Welcome (back) to The Diplomat, in which career U.S. foreign-service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) keeps being obliged to add more plates to the stack she’s already got spinning as she tries to manage international incidents and personal crises as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Netflix series’ first season was all about getting us largely on Kate’s side while acknowledging that she’s a hypercompetent hot mess for whom work-life balance can 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’d anticipated that Kate becoming an ambassador after years of serving on staff at Hal’s postings would provide a good moment for them to divorce amicably, but that was when they believed Kate would be posted to Kabul. It was also before Hal did an extremely Hal thing 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 long-term audition for the role of vice-president, a role soon to be vacated by the current VP. Oh, and that audition was to take place without Kate’s knowledge. How could that go wrong?
“A Stranger Calls” picks up exactly where we left off in the first-season finale: Kate and British foreign secretary/king of three-piece suits Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) are in Paris, and up until just a few moments previous, were enjoying some enchanted evening at a gala at the Louvre, both looking scorchingly hot and after a full eight episodes of stop-and-start flirting, finally on track to fall into bed together in the very near future. They just had one teensy little task to take care of first: to confirm their dawning suspicion that British prime minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is the person who hired Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov to attack HMS Courageous. No biggie!
Unfortunately, the car bomb exploding 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-gathering apparatus.
Looming in the background of their frantic efforts to determine who has survived and who may have perpetrated the attack is their suspicion of Trowbridge. How do you manage a crisis, share information, and sustain a decades-long special relationship with a head of government who may have roped a member of his own Cabinet and the U.S. Ambassador into helping him clean house in France while he gave orders to do the same at home? If Lenkov dies being taken into 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’s the first crisis since they met that Kate and Dennison can’t work on together, not least because while Hal, Stuart, and Ronnie survived the initial explosion, they’re all injured very badly and are being treated at a hospital that Kate has convinced Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) to restrict access to. Kate has to be just as much Hal’s next of kin as she is the U.S. Ambassador, and Dennison has to tread very carefully while continuing to gather information to support or disprove Trowbridge’s guilt.
Dennison shares a further, chilling complication with Kate before they head back to London: If his government was involved in the bombing, there isn’t an obvious starting point to unravel the conspiracy. However, when Russian sources made significant donations to the Tory Party, the person who made those arrangements was the late, right, honorable Merritt Grove. Wouldn’t it be interesting and helpful to know if Trowbridge himself had been a beneficiary of those donations?
Kinnear continues to play Trowbridge as a loudmouthed, reactive Oxbridge-educated walking id — witty and fluent in all the right literary and historical allusions, but petulant and as likely to spin out of control as to offer some worthwhile insight or question — but in his first scene of the new season, in his offices at No. 10 Downing Street, we meet a new character who exerts not-inconsiderable influence over him. She’s as unperturbed as he is shouty, perched calmly in an armchair, only interrupting scrolling on her phone to issue firm directives. Stop shouting, she says. Sit down. And if you’re that worried and intent on making everyone come to you in this crisis, call a COBRA (a Situation Room meeting of Cabinet ministers and emergency service representatives). Son of a gun, he does all three.
We rarely see Trowbridge willing to follow advice, let alone comply with orders from anyone. Who is this wizard of unflappable self-possession? Oh, just his wife, Lydia Trowbridge (Pandora Colin). It’s easy to miss if you have the TV sound down low, but as aides leave the room, each of them says, “Thank you, Mrs. Trowbridge.” Interesting. We later see her bustling into Dennison’s office for an impromptu meeting to request his assistance in tracking down her husband’s longtime adviser and mother figure, Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie). She isn’t at either of her homes and doesn’t have her phone with her, and Trowbridge is frantic.
The brisk exposition Lydia furnishes is also quite illuminating: She’s a bit older than her husband, having been his political history professor at university (he’d been studying the Romantic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and only took the class at his mother’s insistence). Margaret ascended to her role as Trowbridge’s adviser because his debates with Lydia had gotten too loud for their neighbors’ taste. Trowbridge is so concerned that he’s posted officers at both of her residences (something Dennison describes with arid indignation as a spectacular misuse of public monies). Is this the inappropriate yet understandable work of a man worried about the safety of his brilliant mother figure and adviser? Or does it show his intent to whisk away someone who knows too much, and then dispatch her via a method that could later be plausibly described as a terrible accident?
The episode’s frenetic pace is amped up by periodic updates about Hal, Stuart, and Ronnie. Hal comes out of surgery first, and when Kate breaks down and crawls into his hospital bed to hold him, it’s the greatest tenderness we’ve seen between the two. Even if they follow through on their plan to divorce, it’s hard to imagine them not continuing to be deeply intertwined, which would add a further complication to any romance Kate might pursue with Dennison. Stuart and Ronnie’s more complex surgeries eventually resolve with Stuart waking up to a quick neurological assessment, followed by Eidra fulfilling her terrible duty to inform him that Ronnie didn’t survive her injuries.
The shock waves reverberating through Embassy staff following Ronnie’s death are devastating. Stuart’s total bewilderment and disbelief as Eidra is forced to explain to him repeatedly what happened; Alysse’s (Pearl Mackie) near-silent and devastated weeping as she sits with 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 most powerful beats of the episode, and add further texture to each character and performance.
The last moment of the episode is a good old-fashioned cliffhanger, which pulls double duty by highlighting how purpose-built The Diplomat is for binge-watching. A nurse on Hal’s ward takes a call for Kate from one of her friends, an Anne Legendre Armstrong, but when Eidra’s colleague Howard passes it along to Alysse, she tells him there’s no way anyone of that name is on the line, as Anne Legendre Armstrong was the only previous female U.S. Ambassador to the U.K. and died in 2008. Let’s be sure to keep this alleged Armstrong on the line for a while. Oh, certainly, the plummy voice on the other end says, that’s no trouble at all. Those cut-glass tones? They belong to Margaret Roylin. We are so back.
Tea, Scones, and Intrigue
• It’s not hard to imagine The Diplomat existing in the same world as Slow Horses, telling compulsively watchable, high-stakes stories, but through a more earnest and far less booze-soaked lens. Actually, I would pay good money to watch a crossover episode where Eidra has a drink with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) to commiserate over how exhausting their charges are.
• Fun fact! The Trowbridges are a thing in real life, too — Pandora Colin and Rory Kinnear are married and have two children together. Also, whatever Boris Johnson–inflected elements you may detect in Kinnear’s performance as Nicol Trowbridge, none of it is an homage, as this scathing, grieving piece in The Guardian illustrates.
• If you’re fascinated by fictional high-level governmental crisis-management meetings, PBS has the show for you! It’s called COBRA; each of its three six-episode seasons focuses on environmental catastrophes and/or service-grid hacking, and it stars Robert Carlyle as an eternally beleaguered Tory PM swimming with sharks (metaphorical; his Cabinet ministers are a mustache-twirling opportunistic lot, but not literal terrors of the sea) in increasingly absurd ways.
• Kate borrowing a suit from a male British Embassy staffer so she doesn’t have to deal with an international and personal crisis in a flowy red silk gown 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 to ask, “Mike, could you have someone send some clothes over from my office? I look like an idiot.” (She was wearing a lovely Champagne-colored ensemble and a tasteful single strand of pearls, but fair enough, that look doesn’t exactly scream “national security adviser advising the nation on security.”)