The Diplomat Season 2 Ending Explained by Showrunner Keri Russell

Note: The following story contains spoilers from “The Diplomat” season 2 finale.

Just as Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler was ready to ring the bell on British corruption, the politician plotting in “The Diplomat” Season 2 took a sudden turn.

The Netflix series finds Kate and her team gathering incriminating evidence against British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) to prove that he was behind the attack on the British aircraft carrier, HMS Courageous. But their investigation takes a turn when Trowbridge’s former adviser Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) tells Kate that Trowbridge was not involved in the attack and that he hired Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov to stage an attack that would create outrage, not bad As we know, it did not go according to plan and resulted in the deaths of 40 members of the Royal Navy.

As Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) – whom Kate is supposed to replace following a scandal involving Grace’s husband – arrives in Britain to help deal with the growing mess, Kate learns that It was Grace who planted the idea in Roylin. head in a scheme to aid US diplomacy. So Kate was right that the call was coming from inside the house, but she didn’t realize it was in her house.

In the season 2 finale, as Kate wraps her head around becoming VP for the first time, plans for Grace to step down as VP are hijacked when Grace is set to be a nuclear czar in the capacity them as VPs, which puts Kate – and by extension Hal – in a difficult situation with their new acquaintances. They confront Grace, who tries to explain to Kate that she did what she did for the greater good. But Kate is now in Grace’s crosshairs, and Grace worries that Kate might reveal her big secret.

Kate and Hal agree to tell the Secretary of Defense about their discovery, but in true Hal fashion, he goes over Kate’s head and instead decides to break the news to the US President himself (played by Michael McKean). The president takes the news badly – he has a heart attack and dies on the call after hearing the news.

In the final moments of Season 2, Grace threatens Kate with not revealing her secret when Secret Security rushes in on Grace, who has suddenly become President of the United States. Boom. Cut to credits.

TheWrap spoke with showrunner Debora Cahn and stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell about the shocking season 2 finale of “The Diplomat.” And don’t worry, “The Diplomat” has already been renewed for Season 3 by Netflix.

In the end, we see Kate finally accept and show her willingness to become VP. Why is he finally wrapping his head around her?

Deborah Cahn: He gets to a point where he feels he has to – he has a responsibility to step into a role that needs to be filled by someone other than the person in him. And for Kate, what’s interesting about the relationship with Grace Penn is that he has a terrible impression of her, and then he kind of falls for her, all of a sudden she’s fantastic, she’s slandered, and then that relationship goes through these wild changes. and her opinion of who Grace is changes and her idea of ​​whether or not she should take Grace’s job or try to get Grace’s job changes as her opinion of Grace changes.

Keri Russell: (It is) circumstantial. I think her love and loyalty is for the country – she believes in it. She really does. And somebody’s going to take that down – a bad person who shouldn’t be in charge, who handled things that shouldn’t have been handled, who put us in a bad situation, who didn’t do the best good choices, it will work. to take control and I think she thinks it’s wrong. Even though it’s a job she doesn’t want, she thinks she’d be better than this person who has this stain on her and has been involved in shady things. It is a moral point of view.

Kate finally says that Hal wants her to be vice president so he can be closer to power. What do you think of that, Rufus?

Rufus Sewell: I think he wants to affect change. He wants her to be in power. He wants to be in the best position to do the things he wants to do. But she really wants this for herself. He’s really, really excited because he thinks she’s fantastic. He thinks that she is really the best person for this because they have things that they think are important, not just the love of the country, but the love of the world. They care about Afghanistan, not just for America’s benefit, but… they are humanitarians. They have very strong convictions and want to do whatever it takes to affect the changes in the world that they have always believed in. He feels very strongly that she should do this. He has his personal ambitions, but it’s not a secret Machiavellian thing for his own game. I keep coming back to it, but if events had unfolded in such a way that the best play was for him to be vice president, then both of them would have worked to make that happen. But this is the door that opened.

The finale ends with the president dying after Hal tells him the news. Why did you want to drop this twist?

Cahn: We always want to start in a place where we’re asking a lot of questions that might be worth answering in another season. It’s all about people in leadership positions who are new to them and feel somewhat out of their depth, so as soon as someone is settled into a role, we want to shake the snow globe and see what happens if there more on your plate or worse.

Why is Hal going over Kate’s head again?

Sewell: He has this panache, what you might call brilliance (or) courage when he goes out, because he can see a few steps ahead and has a kind of bravado that will make him take enormous leaps and accomplish something amazing. The downside is when it doesn’t work. This, from an operational perspective, was the right call. What he could not predict is what happened, because this was an act of God, which made it a terrible, terrible thing to do. But if it turned out, which you would have thought, to be the most likely to look at the situation, the reasons he cites are quite convincing for doing so. You just couldn’t predict… it’s bad luck. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean that this was something you could have predicted. So I think that’s one of the downsides of this character that can produce brilliant results, is that when things go wrong, and that’s part of his reputation – there are casualties.

Seasons 1 and 2 of “The Diplomat” are now streaming on Netflix.