The Diplomat Recap: You Think You Know Someone!
This is my favorite episode of the season so far; your mileage may vary, of course, but the appeal factors that resonate most with me — the talky strategy scenes, punctuated and then kickstarted by relationship scenes and moments, with brief but very effective backstory elements — it’s all so well-calibrated. It works for everyone on-screen, too, right up until the moment where Nicol Trowbridge announces to the world that the late President Rayburn authorized the attack on HMS Courageous, leaving out any mention of Margaret Roylin, effectively dodging any responsibility or consequences for the U.K. and heaping the entire world’s scorn on President Penn and the U.S. of A.
On some level, this was inevitable, because Trowbridge can only be who he is: a preschooler with an excellent vocabulary and minimal impulse control. He can be a very shrewd and ruthless political operator, and the combination of qualities is exactly the Trowbridge we see in the final scene. Kate accurately predicted half of Trowbridge’s behavior (his emotion-driven impulsivity) and Dennison predicted the other half (exacting 10 pounds of flesh rather than the standard single pound).
So how did we get here? Lucky for the process nerds among us, “Amagansett” spends a lot of time showing us how the strategy sausage gets made. It’s ugly, there’s just no way around it. Everyone agrees that they have to get out ahead of the story, before Andreev takes it elsewhere or goes to a news outlet with it. Beyond that, though, lies chaos, insufficient transparency, and a lot of talk about who gets to be in the room with Grace.
And she needs people in the room; Billie, Hal, and Kate all spend a lot of time trying to talk her out of just laying the whole story out to the public. She thinks once all the shareable details are out there, she wouldn’t look so bad, but she absolutely would look terrible. There’s not a ton of daylight between the strategies on the table — they’re all varying shades of getting Trowbridge and possibly Dennison out to Long Island, reading them in to the situation to some degree, being contrite and offering a package of economic sweeteners, and then making some kind of joint global announcement in which Grace and Trowbridge would both divulge and obscure some portion of the truth.
The rest is a merry-go-round of proportion-balancing, jockeying for position and advisor dominance, with the added complication that Todd and Kate are both present as First and Second spouses. Everyone is driving everyone else around the bend, and between the sniping, squabbling, exclusion attempts, and Hail Mary passes, it’s honestly a miracle that anyone agrees with anyone else about anything. At first blush, it seems as if Todd has made peace with having gone from anticipating being out of the administration altogether to being First Gentleman. He’s swimming his 50 laps twice a day in the outdoor geothermally-heated pool and advising Kate and Hal on how to eat the tray of oysters he presents as a cocktail hour treat. It’s fine! Except it’s plainly not fine.
It’s more like he’s starring in his own one-man production of an Edward Albee play, pouring the remains of everyone else’s abandoned cocktails and wine into his glass and gulping it joylessly down. He’s openly seething, jealous of the increased demands on Grace’s time and attention, and resentful of Billie’s continued position as Grace’s Chief of Staff. He can only view Billie as the person responsible for Grace’s near-ouster as Rayburn’s VP and suspects she’s still loyal to Rayburn, not to Grace. I’m not going back to rewatch the earlier seasons in search of this one fact, but it’s possible that his rant about Billie shoving Grace in front of a bus is where we learn that he 100 percent believes Billie ginned up the controversy surrounding his handling of an NIH grant to oust and replace Grace with Kate. Billie and Grace’s silence on the matter confirms that he’s right.
Kate fares better, but that’s a low bar to clear, and when she does so, it’s maximally loud and messy, and nearly gets herself bundled back to London. Which is both fair (shouting that the vice president, who is both your colleague and your husband, is lying to the president: unprofessional and disruptive) and not (she was right, and forcing Grace and Hal to have a more frank conversation about their work partnership and the potential consequences of Grace coming clean with Trowbridge is good for their working relationship). This is yet another example we can hurl onto the pile of reasons that it’s impossible to serve well as both SLOTUS and Ambassador simultaneously.
After being informed by Billie that she is being consciously uncoupled from this mini-summit prior to Trowbridge and Dennison’s arrival, Kate summons Eidra to try to enlist her to help her convince Hal to convince Grace to try an approach that doesn’t involve confessing her role in the Courageous attack. This scene is painful to watch, particularly because it’s another reminder that Kate doesn’t have friends. There’s Carol, her chum from their days in Baghdad, but Carol seems to have made a quiet, speedy retreat from London following Rayburn’s death. Hal is sort of her friend when they aren’t fighting tooth and nail. Dennison has friend potential, as does Stuart, but Kate’s most obvious maybe-friend is Eidra, and she’s set fire to that bridge a few too many times. When you ask someone to trust you, and then a British national dies in that someone’s not entirely legitimate custody, it’s bound to put a damper on things in your social relationship.
Eventually, Kate’s final gambit — hopping in the pool with Todd to ask him to pass along her idea of making Rayburn the secret face of the catastrophe and convincing Trowbridge to publicly own Roylin’s involvement — works. I’m not convinced that Trowbridge takes the news much better than he would have had he learned that Grace was Roylin’s co-conspirator, but it’s a moot point. The shrewd operator who is also wildly reactive merges both aspects of his character with his off-script moment heard ‘round the world.
It’s shocking, but not surprising, given what we know of Trowbridge, and given what Dennison warned Kate was likely to happen. Trowbridge feels humiliated and is going to use his knowledge to reset the U.K.’s entire relationship with the U.S. I can’t help but hear a smidge of a long-repressed rage/glee hybrid as Dennison lays this out. The trade deal they’ve been wanting since Brexit is barely the tip of the iceberg of what Trowbridge will exact. The new era of relations between the countries will have to be characterized by a wholesale elimination of anything remotely resembling American exceptionalism, he says, and when he lays out why — that Britain has “endured the indignity” of playing America’s “trusty second” for so long in exchange for guaranteed security, but President Rayburn “birthed a play to attack a British warship” — it’s hard to argue that Trowbridge’s perspective is unreasonable. Why shouldn’t they expect “an enthusiastic ‘yes’ to every request we make for the foreseeable future”?
Kate pushes back, Trowbridge’s expectations are “a lot”, and we can’t possibly reset such consequential relationships every time the U.S. messes up on a grand scale. The problem is right there: how many times does one powerful government have to do something catastrophically bad or fail to meet its own high-stakes objectives before another powerful government relieves them of some of the duties and privileges they’ve been taking on as if they’re anyone’s rightful property?
Dennison has done his duty, both to Trowbridge and to Kate (and by extension, the Penn administration). When Trowbridge announces that Rayburn was the architect of the HMS Courageous attack and doesn’t say a word about Roylin, everyone is rocked back on their heels in horrified surprise, except for Dennison. He tried to warn her!
Intrigue and Crumpets
• Oh, don’t mind me, I’m just thinking of how much more of a juicy whirlwind this episode would have been if Kate and Dennison had actually let ‘er rip a few episodes ago, and were in an ongoing romantic relationship. Alas! We will always mourn you, Kateison. (Auster? Or maybe Dennikate. What about Aukate? Here’s how we know that hope springs eternal: I spent a full two minutes thinking up relationship portmanteaux that seem like they’re going to waste away in cold storage.)
• It seems as if they shot this episode on location, and I would really love to know where, exactly, because a geothermally heated pool you can swim in comfortably, even in the depths of winter, sounds heavenly and I want to know more about it.
• Todd and Grace Penn snipe at each other a lot, but despite that, they also spoon in bed at night, so I think they’re going to be okay. Assuming the British Prime Minister doesn’t declare war or arrange to have one of them assassinated or something!