Stuart Haywood and Hal Wyler are both recovering bodily and psychologically from their brushes with death and while it may seem as though each of them is going about it very differently, both of their approaches are fundamentally all about Kate.
Hal wants Kate to acknowledge that should she replace the current vice president, she’ll have a significant second career as a very high-up elected official ahead of her, and she would strongly prefer not to. Who knows? She may well intend to go into this role as a noble stopgap measure, something she can say in good faith that she stepped into because the president asked her to, and once that term is over, she plans to go back to what she does best at the State Department. But if you’re anyone other than Kate Wyler, and especially if you’re her maybe-reconciled husband/rapacious political animal Hal Wyler, you’re thinking ahead. You’re savvily leveraging your role as ambassadorial spouse to line up helpful opportunities for her, making the upcoming 4th of July party into a launching pad for building her election war chest by getting really cozy with an energy company zillionaire to foot the party’s entire $300,000 bill.
And really, is it too much to ask Kate to take said zillionaire (Brad, who is from Maine, and whose Scrooge McDuck-sized contribution to the festivities will stretch to providing lobster rolls for 2,000 or more guests) on a little field trip over to the Foreign Office? Since she’s going over there anyway, having been summoned by Dennison, who she’s sure, on the basis of PM Trowbridge popping onto national television to announce Lenkov’s regrettable and 100 percent accidental death during his attempted arrest by British special forces and French law enforcement, is going to withdraw his recognition of her as U.S. ambassador? A bridge too far for this busy morning? Hm. Okay.
Hal’s impulse to make his obligations pull double duty makes some sense, of course; Kate has moved pretty quickly from refusing the idea of even thinking about the vice presidency to being fine with it, so there’s every reason to think that once she’s ensconced in the role, she’ll eventually agree to running for re-election. She’ll need a war chest for that, and Hal wants to pave the way to a smooth transition to what’s probably next. This is practical foresight, not at all manipulative! He’s sure that Kate will see the wisdom of these moves later and will no doubt thank him for it.
What Kate will not thank him for is being a big crabby baby about her relationship with Dennison. Raise your hand if you recall Hal actively encouraging Kate to carry on flirting with Dennison last season! Now raise your hand if you’ve noticed his jealous stinkface upon seeing a photo of them together on the embassy website, or his faux-supportive questioning of Kate (at Grove’s funeral, no less) about whether or not she and Dennison had slept together yet. For the record, they haven’t; she’d like to but won’t. Probably. So it shouldn’t matter at all that Kate describes Dennison — who did not summon Kate to his offices for a dressing-down of any kind, because he’s successfully orchestrated Trowbridge’s ousting and is not unlikely to succeed him as PM — as the “the best person I’ve ever known in politics.” Seeing an unalloyed good guy not finish last in their field is an unexpected delight, right, Hal? We could believe everything is hunky-dory on this score overall were it not for Hal’s inability to stop making snarky remarks about what a decent, stand-up guy Dennison is.
At first, everyone is high-fiving at the news of Trowbridge’s fall, and were it a done deal, that would be the end of it until it was publically announced. But cracks and complications start appearing almost immediately; Stuart points out that just getting the word out about Lenkov isn’t going to be enough — he wants the totality of the scandal and Trowbridge’s role in it revealed ASAP and is dubious about Kate’s reassurances that it’ll all come out eventually. After reviewing an RSVP list for the party, Hal notices that one of Dennison’s fellow plotters has canceled his attendance. In addition, Kate’s very sweet, quite posh assistant Pensy asks her to pass along her thanks to the PM for dispatching “that horrible man”; to her, Lenkov’s death “feels like a little scrap of justice” for Ronnie, the sailors who died on the Courageous, for Hal and Stuart, too. That’s about 180 degrees from the response Kate thought she’d hear about the operation. Has the vibe irrevocably shifted? Was there ever a vibe to begin with among U.K. citizens?
With such unexpectedly mixed messages bombarding her, Kate carries on as planned so that she can honor Dennison’s request to use the Winfield greenhouse as a quiet spot to show Trowbridge the door, but wants to be extra-sure the plan is kosher. What’s Billie’s take on it? Is her displeasure with the idea a hard no, or simply something she’s not wild about?
This is where Stuart’s whole situation starts to run off the rails. Up until now, he’s been doing his job extremely well — he’s probably incapable of doing otherwise, and it’s very soothing to have one area of predictable accomplished-ness in your life when everything else both literally and figuratively hurts. He and Kate clearly want to move past their earlier confrontation and get back to the imperfect but promising rapport they established earlier, but thoughts of the bombing, and of Ronnie, and of his own injuries being real because Kate didn’t follow his advice about avoiding Margaret Roylin are getting in the way.
All of which leads up to Stuart acting weird on the phone with Billie, who puts her foot down with him as Marine One is landing on the White House lawn, demanding to know what’s eating at him. Some volatile combination of frustration, grief, anger, and conscience results in Stuart blurting out that Billie and the president should move on from Kate as a VP candidate. His deep breath is followed by a litany of potentially disqualifying critiques: Kate is “undisciplined and unfocused, and can’t take her eyes off the Foreign Secretary long enough to get through a workday.” That’s not even the real issue, because they’re actually not involved, but “she’s frothing at the mouth to have the Ides of March play out at her picnic!” That’s pretty damning, but if Trowbridge’s ousting is a done deal, and there is no real scandal to be scandalized by, what’s the issue? Billie sums up her bewilderment by asking the question we all want an answer to, “Stewie, what the fuck are you doing?”
As usual, Stuart is right to be concerned, and had he stopped at “undisciplined and unfocused” with a side of the avidity about the Ides of March in July, his case would be a tough one to argue against. The business about the slow burn between Kate and Dennison makes him sound like an unhinged gossip, though, and it’s hard to tell if his priority is righting the ship, or forcing a comeuppance.
Speaking of comeuppance, Hal was right to flag Dennison’s co-conspirator backing out of the party, as that guy seems to have been the canary in the coalmine. Support for Dennison’s plan is collapsing before his eyes, so he pivots immediately to noble self-immolation (metaphorical). He can live without ridding the country of Trowbridge as Prime Minister, but not with his many sins going unexposed — he’ll go to the press with his suspicions, let them be in charge of the investigation, and let the political career chips fall where they may. Kate seems to convince him not to be hasty, which is impressive given that in the 24-hour period she convinced him to wait to launch his investigation, the Lenkov assassination went forward.
For his part, Trowbridge is bounding around the party without a care in the world, clearly relishing the spotlight and kudos flowing in from all sides. Maybe he was aware of how close he came to getting the boot, but he’s behaving as if such a possibility never occurred to him, slapping backs and loudly inviting Kate and Hal up to a summit in Scotland with their First Minister. Who knows what it’s even about? No idea, as Trowbridge “fell asleep while she was describing it.” Hal would sooner eat a bag of glass for his midafternoon snack and wash it down with a refreshing serving of sulfuric acid, but turning down Nicol the Folk Hero seems impossible at the moment.
The episode concludes with both Hal and Stuart weathering the fireworks display at the party. Stuart barely escapes the beautiful display that sounds very much like bombs exploding without having a full-on flashback, trying to convince a pretty partygoer to share his car home after the valets lose her car keys, while Kate coaches Hal through some deep breathing exercises, assuring him that he’s fine. For now, they’re both fine.
Tea, Scones, and Intrigue
• Swirling around somewhat in the background is the situation with Margaret Roylin. She wants to leave the safe house and isn’t being detained, but Eidra is also not letting her walk freely. What a fun moral and legal gray area that will certainly not blow up in anyone’s face!
• It’s fun to think about the unusual jobs people can have. For example, it was some illustrator’s responsibility to create the gif of Trowbridge as St. George slaying the Lenkov dragon. It was probably an iterative process and may even have necessitated discussion at meetings! I hope Rory Kinnear has a framed still of it blown up very large and hanging somewhere in his house in a gilt frame.
• The apple varieties conversation between Stuart and a Tory advisor named Julian (Rupert Vansittart, subverting expectations by playing a perfectly nice guy rather than an insufferable upper-class blowhard as he’s done so well in films like Four Weddings and a Funeral, and the 1995 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice) is my favorite little moment of the episode. I know Bramleys are real, but Knobbly Russets has me in stitches. I’m convinced that that’s just one of many apple variety names Vansittart made up for this scene in an attempt to get Ato Essandoh to break.