‘The Diplomat’ Boss Breaks Down the Finale Fallout & What’s Next

The final moments of The Diplomat Season 4 provide such a satisfying payoff for the buildup of not only the season’s eight episodes, but the series at large, that you might think this ending was planned from the very beginning. It wasn’t.

Series creator and writer Debora Cahn, who got her start on The West Wing with Diplomat stars Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, discovers what happens next in the writing process between seasons of the Netflix political drama. The fact that the Season 4 ending feels like it’s always been coming is a testament to the strength of her writing. (It’s no wonder our senior critic gave it a five-star review.) The new season came out in full on Netflix on October 15. Below, Cahn explains the finale and other key moments of Season 4 to TV Insider. Warning: The Diplomat spoilers ahead.

In The Diplomat Season 4, Kate (Keri Russell) and Hal Wyler’s (Rufus Sewell) marriage is crumbling under the weight of their respective roles as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom and vice president of the United States. Their tension with President Grace Penn (Janney) and first gentleman Todd Penn (Whitford) threatens to unravel things even more, both on the personal and geopolitical fronts. After a failed assassination attempt on Grace, the president becomes more hawkish than ever before, opting for threats of shows of force against NATO allies that she calls tough but effective moves. The delicate peace that Kate brokered between the U.S. and the U.K. falls apart at the seams and forces Kate to make a decision between loyalty to her country and loyalty to what’s right.

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At first, Kate toes the party line for Grace, in part because she feels she has to in order to protect Hal’s position; he pressures her not to make him lose his seat at the table, and even threatens to leave her for telling a strategic lie to Grace that jeopardizes his career — behavior Kate has forgiven Hal for time and again in previous seasons. When Grace recalls Kate’s deputy chief of mission, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), for publicly dissenting from her plan to send warships against the U.K., Kate makes a public protest of global scale. She resigns from her post in front of Grace and the entire G7 Summit. Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) and Secretary of State Miguel Ganon (Miguel Sandoval) follow suit, and in the finale’s final moments, so does Hal. The season ends with Hal about to tell the press what just happened after Kate gave him the floor.

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Here, Cahn breaks down the finale with TV Insider and explains the season’s biggest moments, including the shocking developments with Austin Dennison’s (David Gyasi) death and Nicol Trowbridge’s subsequent (Rory Kinnear) resignation, which Kate effectively blackmailed him into. Plus, how the ending sets up a potential Season 5. (As of the time of publication, The Diplomat has not yet been renewed.)

I understand that you discover the plot between seasons of the show. You haven’t necessarily had the full arc of the show mapped out from the beginning, but this Season 4 finale feels like everything has led to this. How long have you had this idea in your head for what happened at G7 with Kate and the dissenters that followed?

Debora Cahn: Usually, I have an idea for the end of the season. I want to know what we’re driving toward when I start the writer’s room. And in Seasons 1, 2, and 3, I said what I always say, which is like, “This is what we’re driving toward unless we can beat it, and we should try to. If we can find something better than this, we will do it.” And we always do, or the story unfolds in the writing of it, the pacing unfolds in a way that I didn’t expect. Usually we break too much story, and then I don’t want to tell it in a cheesy, “Oh, here’s a truckload of exposition, here’s what’s happening, and this happened off-screen, and that happened off-screen.” So, we end up just not getting through as much material as I think we’re going to so that we can treat it with a sense of reality.

But this one, I knew I wanted them walking at the end. That was very clear and that did not waver. I didn’t know how we were going to get them there, but I knew that that’s what I wanted to see.

Erika Kuenka/Netflix

So, the Season 4 ending was your first idea for the ending?

Yeah, this is what the idea was in the very beginning of the season, and we stuck with it all the way through.

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Did you change the original vision for the ending in any previous seasons?

Season 1, we had a plan for Episode 8 that turned into Season 2. Episode 7 was stretched out because we had bitten off so much more plot than we could handle. Episode 7 turned into 7 and 8, and then the stuff we were going to do in Episode 8 became the storyline for all of Season 2.

Do you mean that you had planned for one season as a limited series before, or this just helped you find your Season 2 plot early?

It helped us find it early. I mean, you never know [if a show will get renewed].

You never know.

I think I believed that seeing the consequences of, gosh, I guess it was the car bomb, felt like a really dramatic way to end the season, but it turned out waiting for that was even better.

Clifton Prescod/Netflix

Was Austin Dennison’s death always part of your vision for the show? Did you imagine that would happen to him before Season 4? What was the reason for writing this character out?

No, it was not a happy revelation. When we filmed in the U.K., the first two seasons were filmed almost exclusively in the U.K., there were five different prime ministers in the time that we were there. The idea that the government doesn’t change, and Kate has gotten to know them and establish relationships with them such that she has access, she understands what she’s dealing with, it just felt dishonest.

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The fundamental nature of what it means to be in that kind of job, you get a new post every three years, you’re in a different country, and you’re starting from scratch, or you’re there for 10 minutes and the government changes and there’s a whole new cast of characters, and you have no idea what you’re dealing with, and you have no relationships and no way to interpret what the subtext is in any conversation. It just felt like we had to put her through that.

And I also wanted to see her deal with this situation where I think a lot of stuff got blamed on Trowbridge. Trowbridge is such a wild card, he’s so reckless, and his judgment is so bad. Bad things could be blamed on Trowbridge. And I wanted to see what happened when Kate Wyler gets exactly the partner she wants. Her intellectual, equal, shared set of values, they even look a little bit alike.

She gets the dream prime minister on the other side of the table finally, and then it turns out that from that person’s perspective, we are the problem, we are the agents of chaos. And dealing with someone you respect objecting to your behavior is much, much different than having somebody you don’t respect, like Trowbridge not liking your behavior.

Erika Kuenka/Netflix

The ending scene when Kate protests what Grace Penn has done at G7 and walks out, Billie follows, and Ganon follows before Hal, which I thought was really noteworthy. Hal finally comes out, and we don’t actually know what Hal says to the press after that. I don’t think Kate gave the floor to Hal in that moment out of love for him necessarily. I read it as that was the dutiful thing to do; it wasn’t her role. But what does it say about her as a main character by giving Hal that moment at the gate and her stepping back?

Well, the difference between a diplomat who most of the world has no idea who she is. In the fictional world, she’s perhaps known in the U.K., she’s got a kind of a broader reputation now because she’s second lady, but he’s the most powerful character on that chessboard. So, for her to walk out, what we want to see is the difference between how powerful she is, as in some ways, a pawn inside. You can be a pawn inside that room and create an earthquake, but outside, he’s going to be the most powerful voice. And so the statement about what just happened and why out of the mouth of the vice president is just way, way, way stronger.

That’s one answer. The other answer is, why did she do that? [Smiles.]

That’s Season 5’s question to answer, I think.

It’s a pickle, right? It’s a bit of a pickle what you do when they have walked out the door.

Nick Wall/Netflix

I wonder, why is it more dramatically and thematically interesting to you to have a woman American president — and in the show’s world, the first woman American president — committing these wrongdoings when in our actual reality it’s always been male American presidents doing these kinds of things?

Well, the semiotics of it are different. The way that people read her behavior is different because she’s female, and her decisions about what she’s going to do in the public square change because of her understanding of how it will be perceived. And I think that ends up pushing her farther.

I think it makes her more hawkish, as a lot of female heads of state have been, because there’s this sense that, “I’m not the lady here who’s going to tell everybody to hold hands and sing a song.” She’s a hard ass. The character goes places that we don’t love this season, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t protecting her too much. I don’t want a kind of a magical, idealized woman president. I just want a president who happens to be a woman, and they do a lot of things people don’t like, it turns out. And I didn’t want to protect her from that. I didn’t want to keep that off limits.

The Diplomat, Seasons 1-4 streaming now, Netflix