a twisty, turny, talky series that careens between thriller and soap-opera plotlines. The series centers Wyler, who is described as having decades of diplomatic experience around the world, particularly in the Middle East, owing in part to her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) serving as the American ambassador to Lebanon. There are vague references to Wyler’s work in Kabul and Beirut and her concerns for Afghan women after the U.S. withdrew from the country. Still, it’s a surprise when the president asks Wyler to serve as ambassador to the U.K. and later, that he’s considering her to replace his embattled VP, because Wyler considers herself an outsider. The show signifies this primarily through Wyler’s bland wardrobe preferences and her brusque disregard for the niceties of the ambassadorship; she doesn’t care about that stuff because she cares only about the work (and is disgusted when a former colleague describes her as “geo-strategy Barbie” because she’s wearing a blue suit instead of a black one). The Diplomat introduces Penn, who was only mentioned in the first season, as a foil for Wyler in the back half of season two. Here’s a woman who, like Wyler, can hold her own in a room full of men, but unlike her potential replacement, Wyler does so with poise, a chic haircut, and a camera-ready smile. The series intends Penn to be a contrast point, to make her smooth wheeling and dealing feel artificial compared with Wyler’s more passionate righteousness, but her presence ends up emphasizing how hollow Wyler’s character actually feels.

Before the season-two finale “Dreadnought,” The Diplomat whips Wyler back and forth with indecision. Should she do something with her knowledge of Penn’s involvement in a scheme to attack British civilians in order to kill a bid for Scottish secession and maintain an American nuclear-weapons base in Europe? Or should she keep it to herself to avoid seeming like she’s operating out of ambition and to maintain the bond she forged with Penn over the difficulties of being women in public service? Can these two, with their different methodologies and personalities, work together, or are they fated to butt heads, since a core aspect of Wyler’s arc over these two seasons has been grappling with whether she wants Penn’s job? Wyler’s been presented to us as a problem-solver, a woman who views her role in the countries she’s sent to as “in the aggregate … doing good,” and whose skills in negotiation are enough to gain the president’s attention. But The Diplomat does a lot more gesturing to Wyler’s prowess than actually showing it. She theoretically built her perspective on the world before we meet her as a character, but throughout the series, she goes along with whatever the person in front of her says, a storytelling approach that makes for short-term dramatic tension but long-term incompetence. The most The Diplomat provides Wyler is a sheen of resourcefulness, one that’s not quite backed up by her decision-making or her actions, and that thin characterization feels increasingly unable to carry the series’ heightened stakes.

The Diplomat does relationships like this well. Wyler has a prickly connection with her almost-ex-husband and a heavy flirtation with the British foreign secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), and the series jumps between these plot drivers to generate tension. Wyler reveals she thinks Dennison “might be the best person, like … truly decent man I’ve ever known in politics,” and Hal’s jealousy rears its head. The Diplomat has a harder time with actual espionage and the moral weight of spycraft. It’s yet to deepen Wyler past her smirks and into someone with her own defined convictions beyond the girlboss impulse to vie for high positions in the U.S. government. Sure, her constant flip-flopping on whom she considers her foes and her allies, and which war-crime-adjacent actions are justifiable and which aren’t, gives the series episodic unpredictability. But as she peers down the barrel of a potential vice-presidency, we have no idea what she would champion. This makes her an increasingly difficult character to relate to and root for — a reaction The Diplomat clearly wants us to have. It’s exhausting, though, when Wyler’s most passionate outburst is about how much it will cost to serve lobster rolls at a July 4 celebration, instead of the absurdity of Americans and Brits colluding to cover up a false-flag attack that killed dozens of people from both countries.

The Diplomat’s shorter second season is still consumed by the mystery of who’s behind the attacks that kicked off season one (the naval explosion that killed dozens of British sailors) and provided its cliffhanger (a car bomb resulting in the deaths of an American agent and a British MP). The first three episodes involve Wyler attempting to trap Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) in a confession, a plan that fails spectacularly because Wyler follows a series of embarrassingly incorrect hunches. She instructs the CIA to tap Trowbridge’s phone, a major ethical breach; she halts the arrest of a Russian mercenary involved in the attacks, giving Trowbridge time to assassinate him; she gets tricked by Trowbridge into revealing her suspicions of him, causing a major schism in U.S.–U.K. relations — oh, and she accidentally provides a safe haven to Trowbridge’s mentor, Margaret Roylin, the actual architect of the bombings.

But it’s easy for Wyler to finger Trowbridge as the culprit because he’s a racist and sexist conservative whose reactionary politics and brusque rudeness recall Boris Johnson. The way Wyler complains about him as a “folk hero” who turned other politicians into “props, fucking groupies” sounds straight out of the mouth of an MSNBC talking head. You would think, then, that she despises Trowbridge not just for his bluster but his actions. Yet the moment Penn lands in London to deal with the knowledge that Roylin and her allies executed the false-flag attacks and smooth over Wyler’s relationship with Trowbridge (she accused him of being in on the scheme), Wyler falls head over heels for Penn and abandons all her own previously held opinions. After hearing Penn say that Roylin, whom Wyler previously loathed, is “right to worry” because democracies are “carving themselves into splinters while autocracy’s having its best year since ’37,” Wyler emphatically agrees, “Exactly.”

During a later meeting with Penn and Trowbridge in which the former questions the latter on how the British government is going to handle Russia, Russell plays Wyler as an observer. Her eyes ping-pong between Trowbridge, blustery in his insistence that he come clean about the conspiracy, and Penn, who uses a mixture of feigned naïveté (her faux-apologetic line delivery of “Goodness, I misunderstood” feels left over from her Palm Royale villain Evelyn Rollins) and steely sternness to guide Trowbridge toward a solution in which the U.S. and U.K. both maintain a cover-up. Wyler’s squint of discomfort with Penn’s manipulations soon softens into a look of impressed awe, her eyes no longer judgmental but adoring. “You were inspiring today, with Trowbridge. You planted his big idea. You told him to bury it … You were leading him to the plan,” Wyler says, before lamenting that Penn is being pushed out of office. And so The Diplomat sets the stage for Wyler to be schooled, over and over, by Penn and her reactionary doctrine through the end of the season, a dynamic that with each scene reveals how little the series has done to make Wyler a lucid character of her own.

Wyler’s pivot is most egregious when she learns from Hal that the false-flag attack idea originated with Penn. Russell’s repeated “Who does that? … It was us? … It’s us?” is supposed to signify a sense of betrayal, but it reads more like this savvy political operator isn’t so savvy after all. The way Wyler finally processes this is to make it about herself, with a stank-faced, “Oh, shit. I have to be vice-president of the United States.” Ostensibly, this is Wyler calling Penn unfit, and The Diplomat spins it as more evidence of Wyler’s sacrifice, her willingness to do what’s best for her country no matter what. But it’s a setup for another moment where the show can’t figure out who Wyler is, aside from a thankless heroine who works behind the scenes to avoid global calamity. When Wyler capitulates to Penn once more midway through the finale, agreeing with the VP that the only way to avoid a potential nuclear conflict was this convoluted scheme involving terror attacks to undermine Scotland’s self-determination efforts (“She should stay. She should keep her job. She shouldn’t be punished for making a decision that has to be made … She made a tough call,” she says), and then changes her mind again when Hal points out that Penn’s actions are inexcusable, it feels like The Diplomat throwing up its hands at the idea of Wyler having anything resembling a steady ideology. No longer are these bombings worth bringing down an empire over, as they were with Trowbridge. The sense of right and wrong The Diplomat told us drives Wyler is less important to maintain than zigzag plotting leading the two women to a cliffhanger catfight.

None of this to say that characters aren’t allowed to grow, adapt, or change. But what feels so weightless about Wyler’s decision-making is how often it feels less shaped by her priorities and values and more from a desire for The Diplomat to stay spontaneous, to keep us guessing about what its wacky heroine is going to do next. This season’s episodes do include major relationship shifts and power-dynamic swaps thanks to Wyler’s fluidity. But they also leave us with a sense that Wyler just can’t make up her mind about anything, and that flightiness doesn’t read as open-mindedness but insubstantiality, a depiction that doesn’t feel right in a show about weighty geopolitics.

The Diplomat leans even further into its soapy inclinations with its ending. Wyler’s final confrontation with Penn is less about the immorality of the VP’s actions and more about her identity as a martyr for her country: “I don’t want your job … but if the president asks me to serve, the answer is yes.” (In a perfectly grim touch, the concluding argument between the two women occurs on the same private grounds where Wyler says “Margaret Thatcher used to come … when she needed to think.”) What Wyler doesn’t know, though, is that Hal has gone behind her back to tell the president about Penn’s involvement in the bombings, and Hal’s news causes the president to have a fatal heart attack. Hal calls Wyler to frantically tell her the news, and as they’re on the phone, the VP’s Secret Service detail sprints onto the ground to surround Penn, since she’s now the president — and even more of a threat to Wyler, who had just made her now-irrelevant intentions to replace Penn clear. The season’s final images of the now-President Grace Penn looking smug and Wyler looking panicked signal the power struggle to come. But it’s hard to get that excited for wherever this rivalry might go when The Diplomat still can’t nail down who Wyler is. At least we know she’ll frown.