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Every word uttered could be a key. Every move made could be a tell. The delicate chessboard of foreign affairs, even among allies, is always laced with dire consequences in the Netflix political thriller The Diplomat, from creator Debora Cahn (The West Wing, Homeland). But now that it’s set against the memorial services of two colleagues, one American and one Brit, the most catastrophic consequences are cast to the forefront in the second episode of Season 2.
When US Ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) was reassigned from Kabul to London, she thought she’d be thrust into a world of tea parties and curtsies — not quite her style. But now that British MP Merritt Grove (Simon Chandler) and her embassy’s own aide Ronnie Buckhurst (Jess Chanliau) are dead, Kate is starting to understand why she was sent here … and also feeling the emotional strains her husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), dealt with in his previous tours as ambassador.
At the end of the Season 2 premiere, Kate gets a mysterious call from missing British operative Margaret “Meg” Roylin (Celia Imrie), former adviser — and surreptitious current adviser — to Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear). In the episode aptly named “St. Paul’s,” we pick up on a somber note at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Rain pours down in central London, as the dark and stormy political game continues at Grove’s funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral. For the two hours of the service, showing respect to the deceased means hitting a pause button on any commotion — at least on the surface. The Americans use that to their advantage in an intricately executed plot to reveal that Roylin is very much alive and still in the game.
Kate helps a recovering Hal — with a limp and a cane — into the church, as he makes his first public appearance since being wounded in the Notting Hill car explosion. Niceties are exchanged as they cross paths with CIA Chief Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) and British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi).
Eidra is on a mission, meeting with Roylin in a back corner of St. Paul’s and giving her a wardrobe change. Roylin doubts the plan, telling Eidra, “This is unwise.” But Eidra assures her this is the safest place in London during the ceremony and she needs to show her face since these are “dangerous” men.
During the memorial service, attendees start to notice Roylin’s presence — exactly the plan. But no one is more shaken by her sighting than the prime minister himself, who stumbles during his eulogy and immediately tells his wife, Lydia (Pandora Colin), that he saw Roylin.
As the congregation stands to sing, “I Vow to Thee My Country,” Trowbridge can’t take it and turns around, charging toward Roylin.
But the Americans have a precisely choreographed plan in place, and the pieces slide together gracefully. Roylin switches into a coat of a different color, as Hal “accidentally” drops his cane, forcing Trowbridge to show his humanity and help Hal out. This gives Roylin time to slip away.
As the funeral-goers disperse, Trowbridge loses track of Roylin, instead tapping the back of a look-alike in the gray coat he’d spotted her in from the pulpit.
In a clean and successful escape through the cathedral’s tunnels and gates, Roylin and Eidra duck into a vehicle in a hidden garage and into a getaway car.
The Wylers clearly are a great team, pulling off their part of the mission — even with Hal still recovering. They had been firmly on the road to divorce, but it seems like they’ve taken a U-turn since the explosion. Now Kate even appears to be a doting wife.
Always the one to call a spade a spade, Hal addresses the elephant in the room as they exit St. Paul’s, stopping on the steps and telling Kate: “You can still leave me. I mean, the marriage. I mean it. You don’t need to stay just because I got blown up.” She says that’s not why she cranked up her wifely duties.
After Dennison passes them, Hal asks if Kate slept with him. She says no, but he pushes it further: “Were you planning to?” She says yes, and he eggs her on further, saying she still can. But she looks her husband in the eye, declaring, “I don’t want to.”
As Hal steps away to the restroom, Dennison comes over to talk to Kate. The foreign secretary tells the ambassador their hunch was right. While they had both been told that the British were going to arrest Roman Lenkov, the Russian mercenary believed to have executed the deadly attack on the British warship HMS Courageous, there had actually been a secret plot within the British government to kill him. Kate makes clear they need Lenkov alive in order to find out who ordered the attack.
Dennison also lets Kate know that Roylin was just spotted at the funeral. In perhaps their biggest face-to-face lie, Kate plays like she’s surprised by the news.
And what about all that sexual tension that had built up on their fancy night out in Paris? Kate says she was “awful” to Dennison there, and he makes excuses for her, telling her that she was scared. Kate starts to articulate the state of her marriage when Dennison completes the sentence for her that her marriage is “safe” and that “things are as they should be.”
Ever determined, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), the American deputy chief of mission to the UK — who was also injured in the blast — returns to the embassy on crutches. He’s greeted with thunderous applause. Kate scolds him for coming back to work, but he says if he doesn’t, he just sits at home thinking about Ronnie’s death, which sparks panic attacks.
Kate pulls Stuart into her office, expressing regret for her actions that led to him being hurt in the explosion. Stuart stops her and says, “Don’t apologize for things that aren’t your fault. The end.”
Being back in the office might be a distraction, but the fact that Ronnie’s empty desk is just right there is almost too much to bear.
While all this is happening, it turns out Eidra and Kate have been harboring Roylin inside the US embassy. Dangerous stuff. But Roylin doesn’t want to talk to the Americans — she asks for Dennison. This is a bit of a curveball since Dennison hates Roylin.
Now they have to somehow get the British foreign secretary to the American embassy. Roylin tells Eidra to ask Kate to do it since she has an “unusually close” relationship with him, a hint that maybe Kate and Dennison haven’t been that furtive with their flirtation. Kate shuts down the comment, saying, “That’s what I get paid for.”
Kate does call Dennison. She starts off by saying, “I need to see you,” muddling professional and personal intents. After clarification that this is strictly business, he ditches his schedule and heads to the American embassy, under the guise of signing Ronnie’s condolence book.
Upon arrival, he’s not at all amused to find that the Americans have strong-armed him into a meeting with Roylin. Kate tries to advise him, saying, “You’re going to get yourself killed.” But he’s not having it, retorting, “I feel like it might be happening right now.”
In the locked-down room with Dennison, Kate, and Eidra, Roylin reveals that Lenkov was hired by “British citizens” to launch the missile at the warship. But the only name she’ll give up is Grove.
That does no good now that Grove is dead. Dennison doesn’t disguise his frustration. He believes he knows exactly who Grove worked with: Trowbridge and Roylin.
Roylin says that Grove had become an extremist and was going to meet with Hal, but he was silenced. She helps them piece together that Grove’s motivation behind the attack was to prevent Scotland’s secession movement. They needed a “unifying event” like this to keep the UK intact.
But who tipped the perpetrators off about Hal and Grove’s meeting? Roylin says that when people want to know what the prime minister is thinking, they don’t tap his phone — they tap hers, so she always uses a disposable phone to talk to Trowbridge.
However, if someone calls Roylin, then the line is exposed. Kate asks her if Grove called to tell her about the Notting Hill meeting. That’s when Roylin reveals her culprit. “No, darling, you did.”
Kate now realizes it was her call to Roylin from Paris for intel on Grove that literally blew everything up.
That’s still the theory, though the Americans are trying to get concrete evidence. With only a 10-minute heads-up, the prime minister comes to the American embassy to sign Ronnie’s condolence book.
Ducking into a supply closet, Dennison debriefs with Kate and Eidra. He thinks that Roylin is protecting Trowbridge — and wants to turn her in to the police. Kate cautions that if the threat truly is coming from within, the cops could be in on it too. They decide to keep Roylin in a safe house for another day since there are still a few more days before the Lenkov capture — or is it a kill now?
Trowbridge truly is a politician. He does all the handshaking and posing for photos needed to make his visit appear as a show of support for Ronnie. But we also see him whisper to Dennison to step out of his photos, revealing the strain between the two British politicians. Then he gets to his true intent — he wants a private word with Kate. No notes allowed.
After a pregnant pause, Trowbridge simply says: “Margaret Roylin.”
Despite the funeral sighting, he still doesn’t know where Roylin is. He knows Kate called Roylin when she and Dennison were in Paris and wants to know why. Kate says Roylin needed advice on how to handle Trowbridge. He asks what her answer was. Kate says, “Well, if I tell you, it won’t work.”
He pleads with her to reveal more, and she tells him that Roylin wanted to know how Trowbridge would react if the French didn’t agree to the Lenkov arrest since they had at first. Roylin told her he’d be happy that Dennison failed. Trowbridge hates how accurate that is.
Kate adds that Roylin told her that Trowbridge thinks he’s playing chess, when he’s actually playing checkers — he overcomplicates things. The prime minister says that’s not what she meant and storms out of the embassy.
Honoring young Ronnie’s untimely death serves as the background for much of the episode, yet Kate is somehow on the periphery of it all.
When Kate pulls Stuart aside, he pleads with her to take five minutes and look at Ronnie’s picture. She fills him in on their suspicions about Trowbridge and that her own call to Roylin triggered the explosion. Guilt has been consuming her, so she’s been driven to get to the bottom of who killed Ronnie. “Ronnie’s face is seared in my eye,” Kate tells Stuart. “I don’t need to look at a picture.”
Back in a conference room, plans are being made to transport Ronnie’s body back to the US. Kate is clearly distraught listening to it all.
Mistrust within the British embassy is clearly contagious, as the Americans are now starting to doubt one another too. It starts with a conversation between bomb survivors Hal and Stuart, commiserating about their injuries. Stuart then apologizes to Hal, though Hal stops him since it wasn’t Stuart’s fault. But then Stuart implies that he expects an apology from Hal — and things between them sour.
Later, Eidra and Stuart get rolled up into a heated discussion about hiding Roylin — Eidra reminds Stuart that when they started dating, she told him there would be times she couldn’t share info. Stuart reminds him that she broke up with him and now he’s asking in a professional capacity.
It spirals even deeper with Stuart mouthing off about his frustrations with the Wylers and how “cool” they are, i.e.: “They talk to terrorists and hug warlords and drink llama blood.” He takes it one step further and says that Ronnie would still be alive if the previous ambassadors, the Vayles, were still in place.
But perhaps the most tenset moment yet arises between Kate and Stuart while they’re en route to send off Ronnie’s body. Stuart chastises Kate for calling Roylin, especially since he’d warned Kate since her first day on the job to stay away from Roylin. He accuses Kate of not taking the London post seriously — and then he gets blunt: “You made a tactical error. I told you who she was. You ignored me … and it was deadly.”
Back at the British residence, Hal and Kate admit to each other that Stuart is angry at both of them. When Kate concedes that her call to Roylin ultimately led to Ronnie’s death, Hal says, “Correlation is not causation.” Kate says she’s not a fan of that excuse, and Hal clarifies that it simply means it wasn’t her fault.
Kate knows that her actions had deadly consequences. She gets increasingly agitated as Hal shrugs it off as “the cost of doing business,” extending that definition to a couple of situations including a plane in Kabul and a house in Beirut that were seemingly his fault. Now that Kate’s stepped into the ambassador’s role, he believes she’ll come around to his way of thinking.
But Hal and Kate are two different people — and Kate is furious that Hal has no conscience and thinks that Kate will lose her humanity too. Kate kicks Hal out of the bedroom, but since he’s still recovering from surgery, she winds up sleeping in the other room.
The pendulum keeps swaying as they get ready for bed. Kate goes into the bathroom to pee while Hal’s brushing his teeth — a sign of their comfort around each other as a couple. Kate starts to apologize, saying, “I was unfair,” and adding that “it’s the job, I always acted like it was you.” While she doesn’t go so far as to agree with Hal, she concedes that being ambassador comes with a “morally repugnant component.”
But then they start arguing about whether they’re bad people or whether the job made them that way. Hal claims that, for a decade, he acted like he had “no moral compass” so that Kate could be their joint conscience. This cuts too deep. Hal kicks her out of the bedroom once more, and once more, it’s short-lived.
When Hal tries to get into bed alone, he realizes how close his own brush with death was, how badly he was hurt — he still can’t even reach his own shoes to take them off.
He calls for Kate, who slips back into wife mode. She kneels before him to help, once again bowing to his needs … but how long can this continue?