Diplomat creator Debora Cahn Talks Season 2

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains important plot details from Season 2 of Netflix The Diplomat.

Foreign tensions escalate even more in season 2 of The Diplomat while Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) continues to investigate the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

The breakneck six-episode season picks up right where things left off in Season 1, plunging viewers into the panic that erupted after a car bomb exploded in the heart of London, killing MP Merritt Grove and leaving Kate’s husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) as well as her deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) seriously injured.

Kate and British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) had begun to suspect that Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) was behind both attacks, the first in an attempt to silence the Scottish independence movement and the second to silence Grove. But as they dig deeper, it turns out to be much more complicated than they could have ever imagined.

It turns out that Trowbridge’s former consultant Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie) was behind the directive for both bombings … at the behest of US Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney). Trowbridge didn’t know, and neither did the President of the United States. Talk about a plot twist!

To make matters worse, the season ends on a massive cliffhanger after Hal takes it upon himself to inform the President of VP Penn’s discretion. The shock is so great that it kills him, leaving Penn as the new commander.

Lucky for audiences, the series has already been renewed for Season 3.

Creator Debora Cahn broke down the season with Deadline in the interview below. She also discussed Season 2 more broadly in a previous Q&A with Deadline, which also features a conversation between the stars of the Netflix series and Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason that took place ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April.

DEADLINE: You picked up Season 2 right where things left off in Season 1. Is that the plan going forward, for the rest of the series?

DEBORAH CAHN: I like to be open to the idea that at some point we, who knows, jump forward a year or two, but I find that I always want to enter the story just 30 seconds after we left it. I’ve never done that kind of storytelling before, and I think some of it is a desire to be aware that people are watching over a longer period of time. They’re watching two, three episodes at once, and we want to feel like it stays propulsive. It’s like a long story. They are watching a long film. But once you get into the habit of doing it, it’s just fun to write that way.

DEADLINE: This season’s story feels incredibly prescient given that it was written a while ago. Not only do you have a female VP who kind of has to outbid an older president whose abilities are being questioned, then you end up on this massive cliffhanger with her becoming president. Now how does it feel to release this less than a week before the presidential election?

Cahn: It’s a little bit scary because we didn’t want to do a “rip from the headlines”. The idea is always to find a way into the headspace of the country and the audience, and what we are all thinking about right now, especially the world of foreign policy. What are our ideas that we struggle with as a country that we can then have these characters struggle with? But we don’t want it to actually be the same story from minute to minute. I guess we skated a little bit close to the wind—I guess I’m mixing my metaphors there—and ended up getting a lot closer to what happened. We had already filmed it in our world. It was already done right down to there being a moment where Kate comes down in a light blue suit and Kamala Harris wore the identical suit in this big event. Looks like we’re stealing from the headlines, but…

DEADLINE: So next week, if we elect our first female president, how will you reflect on this season?

Cahn: In some ways it was really exciting. I write wish fulfillment and it’s nice that the wish might come true in real life too. She’s a great character and she’s such a great actor that we want to create a situation that’s as rich and gory as possible for that character. But yes, it’s scary to talk about something that unfolds. We don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner that makes us look stale and sad.

DEADLINE: I think this season raises a lot of questions about how we view the skills of our leaders, especially women. When we know Grace Penn directed Roylin, we think she’s unfit, but then she explains herself and the situation becomes far more complicated. Is she right? Does it even matter if we completely agree with her? How did you reflect on all that while writing it?

Cahn: The idea from the start was to create a situation where something bad happens and we know who did it, our enemy did it, and we accuse that enemy and then it becomes clear that they weren’t actually involved. And then we know that, ‘Oh, that’s the other enemy.’ And then we learn that it’s not really right either. Then we learn it was our friend, and then we learn it was us. So ultimately what I’m looking to do is take a situation that feels like a global conflict and a horrible crime and a tragedy and see how something like that plays out. To me, it’s much more interesting and challenging to see how good people who I think are really smart can end up making a decision that has terrible, terrible consequences.

I think a lot of times we beat ourselves up when we look at something that’s happened in the world and we say, ‘Well, it’s because the bad people did it.’ The bad people in our country, or the bad people in another country. It’s not a coincidence that it’s Allison. She is so lovable and admirable. So to take a character like that and allow her to lead us through every step of this decision that we find deplorable and that we call evil, and then come to a place of, ‘Wow, this is really complicated, and it’s really hard to get it right…’ There wasn’t a good option on the table. The situation is bad, the decision maker is not.

DEADLINE: So what does this mean for Kate’s VP ambitions? Are they dead in the water?

Cahn: Welcome to Season 3.

DEADLINE: I found it so interesting that Kate is confronted with the idea that her attraction to Hal is linked to his tendency to make spontaneous, often irresponsible decisions. How will it affect them?

Cahn: We are attracted to charismatic people. We are drawn to thinking outside the box. We are drawn to ‘big, magical moments and grand gestures. So the question is, what are the consequences of them? The consequences are often catastrophic. So when you’ve experienced both sides of that roller coaster ride, do you walk away and say, ‘I’m not looking for that anymore’? Or do you do what I think a lot of people do, and I certainly did for a lot of my life, which is, ‘Well, now I’m looking for that—the high, the high, the great moments, without the downside, and I’m sure it exists’? Unfortunately, it does not in my research. So Kate kind of struggles with that herself and reaches the point where she realizes that the magical side of Hal and the disaster side of Hal are the same, and that if you get one, you have to have the other. It’s something she tries to learn, and she learns rationally, but emotionally she never does.

DEADLINE: So is his guilt in the president’s death and Grace Penn’s ascension her last straw?

Cahn: These are season 3 spoilers! Can the union survive under these circumstances? I don’t know.

DEADLINE: I also want to talk about Dennison. He’s sort of forced out of the dry morality he’s operating under in Season 1 as this situation becomes more complicated. How will he navigate these new developments?

Cahn: I think Dennison still manages to live in a bipolar universe of right and wrong, in a way that I think Kate wishes Hal would and she wishes she herself would. The solutions he comes up with to problems are quite dramatic. He’s willing to be loyal up to a point, and when he’s not loyal, he is really not loyal. I think it’s hard for him to even work in half measures. I think he has to either take a stand and defend a position or give it up and take another stand and defend that position, which in many ways makes him admirable, and in many ways makes him a less than strong player at this record player. as he wants to be.

DEADLINE: Is there a way forward for his and Kate’s alliance? By the end of the season, he really doesn’t trust her anymore.

Cahn: The Kate-Dennison relationship plays many roles narratively…they are two diplomats. They come from different places. They deal with different agendas they get from the government back home, but they are like-minded individuals. They see the world much the same way. They have similar goals. They like each other, they get along, they get things done. The idealism of the show is that if you can make those kinds of relationships around the world, in clutch moments, it can really help. It can really stop things from going off the rails. So the hope is that the experiences they’ve had together don’t ruin it.

It’s a kind of fragile and wonderful and powerful thing. I think that’s something people go through a lot who are in this kind of work. We can share thoughts with our friends, but at the end of the day, if we represent a country, the country will make a decision and we will carry it out. So how do you come back from it? How do you trust people when it’s done? I don’t know. I don’t know if you can rebuild from something like that, but that’s certainly the question that diplomats face time and time again.