The Diplomat Recap: The Job Has a Morally Repugnant Element

The Diplomat
St. Paul’s
Season 2 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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The aftershocks of the deadly bombing in Notting Hill continue to reverberate throughout the American Embassy and the British government; the deadly explosion hasn’t just destroyed people and property, it’s blown apart assumptions, forcing us to see just about everyone and every one of their choices from different angles than we’re used to. Kate’s emerging cowboy tendencies, Trowbridge’s ruthlessness and immaturity, Eidra’s laser focus on intelligence gathering and analysis, Dennison’s rectitude, Roylin’s geopolitics-whisperer shtick — all are heightened and more immediately consequential than before. 

Sometimes, stress tests bring out the best in these characters and their relationships, as is the case in the set piece at St. Paul’s Cathedral for Merritt Grove’s state funeral. The combination of somber pomp — the heavy rain, readings from Ephesians and T.S. Eliot, hymns — and the daring afternoon of 1,000 Margaret Roylins is really effective, as is Eidra and Kate’s enlistment of Hal and the “oh, clumsy me!” bit of business with his walking stick to prevent Trowbridge from catching up with the real Roylin. They pull it off, and now Roylin’s absence is no big deal at all, because she’s been in plain sight, attending a colleague’s public funeral, ta-da! It also protects her and stymies any nefarious moments, thanks to the church being full of women with the same build and coloring, the same neat cap of auburn hair, dark-gray car coat, and structured black tote, all walking every which way as the service ends. If the bad guys are on hand, they don’t know where to look. 

Having whisked Roylin away from St. Paul’s and hosting her a bit awkwardly in the CIA offices of the American Embassy, Eidra and Kate now have some new problems on their hands: reading Austin into the situation and enlisting his help, extracting as much information as possible from Roylin’s walk-in, continuing to keep Trowbridge in the dark while they assess his degree of involvement with the Lenkov Group, and getting a back-to-work Stuart to side with them. 

Taking these priorities in descending order of success, Austin is the easiest for Kate and Eidra to work with. In spite of his strong preference to hand Roylin over to law enforcement, his highest priority is one all three of them share: to do everything possible to ensure that Lenkov is arrested, not assassinated. He’s less thrilled about delaying a public investigation into Trowbridge’s possible commissioning role in the HMS Courageous bombing but agrees anyway. Roylin is a canny operator, and even now, she’s eel-slippery, so if Eidra briefly stashing her in a safe house yields further information, he can live with it.

Roylin is willing, even eager in some moments, to help get to the bottom of the tangled web surrounding the bombings, and insists that several “British citizens,” including Merritt Grove, but not including Trowbridge, hired Lenkov to attack the Courageous, motivated by the increasing threat of Scottish secession from the U.K. She revealed that as a significant piece of the geopolitical puzzle last season, but it seemed at the time to be not much more than another example of Trowbridge being motivated by vanity and worries about his legacy. Scottish independence being powerful enough to be the driver of two tragedies makes us look at that from a different angle, too.

In the episode’s best, knottiest scene, Roylin professes her desire to protect Dennison, warning him that his current attempts to gather information on who hired Lenkov are insufficiently subtle and are likely to get him killed by the same people who killed Grove. It’s nearly impossible for Dennison to believe that, considering that she was responsible for ensuring Trowbridge became prime minister by smearing him. He deeply distrusts Roylin’s motivations and the value of the help she seems to be offering, and he’s probably right. David Gyasi’s ability to put across intense feelings (in this case, fury) with a mild facial expression and low voice is essential to his performance and is, like his endless succession of three-piece suits and perfect public-schoolboy diction, all part of the armor Dennison wears to survive being Trowbridge’s foreign secretary. 

He’s also the best person to ask Roylin directly about how well informed she always seems to be about what he and Kate are up to. She sniffs that “it’s been my job for over 40 years to know what goes on at Whitehall” and simply cannot understand why he refuses her help when he so plainly needs it. For such an insightful person, Roylin is oddly incapable of grasping what heroic restraint he’s exercising. Roylin continues very primly to explain some portion of what she knows and how, including the casual revelation that her phone is no doubt bugged by the London bombers, and so Kate mentioning Hal’s upcoming meeting with Grove may well have sealed his fate. I’m sorry, what? If that’s the case, why on earth didn’t she advise Kate to reach her on one of her burner phones or say, “One moment, darling, this connection is bad, let me call you back?” Doesn’t she feel some responsibility to not put one of her Whitehall colleagues at risk of assassination?

So, is Roylin protecting Trowbridge? Is she setting him up for an even more spectacular fall from grace? She’s insisting he had nothing to do with hiring Lenkov, but she was also very keen to keep away from her mentee at Grove’s funeral. The man himself is not giving away the game, either, but is plainly experiencing a heady brew of emotions when he saw her from the lectern where he was working up quite a head of rhetorical steam. Was he rattled? Furious? Relieved? After Trowbridge’s confrontation with Kate, during which he refers to his erstwhile adviser — almost admiringly — as “a cunt” and then declares, “I’m not sure if I give a fuck” if Kate does hear from her, I’m leaning toward pretty intense wounded anger. 

Speaking of wounded anger, Stuart Heywood is the person expressing the strongest and most righteous version of that feeling. He probably shouldn’t have come back to work quite so early in his recovery, but as he whispers to Alysse, “I lie on my couch and think about Ronnie and have a panic attack,” so what else is he going to do? If coming back to work was his plan for taking a break from memories of Ronnie, though, he’s going to need to head back to the drawing board. If he’s not urging Kate to spend some time with Ronnie’s photo and the book of condolence, he’s coming this close to ordering Eidra to get Roylin out of the Embassy ASAP. Eidra’s description of herself and Kate’s actions as “the CIA station chief and the ambassador doing their jobs of investigating intelligence from a walk-in, and cultivating relationships in the national interest” holds no water with Stuart, who describes Kate’s behavior as “running with scissors right into my staff, and me.”

Things go from bad to worse on the car ride to the ceremony to load Ronnie’s coffin onto a military transport plane back to the U.S. Knowing that Kate’s call to Roylin may well have led to the bombing, Stuart’s blood is boiling. If Kate had heeded his advice and honored the social capital he spent by having her evacuated from a public event on her first day as ambassador specifically so she wouldn’t cross paths with Roylin, maybe none of this would have happened. He’s not wrong. A little reductive? Sure, but this is another bit of evidence on the pile of moments of Kate making judgment calls that can be seen as using the tools at her disposal or as devil-may-care failures to heed guidance from others. Now, who does that sound like? 

For someone so gifted at making himself the main character in every interaction, Hal is almost chill in this episode, right up until the last scene. He and Kate wind up having their version of the conversation she had with Stuart, one which also ends badly. Both parties are right and wrong to varying degrees. Hal wants her to understand that the bombing isn’t her fault, and she wants him to acknowledge that she knows she isn’t the person who set the bomb, but she feels very responsible for the attack because she believes her call to Roylin led to it happening. This is an argument neither of them can win, and it’s unclear whether or not either of them wants to accomplish more than to force the other to shoulder some more of the moral weight of their actions, what Hal calls “the cost of doing business.” Kate spent the last ten years feeling as though Hal forced her into playing the family conscience, and he thinks he let her get away with loudly asserting he had no moral compass. It seems like both of them did both of those things, and a lot of the miserable feelings their self-examination is yielding are just two sides of the same coin. When Kate kneels down to help Hal remove his shoes, it seems as though they both accept that state of affairs, leaving another question hovering in the air between them: What are they going to do about it?

Tea, Scones, and Intrigue

• Another episode, another opportunity for Austin Dennison to do something gallant, removing himself quite delicately from the field of romance with Kate, saying her marriage “is also safe. Things are as they should be.” Okay, Captain Wentworth!

• Stuart’s withering description of Kate and Hal as “so fuckin’ cool — they talk to terrorists, and hug warlords, and drink llama blood” is an A+ combo pack of funny and devastating. 

• In a delightfully evocative moment, Roylin describes Grove, who’d gotten cold feet about working with Lenkov a bit too late in the game, as having been “a great wobbling jelly.” I’m going to have to start working that into my everyday speech.