[The following story contains spoilers from the first two episodes of The Diplomat season three.]
By the second episode of season three of Netflix‘s The Diplomat, viewers may have thought that the political thriller was on the verge of blowing up its entire premise.
After a series of changes, including Allison Janney’s Grace Penn becoming president after President Rayburn (Michael McKean) dies, Celia Imrie’s Margaret Roylin dying and Penn appointing Rufus Sewell‘s former ambassador Hal Wyler as her vice president instead of his wife Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who’d been pursuing the position, Kate is ready to leave her post as American ambassador to the U.K., the role she took in the opening minutes of the series’ first episode, and return to the U.S. with Hal with the promise of a newly created special envoy to Europe position alongside her role as second lady. But as she’s about to board the plane, she looks up at Hal from the tarmac and can’t do it. He looks back at her in a knowing moment for the long-married couple and turns around and boards the plane.
For Russell, the moment, which maintains her character’s current diplomatic position, is also an unusual shift for both Kate and many women.
“The interesting part is that she’s just gonna go along miserably and do what the good girl is supposed to do. And when Stuart (Ato Essandoh) brings it up, like maybe you could just stay, I think she hadn’t even thought of it, and I love that she chooses to stay. It’s a monumental moment to choose yourself. And I think women, in particular, don’t. I think it’s really hard for women to choose themselves,” Russell tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Women don’t do that that much for a million reasons, but at this point, Kate decides to choose herself, which is amazing.”
Kate’s choice also reminded the actress of another acclaimed series she starred in that tackled the intimate relationship of a marriage amid larger geopolitical stakes: The Americans.
“When we were making The Americans, Joe [Weisberg] and Joel [Fields], who wrote that show, said they followed a feminist guidebook, or these guidelines, so every single decision Elizabeth made followed this set of rules,” Russell explained of her Soviet spy character in the FX series. “You did it for yourself, not for your family, not for your kids. You made the decision for yourself.”
Even though there is still “more work to be done” in the U.K., particularly as CIA station chief Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) and Kate’s friend is certain she’s about to be fired, Russell says her character’s decision is more about making a break from her pattern with Hal.
“There’s been enough of following this guy and his career. Let him go do his career, let him have it, live it up,” Russell says. “The rivalry and the messiness of it and all the complications of that relationship, it was just too much. You just have to clear your head. And I think she wanted to clear the slate and focus on what her priorities were.”
The episode in which Kate and Hal part ways also features flashbacks to their early days as a couple, including Hal’s proposal, in what Russell called “contemplative in a way that is a different rhythm for our show.”
She adds, “That whole idea of, ‘How did I end up here?, What steps led me here?’ It’s interesting.”
And she praised Kate being passed over for Hal as VP as great storytelling.
“When I read that, it was so fucking good. To be stripped of that when you’re building and all the work in the first episode of handling things for the president, even though they’re at odds, doing the right thing, making everything work and then for Hal to waltz in with his good looks and his good suit, and be offered the position is just deliciously heartbreaking. It really sets this season off to a completely different place,” she says. “Any character, for me anyway, is better when you’re losing. And [creator and showrunner] Debora [Cahn] writes some pretty fantastic, humiliating losses.”
Speaking at a post-screening Q&A with former American ambassador to the U.K. Jane Hartley in New York earlier this week, Cahn joked about the real-life parallels of someone as qualified as Kate not getting a top job.
“How did we come up with the idea that a really smart woman with a lot of experience and a real granular understanding of how things work would be sort of ready, willing and able to take a big leadership job and then didn’t get it at the last second?,” she said.
But in all seriousness, she said that they wanted to keep Kate in the foreign service.
And, she said, “The idea of having two women in the White House, sadly, felt like science fiction.”
At the beginning of episode two, viewers see Kate methodically remove the multiple bobby pins holding together her vice presidential hair and sweep them away, signaling an end — at least for now — to Kate’s ambitions to be vp.
And that’s where Russell points out that Kate “didn’t want that job.”
“You get into this whipped up environment, and you do sort of think, ‘Well, maybe this is what I want, maybe this is what I’m supposed to be doing,’” she says. “And then when [Hal becomes vp], I think it just strips everything away and makes her rethink the whole thing and what she believes and what she wants. I think that’s a great place to start the season.”
Sewell was also excited by the shifting dynamics that came with Hal being picked for vp, saying he was “aghast” when he found out about the “fantastic” development.
“What it does to the dynamic is so explosive, so unexpected, it throws so much in the air. We’ve always enjoyed those kinds of things,” he says. “You don’t want to be the dog that caught the car, so the change in dynamic, I was very grateful for, because I think there’s only a limited amount of interest that you can get out of the dynamic staying the same for too long. So something that really rebalanced the status and created new problems opened the story up.”
The multiple shifts in season three, Cahn indicates, were just natural consequences of the “tiny” change of Rayburn’s death.
“We just did this one tiny little thing, which was the president dropped dead, and it created a whole lot of fallout,” she quips.
Still, she was intrigued by the possibilities of what these changes would do for the characters.
“It was really fascinating to watch a bunch of characters who believe that the world can turn over, but they will stay essentially the same. They will be the same people in relationship to each other,” she says.
And for those who think that some threads from the first two seasons have been tied up early in season three, Cahn teases that those ties may unravel yet again.
“I always think that we’re going to resolve storylines and embark on a new path, but then we end up with some new wrinkle from the old path, which I guess is a lot like life,” she says.
All three seasons, including the eight-episode third season, of The Diplomat are now streaming on Netflix.