The Diplomat Recap: Is She Your Wife, Or Is She The President?

The Diplomat
Special Envoy
Season 4 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Kate Wyler is not having a great week. It’s not enough to have inadvertently prompted the British prime minister to resign. Oh, no; now she must await a new PM’s election, establish and manage a new relationship with a new administration, and process her roiling emotions at having set that whole mess in motion, all while babysitting the Second Gentleman. Bonus first-act plot twist: Said gentleman plans to move into Winfield House and the embassy, has a million questions, and is prone to leaping to wild conclusions. For her part, Bethan Vaughn (the very welcome Jodie Whittaker) steps into Nicol Trowbridge’s shoes at No. 10 with an approach nearly 180 degrees apart from her predecessor. Where he was impulsive (“Ruled by his tempers,” as she puts it), Vaughn is thoughtful and measured, the type of leader who thinks and “consults the graybeards” in her cabinet before making a big decision. What a concept! Are the scales tilting ever so slightly toward measured normalcy? Come on. That’s not what we’re here for.

Both Vaughn and Todd have tremendous potential as maybe-allies for Kate. She’s pretty good at moving Todd where she needs him to go, and he can and does offer insights into Grace’s psyche that nobody else can or will. His suitability for the role is also sharply limited by his understandable loyalty to Grace. Last season, I remarked that Kate is very isolated. She doesn’t really have a trusted chum on this assignment, and she’s stuck confiding in Hal (who is always playing an angle) and unable to do the same with any of the likely candidates in their circle, like Billie. Grace is, at best, her frenemy; Roylin is dead; and Thema Asseidu-Dennison is grieving. Eidra has the best potential — they have a good rapport and she’s read into most of the sticky situations Kate gets herself into — but is a bit too co-worker-y to be Kate’s ride-or-die, and they both know it. Vaughn is bright, warm, funny, capable, self-aware — A+ friend material, if only Kate were not the representative of a government that has attacked a British aircraft carrier, stolen a nuclear superweapon and lied about it, and blackmailed her predecessor.

Kate’s first meeting with Vaughn goes well; they hit it off immediately and part on good terms. It was a strange nothingburger in every other respect, though, as Vaughn spent most of their whopping four minutes together in a funny little song-and-dance with her civil-service secretary, Elaine, who knocks on the door so quietly she can scarcely be heard. It’s a solid time filler and saves Vaughn from having to address anything on Kate’s agenda, especially the content of the congratulatory call she took from her counterpart in Russia. Things get even more alarming when Eidra can’t reach Tom Libby and reports start rolling in that Vaughn is dismissing everyone in Trowbridge’s government who’d had a significant relationship with Kate and her team. Robyn Palmer, while not exactly forthcoming, fills in enough of the gaps in her brief conversation with Kate that the game board comes into sharper focus. 

She gets an even crisper twenty-twenty view of the state of play at that evening’s Royal Society gala held in Todd’s honor. In light of recent events, Prime Minister Vaughn has serious concerns about the U.S. relationship with the U.K. and is taking steps to insulate the nation from the unpredictability of its closest ally. She’s permitted the Russians to enter U.K. waters to retrieve the bodies of their dead submariners; when they find that the Poseidon is missing, she says that might put the U.S. in a major security crisis, “and while I do not take that lightly, the last thing I hope to do is make security calculations on your behalf, just as I know you won’t do on mine.”

By my rough calculations, Vaughn is better at her job than Trowbridge was by approximately 82 fafillion percent. She’s calmly, firmly holding up a mirror to Kate, showing her the logical consequences of her actions. Kate keeps saying she’s on the U.K.’s side, but how can she be, when, at the behest of Grace and Hal, she has lied, withheld information, and coerced their government into doing the U.S.’s bidding? That’s actually being the swaggering bully Trowbridge accused the U.S. of being in the previous episode. Kate is more isolated than ever, and more than ever, what she needs is good advice from trustworthy sources. She’s always been a good soldier, doing her best to put the mission first in the name of serving the greater good, but Grace’s orders keep pushing her further and further from anything recognizable as the greater good. 

Todd may be Kate’s best bet for a trusted sounding board, especially once they start speaking openly about his likely role as special envoy to the United Kingdom, but he’s also a very mixed bag. He’s clever and kind and seems sincere in his desire to be useful, but he’s also nosy and gossipy, and shares his musings with his wife, who is also the president. Kate sure is throwing up a lot — could she be pregnant? Vaughn stonewalled her about the call she received from Russia — what’s going on there? In fact, what’s going on with Russia in general? Grace is delighted and titillated by Todd’s speculation, and in the middle of a G7 Summit preparation meeting with Billie and Gannon, quietly asks Hal if Kate is pregnant. This little game of highly consequential telephone is a lot to deal with on top of everything else Kate is managing and deciphering. I want to put an extra-fine point on this detail, too: The president of the United States ignored her own chief of staff and secretary of state during a meeting to prepare for their first G7 as a team to have a sidebar conversation about the most personal aspect of her vice-president and British Ambassador’s relationship.

So yes, Grace continues to Grace. She doesn’t just ignore Gannon and Billie; she dismisses their concerns about her planned announcement of a ban on Chinese computer chips, talks over them, and cuts them all off, saying, “Can we stop pretending we’re not in charge? I find it exhausting.” This increasingly frequent defaulting to autocratic behavior combines alarmingly with the almost bloodthirsty pleasure she takes in Trowbridge’s downfall and Kate’s role in it. She actually congratulates Kate and jokes that were it not illegal, she’d appoint Kate to her own post. 

Who knows what Grace will think of Todd eventually confirming Hal’s denial of any pregnancy, but Kate has to go to extreme rhetorical lengths to convince him of it, telling him in two separate conversations that her nausea and vomiting are the result of reflux, not morning sickness. Eventually fed up to the back teeth with his refusal to drop the subject, she yells that the real problem is the work she’s doing on behalf of his wife. Sometimes puking is a sign of pregnancy, but in this case, “it’s just the garden variety wave of nausea people get when they’ve overthrown a democratically elected leader!” 

If dread-driven nausea is contagious, then poor Frances, unintentionally overhearing this in shocked dismay just outside the door to Kate’s study, is sure to be its next victim. 

Intrigue and Crumpets

• Stuart and Eidra have their first big disagreement since getting back together, and it’s a doozy. Eidra pushes her tendency to get glib and sarcastic rather than risk being vulnerable and honest to its farthest limits. Turns out, that pushes Stuart to his limits, too. After she monologues about what a drag it would be to use one of her few individual conversations with the CIA director to request retrofitting Stuart’s house to meet her security needs, concluding with a salty “ew,” Stuart quietly turns away and heads upstairs. Revisit this one tomorrow, lovebirds. 

• Turns out Grace asked the head of Todd’s Secret Service detail to plant the special envoy idea. Are we surprised? At all? She needs him out of her hair, and they both need him to feel competent and not an object of Grace’s disdain. 

• I recall that early on last season, Hal suggested that Kate shift from her ambassadorship to a brand-new role as special envoy to Europe. It came with tons of potential but no specifics as to budget or brief. What are the odds that these are problems Todd runs into in his own tenure as special envoy?

• Kate Wyler is somewhere between 45 and 55 years old. I get Todd wondering for a few minutes about Kate being pregnant, but a man who fumbled a multimillion-dollar NIH grant and his postmenopausal wife should be capable of a tiny bit of pregnancy likelihood math before continuing to hang out on the conclusion they jumped to. 

• I love the gowns costume designer Jenny Gering has put Keri Russell and Jodie Whittaker in for the gala. Russell always shines in something sleek, and her black column dress makes for a very elegant battle dress. The long sleeves, sweeping A-line skirt, and slightly quilted effect on Whittaker’s black-and-gold number are bold visual reminders of Vaughn’s strategic reserve in her conversations with Kate.