The Diplomat Recap: We All Live in a Russian Submarine
“PNG” (that’s short for “persona non grata”, not an image file type) is all about binary options and arguments. President Penn will apologize to Prime Minister Trowbridge, or she’ll shrug off wholesale global disapproval. Kate is either going to wait out the protests outside Winfield House or she’s going to be designated PNG and be forced to flee London with a little suitcase that House Manager Frances has stashed for her in the hall closet. The British are meeting with the Chinese regarding the retrieval of the Russian nuclear submarine inadvertently drowned about 12 miles off their coast, and they’re either doing so to taunt the Americans, or they don’t care at all what the Americans know about it. Kate and Callum are taking their relationship to the next level, or they’re breaking up. Stuart should hire a lawyer, or everything’s going to be fine. American exceptionalism is either bad, or it’s what keeps the dream of global democracy alive.
The White House is thrown into chaos, with Billie doing her best to get everyone — staffers, cabinet members, and Hal — on the same side with the messaging she and Grace have pulled together. The President wants everyone to convey shock, empathy, and distance from Rayburn, not necessarily in that order. As is his custom, Hal has an alternate strategy to suggest: what if we didn’t say anything? He reasons that immediately shifting to defense and abject apologizing defeats the entire purpose of their choice to pin the blame on Rayburn for the HMS Courageous attack. They can still use that move as a means of controlling the narrative.
Can they, though? Gannon points out that there are protests at 16 U.S. embassies worldwide already; Turkey, Hungary, and Germany are all threatening to boycott purchasing U.S.-manufactured weapons; and there are rumblings of the need to offer reparations to the U.K. government. Kate is game to try, so Billie asks her to get the ball rolling to meet with Trowbridge and offer him some wiggle room, because Grace is willing to overlook his behavior the previous day. How about they hold another joint press conference and correct the record with a little Roylin name-drop, and everyone saves face and moves on to the next steps?
Yeah, no. Nobody will take Stuart’s or Neil’s calls at Number 10 or at Whitehall. And unlike on a normal day, Kate can’t just pop over to the Foreign Ministry to enlist Dennison in her communications scheming, because Winfield House is so surrounded by furious but otherwise peaceful protestors that she had to be smuggled onto the grounds on the floor of a borrowed minivan. Were she only the ambassador, she might have some wiggle room, but Agent Bonaventura — who, it transpires, is named Ulysses!! — is unmovable on the need for her, as the Second Lady, to sit tight.
On top of basically being grounded, Kate has to confirm to Stuart that President Rayburn was involved in the bombing. The sight of Stuart’s face falling in devastated disappointment shakes her and reminds her that although she, Billie, Hal, Grace, and Todd all knew there would be serious ramifications regardless of what was announced, when, and by whom, on some level their conversations had gotten kind of academic and detached from how people they know and care about would receive this information.
The rest of Stuart’s arc in “PNG”, particularly in his conversations with Billie and Eidra about how disappointed and angry he is, and about Eidra’s own deeply conflicted feelings about working for the CIA (“one of the most baldly paternalistic arms of the U.S. government”), is the most resonant of the episode. Eidra’s pragmatic approach — “There is not a better CIA or America. The ones we have are fucked up, and we make compromises. Some days, we feel okay about that. Some days, we have gin” — speaks to me largely because it’s a both/and rather than an either/or. It’s also significant that Eidra, whose job requires her to make either/or decisions all the time, is the one to make this argument.
Stuart’s increasingly distressing conversation with Billie, culminating in her advice that he get a lawyer in order to be prepared to face whatever legal blowback may come of his unwitting involvement in Rayburn-driven machinations surrounding the attack, sounds an awful lot like a friendship breakup. And at a higher level, the points Stuart is making about the kinds of questions he’d be likely to face in an official inquiry, about “why Rayburn wanted [Grace] out” and about “if the chief of staff told me to groom a replacement for a VP”, all point to one of the spots where the story of Rayburn as the bad guy are likely to start unraveling.
While Stuart and Billie are having that uncomfortable conversation, Kate is enjoying an impromptu lunch date with Callum, occasioned by Winfield House being on lockdown. He managed to sneak in with Agent Bonaventura’s help, but following a quick chat with Kate about how to approach Trowbridge to get him to agree to let the U.S. assist with retrieving the Russian nuclear submarine, the increased crowds of protestors make it impossible to leave the surrounding grounds.
This is all perfectly charming and includes several important milestones for the lovebirds, such as their first regular conversation (according to Callum, talking about work and sex doesn’t count as conversation) and their first time having sex horizontally. New experiences are available wherever you look! Their final and perhaps most significant long-term milestone of the day is less delightful: their first significant argument.
It takes them both by surprise and gets very ugly very quickly. After learning from Eidra’s back-channel intel that Trowbridge isn’t hiding from U.S. political operatives, he’s just very busy meeting with a Chinese robotics expert whom both Kate and Callum know is also a guy with nuclear energy expertise, Callum shares a critical detail he’s been holding back about the Russian submarine. It’s not just nuclear-powered, it’s armed with a nuclear torpedo called the Poseidon. Everyone in the U.S. intelligence community, including their own well-placed asset at the Kremlin, believes the Poseidon is at least a few years from being deployable, but that is clearly not the case. As far as Kate, Hal, and Billie are concerned, it’s not just important to keep the Chinese away from this submarine, it’s essential. Hal and Billie agree to convince Grace to call Trowbridge and apologize to him about Rayburn so that he’ll agree to let the U.S. assist with retrieving the submarine.
Unfortunately, that’s the last moment that Kate agrees with Callum on anything. She takes it as a given that the U.S. Department of Defense (in The Diplomat’s timeline, nobody is trying to look like a big, brave, important confident man by trying to make fetch happen with the Department of War) would be looped into the conversation due to a loose nuke, while he considers their involvement at any level as a dangerous escalation. Within seconds, they’re shouting at each other about American exceptionalism. Why, Callum wants to know, is it that “the only way to save us is for members of my country to die, and members of your country to say ‘you’re welcome’?” Why did he and many others in the British Army kill Afghanis on American orders, when the Americans then failed to save the people they’d promised to help? Why does the U.S. still consider itself the world’s truest arbiter of democracy and freedom, when Callum’s asset came to him, not anyone in the U.S. intelligence community, with information about the Poseidon?
Kate is getting wound up more with each passing second, until she experiences a stunning moment of insight, realizing that she’s traded one cowboy for another. Like Hal, Callum received a vital piece of internationally significant intelligence, kept it to himself, and cooked up a big plan on his own, and now, one of the direct consequences of his reserving the privilege to hold and plan around that information is that the Chinese government may wind up gaining control of Poseidon. If you’ve watched The Americans, you’ve seen how convincingly terrifying Keri Russell can be when playing someone burning with righteous fury. Aidan Turner looks both horrified and as if he’s been burned to ash where he stands. He’s so appalled that even when Kate tries to apologize, saying she was wrong to blow up at him the way she typically does with Hal in their arguments, he can’t see his way clear to giving her some leeway due to those extenuating circumstances.
When Kate approaches Callum later, after they’ve both learned that Grace called Trowbridge with an acceptable proposal to hold a bilateral summit — not exactly a “let’s kiss and make up”, but certainly better than “we are never ever ever getting back together” — he seems largely mollified, and is willing to entertain the idea of giving things another shot with Kate. It helps that in her own cooldown period, she’s reflected and now hypothesizes that the problem isn’t so much that Hal and Callum are alike (despite their almost-rhyming names) as that she is “not capable of treating people the way they should be treated.” Will this launch a thousand fan edits of moments from The Diplomat paired with the chorus of “Anti-Hero”? What am I even saying? A season one edit already exists on YouTube, and more are undoubtedly awaiting us on TikTok as we speak.
Intrigue and Crumpets
• The theme for this episode’s odds and ends is I Have Questions. For example, are Agent Bonaventura’s parents Classics professors? Are they just fans of Homeric epics? Are they scholars of Joyce? Ulysses Bonaventura is a baller name! I hope he dines out on the backstory all the time, and I want to know every detail of it.
• When Callum calls Kate to see if he can pay her a visit to strategize approaching Trowbridge about the location of the Russian submarine, she tells him to go to the dumpster at the Hanover Gate playground and await pickup by the aforementioned Agent Bonaventura. The oddball specificity of this detail tickles me. How often has she had to tell others to go to this playground dumpster to be snuck into Winfield House? Why the dumpster? How does she know that a dumpster is a permanent feature at that playground? The playground’s official page on the Royal Parks website refers to restrooms for children and a baby changing station, but makes no mention of a dumpster.
• Callum and Kate’s postcoital snacks include flavorful little tomatoes, which is lovely, but Kate has the gall to say, in front of the entire population of the State of New Jersey, that American tomatoes have no flavor. As a proud daughter of The Garden State and an enemy of produce slander, I hereby invite fictional character Kate Wyler to join me at any reputable New Jersey farm stand next summer for a tomato tasting experience.