{"id":82344,"date":"2025-10-16T14:43:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T14:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/82344\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T14:43:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T14:43:10","slug":"the-diplomat-recap-kates-good-bye-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/82344\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Diplomat\u2019 Recap: Kate\u2019s Good-bye Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The Diplomat<\/a><\/p>\n

Last Dance at the Country Club<\/p>\n

\n Season 3<\/p>\n

Episode 2\n <\/p>\n

\n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n

4 stars<\/p>\n

****\n <\/p>\n

\n Kate says bye to her friends and colleagues as she prepares to follow Hal to D.C., and one can\u2019t help but wonder why she\u2019s agreeing to any of this.
\n Photo: Clifton Prescod\/Netflix\n <\/p>\n

The most important moment of \u201cLast Dance at the Country Club\u201d is not its final, Casablanca-inflected image but a brief, devastatingly telling exchange between Kate and Stuart. After learning that she has no idea what their budget would be like, or who they\u2019d be reporting to, he turns down her offer to leave Embassy London to join her on her next adventure, as Special Envoy to Europe, saying, \u201cI can be an ambassador, though. It\u2019s what I\u2019ve been working toward for 20 years.\u201d Kate\u2019s quiet, wistful \u201cYeah, me, too\u201d makes me want to cry. It also makes me want to hurl myself into the TV and claw my way into this scene so I can shake Kate by the shoulders (more metaphorically than actually, but also a little bit actually) and say, \u201cThen do it!!!!!\u201d<\/p>\n

I get it: duty to the nation before personal ambition, the muscle memory of actions transformed into habit over the course of a decade-plus relationship. It all has legitimate weight here. But why? Why hasn\u2019t Hal said, \u201cLook, I can tell this is causing you grief, I\u2019m going to turn her down\u201d? He says he doesn\u2019t want it unless she does, too, that he\u2019ll do what she asks, but he must know by now that Kate isn\u2019t going to ask him to turn down the opportunity to serve as vice president. It\u2019s too important a role, at too thorny a time, under too dangerous a president, not to say yes. But it hurts her, and he knows that.<\/p>\n

If he\u2019s not going to pass on becoming VP, Hal should be running around to secure a substantive, significant role for Kate. He practically shouts at Nora, Grace\u2019s former and his soon-to-be chief of staff, that Kate \u201cshould be brokering an 83-point peace plan for Yemen, she should be secretary of State!\u201d Kate points out that whatever he wants out of this job, he will have to negotiate for, and Nora isn\u2019t the person who\u2019ll be making those decisions. He\u2019s going to have to face Billie, Grace, or both, and to his credit, that\u2019s exactly what he does, exploiting Billie\u2019s knowledge about Grace\u2019s role in the Courageous bombing to wrangle a promising title for Kate. Special Envoy to Europe does sound pretty great; \u201ca cover story and a blank check\u201d has tons of potential. But potential is all a blank check is, until it\u2019s got numbers and a signature on it.\u00a0Stuart points this out very gently. No budget in writing is no budget at all, and no clarity around what entity would be providing that budget and oversight is a bit too murky to be worth jumping ship for.<\/p>\n

So they continue the grim work of taking down the office<\/a>, a bunch of chores that evaporate into total unimportance when Eidra arrives to break the news that Margaret Roylin has died by suicide. They\u2019d just offered her asylum in the U.S., and Eidra knows that Trowbridge has to hear about it officially sooner than later, but she hasn\u2019t \u201cquite figured out how to say that a British citizen killed herself in a CIA safe house she wasn\u2019t supposed to be in.\u201d Fair, particularly since how he receives the news, and from whom, is likely to make the difference between Eidra remaining chief of station and \u2026 not. She\u2019s in a real bind here, as nobody is going to blame the Second Lady for such a dramatic and awful failure.<\/p>\n

Kate, being the one to deliver the news to Trowbridge and Dennison, goes about as well as could be expected, which is to say not well at all, a shot Kate delivers with a chaser of her impending departure. Her good-bye to Dennison is very starchy and Austenian, leaving many paragraphs of things unsaid but mutually understood. Like Stuart, he asks if quitting to follow Hal to D.C. is what she wants, and her very simple answer, that it\u2019s what she keeps choosing, is almost as hard a blow as her answer to Stuart was.<\/p>\n

Once again, I\u2019d like to hop into the scene to have a bracing heart-to-heart with Kate Wyler, who, regardless of how real or fictional she is, very much needs friends. Why can\u2019t she stay on as ambassador to the Court of St. James? She and Hal \u2014 as of the day before \u2014 were still planning to divorce. Being an ambassador has some pretty wild ups and downs, but she likes it. Not only does she like it, it\u2019s the fulfillment of a promise she and Hal made to each other way back when they were secretly together in Baghdad in 2010. As we see in flashbacks, he was offered a post in Vienna, and after a big fight about it, they eventually agreed to marry. Following the example of many State Department couples, they followed each other from posting to posting. Three years for him, three years for her, ad blissfully infinitum. Great plan, but the reality has been Kate following Hal, over and over. She\u2019s done fine work, but being an actual ambassador has revealed Kate\u2019s ambition to herself, and Hal becoming Vice President would be a setback for her, both professionally and personally.<\/p>\n

If Kate were to say any of this out loud to Hal, it would help. The guy is stumbling around in the half-dark, but is that reasonable? The stuff making Kate feel awful is not exactly a secret to him, so why does he appear so baffled? And why has Grace Penn asked him to be her vice-president? Hal says it\u2019s because of gender politics, which he hates, but misogyny is real! Kate says it\u2019s because he\u2019s apolitical and looks good in photos; I think he\u2019s more nonpartisan than apolitical, but that\u2019s a quibble. We haven\u2019t heard from Grace herself about this, and I\u2019m beginning to think we won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Stuart, having seen just how torn up Kate is about resigning and leaving London to become the Second Lady, floats the idea of her instead staying in London and adding Second Lady to her list of titles and responsibilities. Bless this voice of reason, but Kate seems to have her mind made up. Until they go to the airport to board Air Force One, that is. Pennsy and Frances have presented Kate with honey from the Winfield bees; her lead protection officer, Byron, says, in his way, that he\u2019ll miss her; Eidra furnishes an Irish good-bye; and Stuart does the most Stuart thing, which is the always-effective, reassuringly tight-squeeze hug she needed. Ultimately, Kate can\u2019t summon the will to get on that plane with Hal, even with the romantic, gauzy memories of them slow-dancing in Baghdad all those years ago. Madame Ambassador with a side of Second Lady Kate Wyler it is, then!<\/p>\n

\u2022 Note to self (and to everyone): Rewatch Casablanca, that\u2019s the stuff!<\/p>\n

\u2022 Will Kate and Hal actually divorce? It would be good for Kate\u2019s character development to have her interactions with him be brought to a minimum, but neither of them can seem to quit the other. She broods over their history together, spurred to those memories by the twist tie that was her first engagement ring. Yeah, she still has it in her wallet! That just doesn\u2019t scream \u201cWe are definitely divorcing!\u201d to me.<\/p>\n

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