Review: "The Diplomat" Season 4 Can't Undo Bad Decisions One After Another
The final season of Deborah Cahn's high-stakes political drama, from a desperately clumsy opening twist to a Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) who has become maddeningly compliant, inadvertently diminishes her own power by chasing more of it.
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"We do really high highs and really low lows," Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) tells her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) in another State of the Relationship chat. He tries to say that he knows their marriage, which has been on the rocks since the Netflix series aired, will never be easy. He is the Vice President of the United States. He is the US ambassador to the UK. Their nightly conversations aren't about who's picking up the kids from school or what movie to rent before bed. They're about who will stop the president (Allison Janney) from inciting World War III and which (very hot) international envoy he should trust with his life. RELATED STORIES 'La Bola Negra': Netflix's gay epic must survive director split before Oscar frontrunner How 'The Diplomat' ends shocking fourth-season debut: 'We talked about how quiet [spoiler] is'
"The fights will be intense," he says.
Kate wants it all, and so do we. That spice is what makes The Diplomat hum, and the first three seasons might as well have been filmed on Arrakis, given the copious amounts of quicksand. (Plus, all those interior scenes could have been shot anywhere, including another planet.) But back to Kate: she wants Hal so much that she's willing to humble herself before him—pursue him, prove his loyalty, rather than bulldoze her needs away to carry out her plan.
On the one hand, this plot makes sense: Kate betrayed Hal and broke his heart. Now he wants to fix it. But however healthy this may be for their marriage, it is a disaster for the "diplomat".
Deborah Kahn's political drama about political relationships — and the politics of relationships — thrives on the layered and overlapping tensions between Kate's love for her job and her love for her husband. Each has a high risk. Each hangs by a thread. And each wants Kate to risk everything—to save her marriage and to save the world.
So when he suddenly refuses out of respect for his wife's position, the series loses its main source of suspense. Seeing the Wailers work as a team might be a good idea, but it saps the drama and puts all the weight on political maneuvers that are simultaneously too close to reality to provide effective escapism and too far from reality to provide pleasant insight. And seeing them square off against another power couple—even one starring Bradley Whitford and recent Emmy winner Allison Janney—isn't cool. It's easy and one-sided, whereas Kate and Hal's old bros were the emotionally and politically Byzantine part of it that simply came off.
Speaking of easy, Season 4 opens with a hackneyed "maze" that speaks to the boilerplate the series seems to be running on (mild spoilers for Episode 1 ahead): President Grace Penn is shot! The fallout from his sneaky theft of a Russian super-nuke (at the end of Season 3) is cut short as surgeons remove a bullet from Grace's gut — not that we see surgery or even much shooting. It's crucial to Kahn's storied drama, and while the gunshot itself is well staged by director Alex Graves, what's technically a momentous moment (in The Diplomat's diegetic history, as well as the season as a whole) soon seems like little more than a marker in time when the already belligerent president notices his double ammo.
The sea change widens the gap between the diplomat and his government (Keith always thought President Penn was dangerous, if not unfit for the post), leading to a lot of back-and-forth about how to deal with a hostile and irrational Commander-in-Chief — and, gee, what's that going to look like? The Diplomat has always existed in its fictional political bubble, which works well enough when its global crises are held on the same theatrical level as its romantic melodrama. But in Season 4, the balance isn't tipped, and the fictional president's parallels with our real-life war-traitor POTUS make the president's plight that much more trivial.
To be honest, I'd like to live in a world where the problems President Penn has created rather than the problems President Trump has created. I'd be just as happy not to think about President Trump at all while watching what has always been, even at best, a cheesy, silly Netflix drama. But without the usual marriage drama, the political drama comes close to a polite simulation of what really goes on in Washington, which destroys any hope of suspension of disbelief.
Kahn et al try to replace the tension lost in Kate and Hal's recommitment. President Penn and his husband Todd (Whitford) occasionally fall to the ground, as an already shameless husband must sit and watch his wife descend into bitter militancy. On the other end of the spectrum are Stewart (Ato Asandouhe) and Aidra (Ali Ahn), a young couple who are getting closer and closer to a long-term commitment. Their romantic gestures are sweet, just as their tender failures are poignant, but the relationship triad — the young, slightly naïve couple, the middle-aged couple in midlife crisis, and the older, over-the-top couple — isn't deep enough to replace Kate and Hal's troubled relationship. (They were right!)
Our star couple still bicker (and Russell, Sewell, and especially Whitford give strong performances during the bickering), but after falling from the "top" of a passionate marriage to an informal separation and assumed divorce in previous seasons, the Wailers' new union (formalized during an impromptu vow renewal in episode 1) is more than stable. He's too much of an open book (remember when Hal was a wild card? That was fun!), and he's too much of an admirable sidekick (writes his own lines, delivers his own messages, secretly holds cue cards during Zoom calls - woof). Keith Jesus is nobody, and watching him pretend he can be for the better part of a season is unconvincing. And it just feels wrong.
The main strength of "The Diplomat" was in its central relationship. Season 4 cuts this power down to three couples, one of whom holds the highest position in America. But a lofty title is no substitute for valuable work, just as an honorable union founded on lies is no better than an honest partnership conditioned by an unbreakable covenant:
Season 4 of "The Diplomat" premieres Thursday, October 15 on Netflix. All eight episodes will be released simultaneously.