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 alarm bells of British corruption, the politician planned “The Diplomat” Season 2 took a sharp 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 she hired Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov to stage an attack that would cause outrage, no harm. As we know, it did not go to plan and resulted in the deaths of 40 Royal Navy personnel.

When Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) – whom Kate is supposed to replace in the wake of a scandal involving Grace’s husband – arrives in Britain to help deal with the escalating mess, Kate learns that it was Grace who planted the idea in Roylin’s head in a plan to help American diplomacy. So Kate was right that the call came from inside the house, but she didn’t realize it was inside her house.

In the season 2 finale, as Kate wraps her head around becoming VP for the first time, Grace’s plans to fall into her role as VP are derailed when Grace is set up for the gig as nuclear czar in her capacity by VP, which puts Kate – and by extension Hal – in a sticky situation with their newfound knowledge. 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 decides instead to deliver the news to the President of the United States himself (played by Michael McKean). The president takes the news badly – he has a heart attack and dies during the call after hearing the news.

In the final moments of Season 2, Grace threatens Kate against revealing her secret as secret security rushes to 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 “The Diplomat” Season 2 finale. And don’t worry, “The Diplomat” has already been renewed for Season 3 by Netflix.

In the finale, we see Kate finally accept and show her will to become VP. Why does she eventually wrap her head around it?

Deborah Cahn: She reaches a point where she feels she has to – she has a responsibility to step into a role that has to be filled by someone other than the person in it. And for Kate, the interesting thing about the relationship with Grace Penn is that she has a terrible impression of her, and then she had a kind of work crush on her, suddenly she’s amazing, she’s been vilified, and then that relationship goes through these wild swings and changes in her opinion of who Grace is and her idea of ​​whether or not she should take Grace’s job or not try to take 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 someone will take it down – a bad person who shouldn’t be in charge, who manipulated things that shouldn’t have been manipulated, who put us in a bad situation, who didn’t make the best choices, is going to take over, and that I think she thinks 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 them and was involved in shady s–t. It is a moral point of view.

Kate says in the finale that Hal wants her to be VP so he can be closer to power. What do you think of that, Rufus?

Rufus Sewell: I believe he will 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 he really wants that for her. He’s very, very genuinely excited because he thinks she’s amazing. He believes that she is very much the best person for it because they have things that they believe are important, not just love of country, but love of the world. They care about Afghanistan, not only for the benefit of the United States, but … they are humanitarians. They have very strong convictions and want to do whatever it takes to effect 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 this, but if events had unfolded in such a way that the best bet was for him to be vice president, then they both would have worked toward that happening. But this is the door that opened.

The finale ends with the President dying after Hal tells him the news. Why would you leave this twist?

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

Why is Hal going over Kate’s head again?

Sewell: He has this panache, what you might call brilliance (or) bravery when he succeeds, because he can see several steps ahead, and he has a kind of bravado that will make him take huge leaps and do something amazing. The downside to that is when it doesn’t work out. This was, seen through the perspective of it succeeding, the right call. What he could not predict is what happened because it was an act of God which made it a terrible, terrible thing to do. But if it had succeeded, which you would have thought, looking at the situation, was the most likely, the reasons he gives are pretty compelling for doing so. You just couldn’t foresee… it’s bad luck. But at the same time, it does not mean that it was something that could have been foreseen. So I think that’s one of the downsides of having this character that can produce brilliant results is that when things go wrong, and that’s part of his reputation – there are casualties.

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