Sigh.

We’re back here again, ladies and gents. This is why we can’t have nice things, dammit.

Alright, so, the story with The Diplomat is a funny one for me. I had no intention of ever watching this show until one day in 2023, I was on the phone with my dad and he suggested the show. I asked him why, as I generally don’t go for political dramas or thrillers, but he assured me I’d get it once I watched the pilot. So I tried the pilot. I then gave my father another phone call afterward.

Me: …did you tell me to watch this show because I AM Kate Wyler?

Dad: That is EXACTLY why.

Me: How dare you.

Now then, we’re going to talk about The Diplomat in excruciating detail because I cannot shut up to save my life (“AND YOU KNOW THIS, MANNNNNNNN!”) and so if you’re not caught up through the end of season three of The Diplomat, please bookmark this post and pop back in when you’re up to date. Spoiler Warning: I will be spoiling nearly the entire show to talk about what I felt went horribly wrong in season three.

So the story of me watching The Diplomat is mostly that I found my tribe with Kate Wyler, who before season three was a sleep deprived trainwreck tomboy and that’s still 100% me (even though now I like to wear dresses, funnily enough), so I gobbled up season one in a binge-watch and did the very same for season two, enjoying both seasons immensely. Of the two, I’d lean slightly towards season one, but only for the epic confrontation scene (and yes, I know, if the genders were reversed, it wouldn’t be funny, but as it stands, it’s HILARIOUS and I regret nothing). I truly had fun with the show, so I was very excited about season three once announced. The show itself is not one of the super trending shows, so I actually had to go look up the premiere date for season three myself and then discovered the trailer was online with a mid-October premiere date, so I gave it a watch.

And I immediately got worried.

The trailer was skewed towards the toxic romance between Kate and Hal, hinted at Kate’s relationship with Austin, and then introduced some random dark-haired guy as a potential love interest. It immediately put me on edge as this show’s never used the toxic romance bit to carry it; the romance has always been a catalyst. I quelled my fears and decided to wait in spite of my unease and see where the actual season went, as trailers often are misleading.

The season came out. I was in Atlanta hanging out for Multiverse Con, so I split the eight episodes into three days of viewing after the con when I got back home.

I am very, very worried about this series now.

Let’s get into why.

Alright, recap time: The Diplomat stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell as Kate and Hal Wyler, a married couple of diplomats and ambassadors to Britain. Long story short is that their marriage is a sham and only being kept up for appearances as both of them are toxic and argue constantly, then make up constantly over how to handle her job. Kate then finds out the Vice President of the US is going to be replaced and they have been eyeing her for the role. She doesn’t want it, but shenanigans happen and eventually, she realizes there may be some merit in accepting the role and so the show is about them not only keeping Britain from going to war thanks to their irresponsible, childish prime minister Trowbridge, but also her slowly realizing the path to the White House might be right for her after all. The conflict comes from keeping Trowbridge under control and the fact that Hal loves to go behind her back to manipulate things in his favor to give him more power.

In season three, Hal told President Rayburn that the VP Grace Penn was the one who suggested the mistakenly fatal attack on the HMS Courageous. Originally, it was a tactic that should have resulted in no deaths, but errors caused it to kill 41 sailors and sink the ship. The shock of the news plus Rayburn’s age and poor health result in him actually having a heart attack and dying upon being told his own VP was partially responsible for the deaths of 41 British sailors. The country is thrown into crisis mode as they speedily ready Grace Penn to be sworn in as President, and to the Wyler’s shock, she actually chooses Hal to be her VP, not Kate. Hal and Kate have an intense argument, but she tells him to accept the role, and he does, but she is now second lady and the ambassador to Britain, and so the strain of doing both roles then completely deep-sixes their marriage all over again. Kate becomes resentful of Hal leaving her out of conversations she feels she should be involved in; Hal resents Kate for moving on with a new boyfriend even though they are supposed to pretend to be happily married in public. Then, a discovery is made that there is a derelict Russian sub in British waters carrying a very bad nuke called the Poseidon. If they don’t remove it quickly, a bad foreign power will get their hands on it, so everyone has to now convince the very angry Trowbridge to address the nuke sub issue without causing an international incident between the US, the UK, China, and Russia.

On paper, that doesn’t sound like a bad season, right?

Well, here’s where things went wrong for me.

1. The Kate/Hal ship went from toxic, but compelling to outright abusive and unlikable. I have to admit I’m not surprised this was the first bubble to burst in season three. I’m sad it did, but I’m not surprised. They walked a razor thin line between being toxic but fun, and sadly, the writing has now pushed both Hal and Kate into full on emotionally abusive sociopaths. The reason that the Kate/Hal machine worked in previous seasons is that as angry as they get, they also recognize that they find comfort and solace in each other because they’re both fucked up. Both of them are vicious in their pursuit of protecting their station and protecting the country. The balance struck in the previous seasons showed you all the good and all the bad, meeting in the middle at a dead stop. Neither one of them could get out of their own way to be together in a healthy way, so they just constantly were in a Will They/Won’t They holding pattern, throwing in Austin as Kate contemplated picking a much healthier romance over Hal. Sadly, this season, they lost the thread completely. Hal is a jealous boorish pig who won’t stop sniping at Kate and behaving like an angry teenager whether he’s with her or without her. Before, we knew he got frustrated with her, but now it’s just an entire season of passive aggressive sniping comments and snide remarks. It’s the opposite of what made us all love to hate Hal in the first place. Rufus Sewell was chosen for this role because it perfectly suits his acting ability. He almost always plays a bad guy because he just has a bad guy villain face and voice, but here, Hal is a complicated creature. Hal is extremely smart and extremely creative, but he’s also an egomaniac that wants monuments built in his honor because he just fancies his own intelligence that much. He is effective, but he’s also stubborn and is incapable of holding his tongue in any high stress situation, so he’s also a liability. Before, Hal was a dangerous but necessary aspect of the show. In season three, he’s intensely unlikable for his childish taunts and refusal to cooperate simply because he’s jealous of Kate’s position and Kate’s new boyfriend. Kate, conversely, has similar issues, but this season also ruined her. Before, Kate was a mess, but not a disaster. She’s also stubborn and self-righteous, but for the most part, her heart is always in the right place and she is trying to avert a crisis. In season three, Kate is characterized in a way that I’m not entirely sure was intentional. She is indecisive the entire season through in her personal life, somehow ping-ponging between Hal, Austin, and a third love interest randomly introduced a few episodes into the season who’s just there to scratch her itch. Now, do I know it’s very human, if messy, to sleep with people you work with? Yes. I promise I’m not slut shaming Kate Wyler. What I am saying is she’s written so poorly this season that I feel the urge to slut shame her, and I shouldn’t because slut shaming is wrong. There is no excuse for her behavior, in my opinion, and I only mean from the standpoint of the fact that she KNOWS she is to pretend to be happily married to Hal and arrogantly assuming she can sneak and fuck Callum Ellis the entire time with no one figuring it out is absurd. Hal notices it the very first time he even sees the guy, so why would she assume no one in the entire organization would put two and two together? It’s simply a bad idea to jeopardize her career and Hal’s career for sex. It’s just sex, lady. You’ve had it before. Maybe just suck it up for a while and wait until things cool off, then try to get laid? It just comes across as shallow and stupid of her when it’s so easy for her to get caught and ruin both their careers. It also makes them both look like terrible people abusing each other back and forth all season long with no repercussions other than their own unhappiness. It makes you not want to spend time around these people, and I’ll use an example to help you get why it bugged me so much. Billions is fantastic show my dad also introduced me to, and it’s against my nature to watch that one as well for its subject matter, but it had one key factor that made me not finish the show. Billions is an excellent show. But Billions is a show in which literally every single character is an immoral piece of shit. Are they all well written and interesting? My God, yes! They are FASCINATING people, but every single one of them’s an asshole, so what happened is I simply got tired of spending time with so many shitty but interesting people. I just stopped watching after I realized no one was ever going to be someone I could root for, and that’s okay. It simply wasn’t for me. The difference is that Billions was always about immoral but interesting people; The Diplomat was not. Kate and Hal started this show as likable leads, and season three took that out back and shot it in the head twice. I am sad to say I think The Diplomat moved Kate and Hal into unlikable territory in the same vein as Billions, and I think that decision is a mistake.
2. The Kate/Callum subplot was terribly underwritten and unnecessary. Kate has more than enough material if the writers room wanted to make the romance the focus, and Callum’s late, under-written inclusion massively hurt this season for me. I actually had a comedy of errors the first time I even saw the guy. I had accidentally walked into another room when the series put up the graphic for the (very stupidly handled) five month time skip. So I watched the next scene utterly confused, rewound, and then realized I’d walked away from the screen when it told us it was five months later and now Kate is banging this chump. Is Callum an annoyance as a character? No. He’s too bland for me to hate him. I simply dislike him because who does a time skip on a romantic fucking relationship and then expects me give a single shit about the new guy nor his relationship to Kate? Why would we care? We don’t know this guy from a hole in the ground and he’s just every charming British bloke. The reason Callum falls so flat is that Austin is a much better choice even though it would land them both in hot water if anyone found them out. Callum comes across as totally unnecessary when Kate’s sexual tension with Austin had been building in a nice and believable way, so throwing another bland dude in the middle and then deep-sixing the relationship abruptly with no explanation and a rushed marriage comes across as terrible writing. There is no reason Kate needs another man in her life. Especially since she confusingly says she wants another chance, then she runs to Hal in the finale and claims she wants to go back to him. But that segways into my next point.
3. Characters do contradictory things in the narrative in a way that doesn’t feel organic nor intentional. There are two big decisions this season that, to me, make no sense whatsoever: Austin getting married to a girl he met and dated for five months and Kate going back to Hal in the finale. Austin’s entire arc is confusing to me because it feels like the writers cannot decide what his use is in the show after the first season. He seems to be a foil to Hal at first, showing decorum and restraint with Kate and she’s never had that before. At first, I thought they were doing a non-stupid version of what the Twilight series attempted with Jacob and Edward (and yes, I hate myself for even knowing this subplot at all.) In New Moon, Bella claims that the decision wasn’t Jacob vs. Edward; it was who she should be versus who she actually is as a person (which is nothing; Bella is the worst protagonist in book history and I will not ever retract that statement COME AT ME SCRUBLORDS I AM RIPPED) and I thought maybe the show was slowly putting that together for Kate. To me, Austin is who Kate would choose if she was ready to leave behind the toxic patterns she learned with Hal. She would not behave with Austin how she would behave with Hal if they got together, no way, no how. He is a true gentleman and would likely treat her with nothing but the utmost respect. However, that’s not what went on. It looks like Austin unfortunately got used to just interrupt Kate and Hal’s relationship and be a threat without ever being a true threat. Recently, the black fandom’s been calling it the Disposable Black Girlfriend trope, which is where a very nice and interesting black woman is introduced as a love interest to a handsome white male lead, but for almost always shallow or stupid reasons, they break up or never get together at all and he is later put with a canon white woman. It seems even The Diplomat may not have escaped this annoying trope, just gender flipped. I do not understand why they had Kate pursue him in this season when it’s not a viable option for her, and the impulsive makeout they have felt forced. Did I like it? Hell yeah! Get you some, Austin, you’re a cool dude! But it wasn’t right. It felt like it was lip service to just address the romance one last time, then push him off to not be with her because she’s stuck in her toxic ways. I can at least postulate about what went on there, but I cannot at all for Kate running back to Hal and begging him to take her back. I will probably watch this season again with my parents and I still don’t know why the hell Kate said she’d take Hal back; literally, there is a scene earlier in the season where she asks Callum for a second chance. I’m baffled as to why they won’t let Kate outgrown Hal and vice versa, as they both became so abusive this season that I don’t get why they would get back together.
4. Kate acts out-of-character for much of the season, but specifically how she behaves with Eidra. This part I continue to be vexed and confused by. So part of the involvement of Eidra is that the plan to attack the HMS Courageous (the conception was for a harmless attack, but the attack itself would have fixed something for Britain if carried out correctly and it just went wrong) was suggested by Grace Penn to a woman named Margaret Roylin, the direct mentor to Trowbridge. This meant that they had to secure Roylin as a material witness to the massive international crime, so she’s been in Eidra’s secret CIA safe house. After the early events of the 3rd season, they want to move her to the US so she won’t be murdered by her co-conspirators in Britain and Russian, but unfortunately for them, Roylin commits suicide by taking her sciatica medication’s entire bottle in the safe house. This now means a British political figure died in CIA custody off-the-books, and without informing the British intelligence, so Eidra is now up against being fired and criminal charges since Kate is the one that told her to detain Roylin and they were supposed to transfer her on Trowbridge’s orders. Now, Eidra and Kate have always had a strained relationship because Kate does risky shit and refuses to ever change her mind even when she’s wrong, so this didn’t help that relationship one single bit. What feels wrong about it is Kate is weirdly cheerful even though Eidra is visibly afraid for her freedom and career, and so it comes across as callous. Kate should be doing everything she can to help fix what she broke by telling Eidra to detain Roylin, but she instead makes matters worse by acting indifferent and by messing up several things that would have helped Eidra avoid the hammer coming down on her. Now, in the end, she manages to avoid getting fired or thrown in jail, but it is not much thanks to Kate and it truly gave Kate this unflattering white women indifference to an Asian woman’s plight, especially unflattering because all of this is Kate’s fault. Yes, Eidra could have said no, but under those circumstances, a no was going to be an even bigger problem. I just think the show handled the entire subplot poorly and made Kate look like an ingrate.
5. The characters make several Captain Obvious idiot decisions that you know won’t produce the results they want, yet they behave as if they had no other choice or that it was a good idea. As a few of the IMDB reviewers have pointed out, the show would bend the rules for things a diplomat and ambassador can do, but season three broke them. There were several moments that I can tell wouldn’t be tolerated by our government nor the British government, but the most egregious moment for me was the Poseidon incident. It makes no sense that Grace, Hal, Kate, and Billie behaved like Trowbridge has been anything except a whiny, immature, sexist bully and a coward. The second he threw Rayburn under the bus and protected himself and Roylin, you knew that any plan with that sub wasn’t going to earn his cooperation. The idea to sink it should have been the first thing out of their stupid mouths instead of sneaking a drone down to take pictures. Trowbridge had already been enraged at Roylin’s suicide and the (fake) news that Rayburn suggested the Courageous attack, so why in the living hell did they all act like he would listen when they told him about Poseidon? Plus, as the reviewers pointed out, I very much don’t think Trowbridge could have acted without Parliament or other procedures, even though I am an American and I don’t know how their system works. All I know is it didn’t sound believable in a show where it mostly tries to sound logical. I also agree with the people that said blaming Rayburn was a scumbag move and it made you dislike Kate, Hal, and everyone that went along with it. I have no love for Rayburn, but I also thought it was a slimy way out for them all. This show has routinely proven that it can write smart characters, yet this season felt like everyone got slapped with a dunce cap and told to be stupider, maybe to appeal to some kind of broader audience? I’m not sure. All I know is that shit with Trowbridge was dumb as hell, yet the series acted as if it was the right choice or the only choice. I also don’t understand why the fuck Hal and Grace would steal Poseidon. There is no benefit at all, unless they got intelligence someone tried to steal it first and they just stopped that theft. There is no reason for them to have stolen it from Trowbridge other than cheap, easy drama next season, so that too is another sign that this series is on the slippery slope.

I truly don’t think this show is at a point where it can’t be saved, but this season struck such a hard blow against it that I’m reeling a bit. It’s just such a vast difference in quality in the writing that I have to wonder if three things happened, and I’ll hopefully find out someday now that the season is out: (1) Netflix told them they got the season four greenlight, but they have to start trending, not just getting great reviews, and so they told them to insert way, way more romance and sex to attract female viewers ala Scandal or a Shonda Rhimes/Ava Duvernay series (2) Netflix told them that they want the show more like Billions, where the cast of characters are terrible, flawed, but interesting people, instead of sticking with the flawed but likable cast we currently have written (3) The show ran out of ideas of what to do next due to the excellent writing for their first two seasons, so they tried focusing on the romance instead of the clever plot and added more sex to try and distract from the fact that they ran out of ideas for season three. Since it’s so early, I’m sure there isn’t much out about the third season’s production, but I will be listening out to hear if one of those three theories is why season three is so damn wonky.

I’m also not alone in my griping for once. I popped open the IMDB page after the season three premiere and several of the user reviews have said the exact same things that I did (albeit it with brevity). What’s scary is how many of the recent reviews not only say that the first two seasons are great and this one sucks, so many of them use the exact phrase “soap opera” that I can tell I’m not the only one that thinks season three is a massive step down and setback from seasons one and two. Truly, if you don’t believe me, go have a look.

I really want this show to get out of its death spiral. I do. I hope that the critical reviews are read and reviewed by the creator and the writing team and they realize this is a simple misstep and they course correct. After all, we just saw the first Castlevania Netflix series do the same (great first two seasons, terrible third season, but much improved fourth season closing it out, though it didn’t do everything we wanted like make TrephaGretacard a canon poly ship, but I digress.) I don’t feel like this season made everyone irredeemable, but if I were the writers, I’d set up the first half of season four to fix everything I just said. Fix Hal and Kate so that they are no longer unlikable sociopaths. Fix Austin so he’s not just being used and discarded to interrupt your main ship. Toss Callum out the window or actually bother to write him into the narrative so he matters and we care about him, whether that’s love or hate. Get everyone’s actions back to being consistent. Stop making lazy decisions for easy manufactured tension. Make sure Kate has an actual arc, not just bouncing around on dicks making really poor decisions (and again, not slut shaming; saying please write the sex and romance parts better).

You can do this, Diplomat. I believe in you. So please believe in me, in your audience, and clean this shit the fuck up next season, or I won’t be back, and I might not be the only one walking out on you.

I guess we’ll see where we go from here. Let’s hope it’s up, not down.