‘The Diplomat’ Season 2 Ending Explained by Creator, Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell

Note: The following story contains spoilers from “The Diplomat” Season 2 finale.

Just as Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler was ready to sound the alarms bells for British corruption, the politician plotting in “The Diplomat” Season 2 took a sharp turn.

The Netflix series finds Kate and her team collecting incriminating evidence against British Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) to prove that he was behind the attack on British aircraft carrier, the 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 create outrage, not harm. As we know, it didn’t go to plan and resulted in the death of 40 Royal Navy personnel.

As Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) — whom Kate is supposedly meant to replace in the wake of a scandal involving Grace’s husband — arrives in the U.K. to help manage the escalating mess, Kate learns that it was Grace who planted the idea in Roylin’s head in a scheme to help U.S. diplomacy. So, Kate was right that the call was coming 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, plans for Grace to descend her role as VP get sidetracked when Grace is put up for the gig of being a nuclear czar within her capacity as 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 she did what she did for the greater good. But Kate is now in Grace’s crosshairs, and Grace worries 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 instead decides to deliver the news to the U.S. President himself (played by Michael McKean). The President takes the news poorly — he has a heart attack and dies on the call after hearing the news.

In the final moments of Season 2, Grace is threatening Kate against revealing her secret when secret security rushes to Grace, who has suddenly become President of the United States. Boom. Cut to credits.

TheWrap spoke to showrunner Debora Cahn and stars Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell about the shocking “The Diplomat” Season 2 ending. And fret not, “The Diplomat” has already been renewed for Season 3 by Netflix.

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

Debora Cahn: She reaches a point where she feels like she has to — she has a responsibility to step into a role that needs to be filled by somebody other than the person in it. And for Kate, what’s interesting about the relationship with Grace Penn is she has a terrible impression of her, and then she sort of got a work crush on her, suddenly she’s fantastic, she’s been maligned, and then that relationship goes through these wild swings and changes in her opinion of who Grace is, and her idea about whether or not she should be taking Grace’s job, or trying to be taking Grace’s job, changes as her opinion of Grace changes.

Keri Russell: [It’s] circumstantial. I think her love and her loyalty is for the country — she believes in it. She really does. And someone is going to take that 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 I think she thinks that’s wrong. Even though it’s a job she does not want, she thinks she’d be better than this person who has this stain on her and who was involved in shady s–t. It’s a moral standpoint.

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

Rufus Sewell: I think he wants to affect change. He wants her to be in power. He wants to be in the best position to do the things that he wants to do. But he really wants that for her. He’s very, very genuinely excited because he thinks she’s fantastic. He thinks she’s really very much the best person for it because they have things that they believe are important, not just love of country, but for the world. They care about Afghanistan, not just for America’s benefit, but … they’re humanitarians. They have very strong beliefs, and they want to do whatever is necessary to affect the changes in the world that they’ve always believed in. He feels very strongly that she should be doing this. He has his personal ambitions, but it’s not some secret Machiavellian thing for his own game. I keep on returning to this, but if events had unfolded in such a way as the best play was for him to be vice president, then they would have both worked towards that happening. But this is the door that opened.

The finale leaves off with the President dying after Hal told him the news. Why did you want to leave off on this twist?

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

Why does Hal go over Kate’s head again?

Sewell: He has this panache, what might be called brilliance [or] bravery when it works out, because he can see several steps ahead, and he has a kind of bravado that will make him make enormous leaps and pull off something astonishing. The downside of that is when it doesn’t work out. This, seen through the perspective of it working out, was the right call. What he couldn’t predict is what happened, because that was an act of God, which made that a terrible, terrible thing to do. But if it had worked out, which you’d have thought, looking at the situation was the most likely, the reasons he gives are quite convincing for doing it. You just couldn’t foresee … it’s bad luck. But at the same time, it doesn’t mean that that was something that you could have predicted. So I think that’s one of the downsides of having this character that can produce brilliant results, is that when it goes wrong, and this is part of his reputation — there are casualties.

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

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