Recap of ‘The Diplomat’, Season 2, Episode 1: A Stranger Calls

The diplomat

A stranger calls

Season 2

Episode 1

Editorial review

4 stars

****

Photo: Alex Bailey/Netflix

Welcome (back) to The diplomatin which career, US Foreign Service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is increasingly required to add more plates to the pile she already has spinning, as she navigates international incidents and personal crises and Northern Ireland. The Netflix series’ first season was largely about getting us on Kate’s side while recognizing that she’s a hyper-competent hot mess for whom work-life balance may never be possible.

In fact, Kate would often prefer to be more married to her job and less married to her actual husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), who is brilliant and insightful and also an exhausting handful. They had expected that Kate becoming an ambassador after years of serving in Hal’s posts would be a good time for them to part amicably, but that was the moment they thought Kate would be sent to Kabul transferred. It was also before Hal did something extreme Hal by working in cahoots with White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) and Kate’s Deputy Chief of Mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) to use Kate’s ambassadorship as a lengthy audition for the role of Vice President, a role soon to be vacated by the current Vice President. Oh, and that audition was supposed to happen without Kate’s knowledge. How could That go wrong?

“A Stranger Calls” picks up right where we left off in the first season finale: Kate and British Foreign Secretary/king of the three-piece suits Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) are in Paris, and until moments earlier, enjoyed an enchanting evening at a gala at the Louvre, both looking scorching hot and after eight full episodes of stop-and-start flirting, finally on track to falling into bed together in the very near future. They had just one small task to complete first: confirm their nascent suspicion that British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is the person who hired Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov to attack. HMS Courageous. No problem!

Unfortunately, the car bomb that explodes in central London, right in front of Hal, British MP Merritt Grove (Simon Chandler), and Stuart and his own deputy, Ronnie Buckhurst (Jess Chanliau), is now the focus of their considerable energy and information. collection device.

In the background of their frantic efforts to determine who survived the attack and who may have committed the attack, their suspicion of Trowbridge looms. How do you manage a crisis, share information and maintain a decades-long special relationship with a government leader who may have persuaded a member of his own cabinet and the US ambassador to help him clean his homes in France while on orders gave. same at home? If Lenkov dies while in custody, everything he knows and could share about who hired him dies with him.

This is quite a vat of Marmite to trudge through. It is the first crisis since they met that Kate and Dennison cannot work on together, not least because Hal, Stuart and Ronnie survived the first explosion, but they are all very seriously injured and are being treated in a hospital that Kate has. convinced Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) to restrict access to. Kate must be as much a survivor of Hal as she is the American ambassador, and Dennison must tread very carefully as she continues to gather information to support or refute Trowbridge’s guilt.

Dennison shares another chilling complication with Kate before they return to London: if his government was involved in the bombings, there is no clear starting point to unravel the conspiracy. However, when Russian sources made significant donations to the Tory Party, the person who made these arrangements was the now deceased, right-wing, Honorable Merritt Grove. Wouldn’t it be interesting and useful to know if Trowbridge itself had been a beneficiary of these donations?

Kinnear continues to play Trowbridge as a loud, reactive, Oxbridge-educated walking id – witty and fluent in all the right literary and historical allusions, but petulant and just as likely to spiral out of control as to offer a valuable insight or question – but in his In the In the first scene of the new season we meet a new character in his office at No. 10 Downing Street who exerts a significant influence on him. She is as unperturbed as he shouts, sitting quietly in an armchair, only pausing her scrolling on her phone to give firm directives. Stop yelling, she says. Sit down. And if you are that concerned and plan on having everyone come to you during this crisis, call a COBRA (a Situation Room meeting of ministers and emergency services representatives). Son of a gun, he does all three.

We rarely see Trowbridge willing to take advice, let alone orders from anyone. Who is this wizard of imperturbable self-control? Oh, just his wife, Lydia Trowbridge (Pandora Colin). It’s easy to miss when the TV is on low, but as the assistants leave the room, each one says, “Thank you, Mrs. Trowbridge.” Interesting. We later see her storm into Dennison’s office for an impromptu meeting to enlist his help in tracking down her husband’s old advisor and mother figure, Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie). She is not in any of her houses or has her phone with her, and Trowbridge is panicking.

Lydia’s lively explanation is also quite illuminating: she is slightly older than her husband and has been his professor of political history at university (he had studied the romantic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and only took the class at his mother’s insistence) . Margaret rose to her role as advisor to Trowbridge because his debates with Lydia had become too loud for the taste of their neighbors. Trowbridge is so concerned that he has placed officers in both her homes (something Dennison describes with dry indignation as a spectacular misuse of public money). Is this the inappropriate but understandable work of a man concerned about the safety of his brilliant mother figure and advisor? Or does it demonstrate his intention to take away someone who knows too much and then send her packing in a method that could later plausibly be described as a terrible accident?

The episode’s frenetic pace is enhanced by periodic updates on Hal, Stuart and Ronnie. Hal comes out of the operating room first, and when Kate breaks down and crawls into his hospital bed to hold him, it’s the most tenderness we’ve ever seen between the two. Even if they go through with their plan to divorce, it’s hard to imagine them not remaining deeply intertwined, which would add further complication to any romance Kate might pursue with Dennison. Stuart and Ronnie’s more complex operations eventually subside when Stuart wakes up with a quick neurological assessment, followed by Eidra doing her terrible duty to inform him that Ronnie did not survive her injuries.

The shockwaves that reverberate through embassy staff after Ronnie’s death are devastating. Stuart’s utter bewilderment and disbelief as Eidra has to repeatedly explain to him what happened; Alysse’s (Pearl Mackie) almost silent and devastated crying as she sits by Ronnie’s corpse; Kate’s somber, unexpectedly collegial conversation with Ganon as they prepare to inform Ronnie’s parents – these quiet moments are three of the episode’s most powerful beats, adding further texture to each character and performance.

The episode’s final moment is an old-fashioned cliffhanger, which does double duty by emphasizing how purposefully built The diplomat is for binge watching. A nurse on Hal’s ward takes a call for Kate from one of her friends, one Anne Legendre Armstrong, but when Eidra’s colleague Howard passes it on to Alysse, she tells him that there is no way anyone with that name is on the line. is. Armstrong was the only former female US ambassador to Britain and died in 2008. Let’s keep this alleged Armstrong on the line for a while longer. Oh, sure, says the plump voice on the other end of the line: that’s no problem at all. Those cut glass tones? They belong to Margaret Roylin. We are so back.

• It’s not hard to imagine The diplomat existing in the same world as Slow horsesthat tells compulsively watchable, high-stakes stories, but through a more serious and far less saturated lens. Actually, I’d pay good money to watch a crossover episode where Eidra has drinks with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) to commiserate about how tiresome their charges are.

• Fun fact! The Trowbridges also exist in real life: Pandora Colin and Rory Kinnear are married and have two children together. And whatever Boris Johnson-inflected elements you discover in Kinnear’s performance as Nicol Trowbridge, none of it is a tribute, as this scathing, mournful piece in The Guardian illustrates.

• If you’re fascinated by fictional high-level crisis management meetings, PBS has the show for you! It’s hot COBRA; each of the three six-episode seasons focuses on environmental disasters and/or hacking into service networks, and Robert Carlyle plays the perpetually beleaguered Tory Prime Minister who swims with sharks (metaphorically; his ministers are an opportunistic bunch with mustaches, but not literal horrors of the sea) in increasingly absurd ways.

• Kate borrowing a suit from a male employee of the British Embassy so she doesn’t have to deal with an international and personal crisis in a flowing red silk dress reminds me of the moment in the second season premiere of The West Wing where Nancy McNally’s first act upon entering the Situation Room is, “Mike, can you have someone send some clothes from my office?” I look like an idiot.” (She wore a beautiful champagne-colored ensemble and a tasteful single pearl necklace, but fair enough, that look doesn’t exactly scream “national security advisor advising the nation on security.”)