close
close

All about this big twist

play

Spoiler alert! Below are details about The Diplomat season 2 finale.

The Wylers are really unlucky when it comes to breaking big news to world leaders.

The couple at the center of Netflix political drama The Diplomat have a bad habit of having intimate meetings with important people who then drop dead mid-conversation. And judging by whichever leader didn't make it to the show's second season finale, things are only going to get wilder from here.

New episodes of “Diplomat,” which aired Thursday, follow U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) and her husband, former State Department official Hal (Rufus Sewell), as they attempt to… Preventing the end of the world fire following an attack on a British aircraft carrier. And at the end of the second season, US Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) is there to help or perhaps hinder Kate.

Here's what happened in the explosive finale and what it could mean for the series' third season (which is currently filming).

What happened in the Season 2 finale of The Diplomat?

Kate, Hal and CIA station chief Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) discover mid-season that the attack on the British ship HMS Courageous was a false flag operation carried out by posh Conservative party broker Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie). Roylin won't reveal the biggest names of her co-conspirators to anyone except Hal since he's not an official representative of the U.S. government, but Hal tells Kate anyway. The real mastermind? Penn, the vice president.

Amid this chaos, Penn shows up in London and subtly manipulates British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) into keeping the entire treacherous plan secret. She succeeds so well in charming Trowbridge that the Prime Minister appears to convince US President William Rayburn (Michael McKean) to reconsider his plan to fire Grace from the government and replace her with Kate.

But after Trowbridge causes confusion at the fancy dinner attended by Kate, Hal, Grace and other dignitaries, Kate and Hal are forced to reveal to Grace that they know she was behind the attack. The Vice President drags Kate out of dinner and, using an inappropriately hilarious visual aid, explains that the attack was a plan to prevent Scottish independence, which would have meant the loss of a key U.S. nuclear base in the North Atlantic. See, she didn't bomb the British ship because she's a bad person, she did it to save the world from nuclear annihilation by Russia in a future hypothetical war.

Kate has a hard time dealing with this new information and eventually realizes that she and Hal should just follow the rules: Hal should inform the Secretary of State and leave the matter to someone higher up. Except Hal doesn't do what he's told.

No, he goes straight to his good buddy President Rayburn, who finds the news so disturbing that he drops dead on the Zoom call. Hal runs screaming through the halls of the US Embassy in London, trying to reach Kate, who is having a nice (read: super passive-aggressive) conversation with Grace about how Grace is trying to silence Kate and Hal.

The episode ends with Secret Service agents sprinting toward Grace and Kate across the grounds of the ambassador's mansion as Hal screams through the phone into Kate's ear, “Grace Penn is President of the United States!”

What does this mean for The Diplomat season 3?

Now Grace is the president and only Kate, Hal and Margaret Roylin know that the new leader of the free world is also responsible for the deaths of 41 British sailors. So it'll be pretty quiet, right?

Probably not. Kate and Hal have become bitter enemies of the newly most powerful person in the world, but they also have a pretty powerful influence over her. The VP job is now open and Kate had started to actually want it, but there's no way Grace is going to put Kate in that position now. Furthermore, this is not the case The It's largely a political fantasy: there's no way that both the president and vice president could be women, even in this fictional world.

Will Kate remain ambassador? Will Hal get a chance to get back into international relations with an official position? Will Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), the British Foreign Secretary, warm to Kate again? Will Kate and Hal's marriage survive even greater political turmoil?

Well, at least we can predict that Janney will return as President Grace Penn. And more Allison Janney is never a bad thing. Even if she plays a villain.

You may also like...