The Diplomat Has a Villain Problem

Spoilers follow for The Diplomat’s fourth season, including the ending.

Season four of The Diplomat picks up at exactly the sort of place a new season of The Diplomat would begin. A crisis just happened — in this case, last season’s conflict over a disabled Russian submarine carrying a nuclear weapon, which went adrift in tricky international territory off the UK coast — and the fallout begets even more disaster. President Grace Penn is shot on the lawn in front of Windsor Castle, making Vice President Hal Wyler the acting president while she’s airlifted off for emergency surgery. No one’s sure what to do about the sub, and no one’s sure whether to follow Grace’s orders after she immediately wakes up from surgery. UK ambassador Kate argues with Hal about how to deal with the Brits. Hal argues with Grace about whether she knows what she’s doing. Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge is at first deeply sympathetic, and then absolutely unreasonable because he knows they’re all lying to him about the sub.

This is par for The Diplomat course. Terrible crises take place, and when the main characters have massive arguments about the right thing to do, it’s usually obvious that no one is entirely correct. None of them can see the whole picture and they’re all working with several layers of divided loyalties. Hal and Kate are married; Grace is a former vice president attempting to fulfill her own aims while living with her late predecessor’s legacy; Grace’s husband Todd is loyal to his wife but increasingly concerned about her judgment. That complicated mix fuels the pleasure of the show, but it’s also why the second half of season four goes so oddly astray. After several seasons of a delicate balancing act between so many motives and so much asymmetrical information, The Diplomat does something it’s never done so blatantly before: It turns Grace Penn into an out-and-out villain, with no clear explanation of her motives or her distinct perspective on world events. The entire show goes from a pleasant snarl of internecine neoliberal international wrangling, to, “oh no, the president’s bad!”

The Diplomat does at least try to create an explanation for why Grace Penn goes off the deep end. In the episodes after she’s been shot, Grace is irritable and abrupt, snapping at her husband Todd, not sleeping, and acting in an increasingly irrational manner. The obvious connection, which Todd, Kate, Hal, and Grace’s chief of staff Billie all make, is that Grace is continuing to experience long-tail post-traumatic effects from the shooting. She refuses to hear reason about the costs of burying this nuclear submarine, insisting that the Brits pick up the extra financial burden, and shrugging off Hal and Kate’s concern that this will tip off the Brits about what exactly has happened to the nuclear weapon on this sub. When the Brits suggest they need to approach the sub themselves, Grace threatens to open fire on America’s closest ally. The baseline math of this makes some kind of sense. Grace got shot in the UK and some subliminal part of her wants to punish them now.

For a while season four manages to spin the wheels on her emotional collapse. Kate, Hal and Todd tiptoe around her, assuming that eventually she’ll snap out of it. Todd tries to talk her into turning her phone off in the bedroom, or at least reading her briefings on physical paper rather than staring at a laptop screen late into the night. While her mental state is in a space of uncertainty, there’s still room for The Diplomat to play it off as productive complexity. Maybe it’s like in previous seasons, when Grace has actually known much more about the situation than everyone else! Perhaps she’s behaving this way because she’s about to give Kate another fantastic, bracing lecture like the one she delivered in the finale of season two, a densely informational rhetorical beatdown about the delicate balance of international relations, delivered in formal wear and complete with map-based visual aids.

Somewhere in the last half of the season, though, Grace goes from traumatized president struggling with her own lost sense of security, to monstrous villain bent on the destruction of the entire web of global relationships. She does not care about the consequences, and in fact she seems to enjoy the idea that she’s alienating the United States’s closest friendships and potentially causing NATO to collapse. Her choices will likely come with a significant death toll, especially if she allows the United States to become an isolated political power and begins military actions against NATO allies. In a world where most viewers have too much recent information about what happens when a president doesn’t care about the consequences of their actions, Grace’s behavior feels like a pointed reference to current events; what it does not feel like is a logical progression of the character we’ve come to know over the course of this show. The woman who was introduced via her alarmingly detailed knowledge of how important it is to maintain international relationships does not make sense as the woman who’s now totally fine with US warships firing willy-nilly on whoever happens to come close. 

The Diplomat’s most interesting conflicts have always arisen out of characters who see the world differently. Kate’s sense of risk and her priorities tend to tilt more toward an international lens, while Hal is mostly concerned about American interests. In previous seasons, Grace has been the one with a more comprehensive view of current global affairs, in comparison with Kate’s narrower attention to the individual whims of the British government. Usually all of it slots together into a story where no one is precisely the villain, not even someone like former PM Nicol Trowbridge, who is at least given the dignity of resigning this season while being plagued by hallucinations of his victims and adversaries.

But Grace doesn’t even get the all-purpose narrative device of a dream sequence where it’s clear she’s losing her marbles, much less an illuminating monologue where she explains how she’s internally justifying her complete disregard for human life. She just gets angrier and angrier at everyone until she finally snaps at the G7 meeting in the finale, hijacking the opening remarks to publicly announce her plans to go to war with anyone who dares look at her wrong. It allows The Diplomat to stage a grand, thrilling final twist, where Kate, Hal, and Grace’s other staff all walk out of the conference in visible protest of Grace’s actions, presumably setting up a nonviolent coup in a still-unconfirmed season five. Without any deeper understanding of Grace’s motivations beyond “she’s really upset,” though, the gesture is emptier than it should be. They’re not taking a particularly difficult stance, or wrestling with their own moral compasses. They’re standing up to a mad queen who’s gone totally off the deep end.

The Diplomat is now many seasons into its familiar structure of twisting all its plot and character development into a cliffhanger device for the final few scenes, and it’s not surprising that Grace Penn’s fully villainous turn becomes the latest bid to get audiences on board for another season. But it’s so much less textured or fun than previous cliffhangers, because by this point in the season, Grace’s behavior is already well-established and yet still totally lacking in any accompanying character development. Her villainy seems to exist entirely to set up the moment when Kate and Hal walk out. There may be some contemporary political resonance in the depiction of a brave group of public servants who finally take a bold position against an American leader whose actions are seemingly random bids for chaos and violence, without any comprehensible worldview or motive beyond narcissistic power grabs. That does not mean it makes for a good plotline on TV, where we can still have the luxury of villains with interesting interior lives. It’s too bad Grace Penn is no longer one of them.