The diplomat

A stranger calls

Season 2

Episode 1

Editor's Rating

4 stars

****

Photo: Alex Bailey/Netflix

Welcome (back) to The diplomatIn this career, U.S. Foreign Service Officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is constantly forced to add more plates to the pile she already has in circulation as she tries to navigate international incidents and personal crises as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom to cope and Northern Ireland. The first season of the Netflix series was all about getting us mostly on Kate's side while acknowledging that she's an overcompetent hottie for whom work-life balance will never be possible.

In fact, Kate would often prefer to be more married to her job and less to her actual husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell), who is brilliant and sensitive and also a tiring handful. They had figured that Kate's ambassadorship would be a good time for an amicable divorce after years of working in Hal's post, but then they thought Kate would be transferred to Kabul. It was also before Hal pulled off an extremely Hal move by working with White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) and Kate's deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) to promote Kate's ambassadorship as a long-term audition for the mission to utilize role of vice president, a role soon to be vacated by the current vice president. Oh, and this audition was supposed to take place without Kate's knowledge. How could The go wrong?

“A Stranger Calls” picks up right where we left off in the season one finale: Kate and British Foreign Secretary/King of Three-Parters Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) are in Paris, and until recently had been enjoying an enchanting evening at a gala at the Louvre, both of them looked smoking hot and, after a full eight episodes of non-stop flirting, were finally on their way to falling into bed together in the near future. At first they only had one tiny task to worry about: confirming their emerging suspicions that British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is the one who hired Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov for the attack HMS Courageous. No problem!

Unfortunately, the car bomb that explodes in central London right in front of Hal, British MP Merritt Grove (Simon Chandler), and Stuart and his own deputy Ronnie Buckhurst (Jess Chanliau) is now the focus of their considerable energy and information. collection apparatus.

In the background of her desperate efforts to find out who survived and who may have committed the attack, her suspicions about Trowbridge take a backseat. How do you manage a crisis, how do you share information, and how do you maintain a decades-long special relationship with a government leader who may have persuaded a member of his own Cabinet and the U.S. ambassador to help him clean up in France while he There were orders for this? the same at home? If Lenkov dies in custody, everything he knows and can say about who hired him dies with him.

That's a pretty big vat of Marmite to wade through. It is the first crisis since they met that Kate and Dennison cannot work on together, not least because Hal, Stuart and Ronnie survived the first explosion, but they are all very seriously injured and are being treated in a hospital Kate also convinced Eidra Park (Ali Ahn) to restrict access. Kate must be Hal's next of kin as much as she is the US ambassador, and Dennison must proceed very carefully and continue to gather information to support or refute Trowbridge's guilt.

Dennison tells Kate another frightening complication before they return to London: if his government was involved in the bombing, there is no obvious starting point for uncovering the conspiracy. However, when Russian sources made significant donations to the Tory Party, the person who made these arrangements was the late Honorable Merritt Grove. Wouldn't it be interesting and helpful to know whether Trowbridge himself would have been a beneficiary of these donations?

Kinnear continues to play Trowbridge as a loud-mouthed, reactive, Oxbridge-educated walking idiot – witty and fluent in all the right literary and historical allusions, but irritable and just as likely to spiral out of control to offer a worthwhile insight or question – but in his in In the first scene of the new season we meet a new character in his offices at No. 10 Downing Street who has a not insignificant influence on him. She's just as unfazed as he is screaming, sitting quietly in an armchair, only pausing from scrolling on her phone to give clear instructions. Stop screaming, she says. Sit down. And if you are so worried and anxious for everyone to come to you in this crisis, call a COBRA (a situation room meeting of cabinet ministers and emergency services representatives). He is a true professional and can do all three things.

We rarely see Trowbridge willing to follow advice, let alone obey anyone's orders. Who is this wizard of unshakable self-control? Oh, just his wife, Lydia Trowbridge (Pandora Colin). It's easy to miss if you have the sound on the TV turned down, but as the helpers leave the room each of them says, “Thank you, Mrs Trowbridge.” Interesting. We later see her rush to an impromptu meeting in Dennison's office to ask for his help in finding her husband's longtime advisor and mother figure, Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie). She's not at home and doesn't have her phone, and Trowbridge is beside herself.

The vivid portrayal that Lydia provides is also quite revealing: she is slightly older than her husband and was his professor of political history at the university (he had studied the romantic Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and only took the lecture at his mother's insistence part). Margaret took on her role as Trowbridge's advisor because his debates with Lydia had become too loud for her neighbors' taste. Trowbridge is so concerned that he has stationed officers in both of their homes (which Dennison describes with wry indignation as a spectacular misuse of public money). Is this the inappropriate but understandable work of a man concerned about the safety of his brilliant mother figure and advisor? Or does it show his intent to kidnap someone who knows too much and then finish her off in a way that could later plausibly be described as a terrible accident?

The episode's rapid pace is reinforced by regular updates about Hal, Stuart and Ronnie. Hal is the first out of surgery, and when Kate collapses and crawls into his hospital bed to hold him, it's the most tenderness we've ever seen between the two of them. Even if they go through with their divorce plan, it's hard to imagine they won't remain close, which would further complicate the romance Kate could pursue with Dennison. Stuart and Ronnie's more complex surgeries eventually unravel when Stuart wakes up and has to undergo a quick neurological exam. Eidra then fulfills her terrible duty and informs him that Ronnie did not survive her injuries.

The shock waves that went through the embassy staff after Ronnie's death were devastating. Stuart's utter confusion and disbelief as Eidra is forced to repeatedly explain to him what happened; Alysse (Pearl Mackie) cries almost silently and devastated as she sits by Ronnie's body; Kate's dark, unexpectedly friendly conversation with Ganon as they prepare to inform Ronnie's parents – these quiet moments are three of the episode's most powerful moments, adding further texture to every character and performance.

The final moment of the episode is a good old-fashioned cliffhanger that does double duty by highlighting just how purposeful the film is The diplomat is intended for binge-watching. A nurse on Hal's ward takes a call for Kate from one of her friends, one Anne Legendre Armstrong, but when Eidra's colleague Howard transfers the call to Alysse, she tells him that there is no way anyone with that name is on the line, other than Anne Legendre Armstrong was the only former US ambassador to the UK and died in 2008. Let's make sure this alleged Armstrong stays in limbo for a while longer. “Oh, sure,” says the chubby voice on the other end, “that’s no problem at all.” Those cut glass tones? They belong to Margaret Roylin. We are so back.

• It's not hard to imagine The diplomat exist in the same world as Slow horsestells compulsively watchable, high-stakes stories, but through a more serious and far less alcohol-soaked lens. I'd actually pay a lot of money to see a crossover episode where Eidra drinks with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) to complain about how tiring her charges are.

• Fun fact! The Trowbridges also exist in real life – Pandora Colin and Rory Kinnear are married and have two children together. And whatever Boris Johnson-inflected elements you might detect in Kinnear's performance as Nicol Trowbridge, none of them pay homage quite like this devastating, mournful piece The Guardian illustrated.

• If you're fascinated by fictional high-level government crisis management meetings, PBS has the show for you! It says COBRA; Each of the three six-episode seasons focuses on environmental disasters and/or utility hacking, and stars Robert Carlyle as a perpetually beleaguered Tory prime minister who swims with sharks (metaphorically; his cabinet ministers are an opportunistic, moustache-twirling bunch, but not). (literal terrors of the sea) in increasingly absurd ways.

• Wearing a flowing red silk dress, Kate borrows a suit from a male employee at the British Embassy so she doesn't have to deal with an international and personal crisis. This reminds me of the moment in the season two premiere The West Wing where the first thing Nancy McNally asks upon entering the Situation Room is, “Mike, could someone send you some clothes from my office?” I look like an idiot.” (She wore a pretty champagne-colored ensemble and a tasteful single pearl necklace, but To be fair, this look doesn't exactly scream “national security adviser advising the nation on security issues.”)