The Diplomat Recap: The Twist Ties That Bind
The most important moment of “Last Dance at the Country Club” is not its final, Casablanca-inflected image but a brief, devastatingly telling exchange between Kate and Stuart. After learning that she has no idea what their budget would be like, or who they’d be reporting to, he turns down her offer to leave Embassy London to join her on her next adventure, as Special Envoy to Europe, saying, “I can be an ambassador, though. It’s what I’ve been working toward for 20 years.” Kate’s quiet, wistful “Yeah, me, too” makes me want to cry. It also makes me want to hurl myself into the TV and claw my way into this scene so I can shake Kate by the shoulders (more metaphorically than actually, but also a little bit actually) and say, “Then do it!!!!!”
I get it: duty to the nation before personal ambition, the muscle memory of actions transformed into habit over the course of a decade-plus relationship. It all has legitimate weight here. But why? Why hasn’t Hal said, “Look, I can tell this is causing you grief, I’m going to turn her down”? He says he doesn’t want it unless she does, too, that he’ll do what she asks, but he must know by now that Kate isn’t going to ask him to turn down the opportunity to serve as vice president. It’s too important a role, at too thorny a time, under too dangerous a president, not to say yes. But it hurts her, and he knows that.
If he’s not going to pass on becoming VP, Hal should be running around to secure a substantive, significant role for Kate. He practically shouts at Nora, Grace’s former and his soon-to-be chief of staff, that Kate “should be brokering an 83-point peace plan for Yemen, she should be secretary of State!” Kate points out that whatever he wants out of this job, he will have to negotiate for, and Nora isn’t the person who’ll be making those decisions. He’s going to have to face Billie, Grace, or both, and to his credit, that’s exactly what he does, exploiting Billie’s knowledge about Grace’s role in the Courageous bombing to wrangle a promising title for Kate. Special Envoy to Europe does sound pretty great; “a cover story and a blank check” has tons of potential. But potential is all a blank check is, until it’s got numbers and a signature on it. Stuart points this out very gently. No budget in writing is no budget at all, and no clarity around what entity would be providing that budget and oversight is a bit too murky to be worth jumping ship for.
So they continue the grim work of taking down the office, a bunch of chores that evaporate into total unimportance when Eidra arrives to break the news that Margaret Roylin has died by suicide. They’d just offered her asylum in the U.S., and Eidra knows that Trowbridge has to hear about it officially sooner than later, but she hasn’t “quite figured out how to say that a British citizen killed herself in a CIA safe house she wasn’t supposed to be in.” Fair, particularly since how he receives the news, and from whom, is likely to make the difference between Eidra remaining chief of station and … not. She’s in a real bind here, as nobody is going to blame the Second Lady for such a dramatic and awful failure.
Kate, being the one to deliver the news to Trowbridge and Dennison, goes about as well as could be expected, which is to say not well at all, a shot Kate delivers with a chaser of her impending departure. Her good-bye to Dennison is very starchy and Austenian, leaving many paragraphs of things unsaid but mutually understood. Like Stuart, he asks if quitting to follow Hal to D.C. is what she wants, and her very simple answer, that it’s what she keeps choosing, is almost as hard a blow as her answer to Stuart was.
Once again, I’d like to hop into the scene to have a bracing heart-to-heart with Kate Wyler, who, regardless of how real or fictional she is, very much needs friends. Why can’t she stay on as ambassador to the Court of St. James? She and Hal — as of the day before — were still planning to divorce. Being an ambassador has some pretty wild ups and downs, but she likes it. Not only does she like it, it’s the fulfillment of a promise she and Hal made to each other way back when they were secretly together in Baghdad in 2010. As we see in flashbacks, he was offered a post in Vienna, and after a big fight about it, they eventually agreed to marry. Following the example of many State Department couples, they followed each other from posting to posting. Three years for him, three years for her, ad blissfully infinitum. Great plan, but the reality has been Kate following Hal, over and over. She’s done fine work, but being an actual ambassador has revealed Kate’s ambition to herself, and Hal becoming Vice President would be a setback for her, both professionally and personally.
If Kate were to say any of this out loud to Hal, it would help. The guy is stumbling around in the half-dark, but is that reasonable? The stuff making Kate feel awful is not exactly a secret to him, so why does he appear so baffled? And why has Grace Penn asked him to be her vice-president? Hal says it’s because of gender politics, which he hates, but misogyny is real! Kate says it’s because he’s apolitical and looks good in photos; I think he’s more nonpartisan than apolitical, but that’s a quibble. We haven’t heard from Grace herself about this, and I’m beginning to think we won’t.
Stuart, having seen just how torn up Kate is about resigning and leaving London to become the Second Lady, floats the idea of her instead staying in London and adding Second Lady to her list of titles and responsibilities. Bless this voice of reason, but Kate seems to have her mind made up. Until they go to the airport to board Air Force One, that is. Pennsy and Frances have presented Kate with honey from the Winfield bees; her lead protection officer, Byron, says, in his way, that he’ll miss her; Eidra furnishes an Irish good-bye; and Stuart does the most Stuart thing, which is the always-effective, reassuringly tight-squeeze hug she needed. Ultimately, Kate can’t summon the will to get on that plane with Hal, even with the romantic, gauzy memories of them slow-dancing in Baghdad all those years ago. Madame Ambassador with a side of Second Lady Kate Wyler it is, then!
Intrigue and Crumpets
• Note to self (and to everyone): Rewatch Casablanca, that’s the stuff!
• Will Kate and Hal actually divorce? It would be good for Kate’s character development to have her interactions with him be brought to a minimum, but neither of them can seem to quit the other. She broods over their history together, spurred to those memories by the twist tie that was her first engagement ring. Yeah, she still has it in her wallet! That just doesn’t scream “We are definitely divorcing!” to me.