Spoilers for the second season ahead DiplomatAll six episodes premiered on Netflix on October 31.

Another season Diplomat Which means it’s another opportunity for this show to try to convince us that a woman in her 40s has never heard of bobby pins and that this complete ignorance of practical life is bullshit. Good thing. She’s so busy making tough decisions, tapping international leaders’ cell phones, and thinking about how sad it would be if Europe descended into chaos like the Middle East, she doesn’t know how to put her hair in a bun. Girls want to break international law while failing at basic human hygiene, you know?

this problem Diplomat, again: Relies on girl bossy and neoliberal tropes to make a generic soap opera about political strife exciting and urgent. At least it’s consistent! Despite fewer episodes, Kate’s focus expands beyond the UK’s position on the world stage as she nears the vice presidency, and American imperialism and Allison Janney come into play in the most exhausting ways possible. There are four more things here Diplomat Something I never want to see on TV again.

Photo: Netflix

Diplomat It has always been half about international politics and half about the shaky marriage between Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, and her husband, Hal Wyler (Rufus Sewell), the former American ambassador to Lebanon. The shift in their dynamic, with Kate in a formal position of power and Hal becoming her plus one, drives much of the first season’s tension. Even though Hal doesn’t have the title of diplomat, he still thinks he can act like one, and after the Wylers delay their divorce to create a stable front for Kate’s business, he gives Kate unsolicited advice and goes behind her back, ostensibly to create situations for her. use. Hal is a lot, but he loves Kate, and the show asks us to decide if she’s worth all his bullshit. Yes, he challenges Kate’s morals by courting donors without Kate knowing, but he’s also become experienced enough in the game to make rival politicians trust him with secrets that they don’t yet trust Kate with. Marriage is hard, Diplomat because it tells us Moreover It becomes even harder to navigate when a member of diplomacy and marriage is a wild card, like a politician with a direct line to the president. It’s a comparison that the series then hammered with viewers over the head until it lost its power.

Despite Kate’s repeated insistence in season one he Hal is not the ambassador, the two work as a package deal in the second season. They must defend themselves against US Embassy employees who blame them for the explosion that killed one of their team, with Kate describing her employees as “our children”. Despite going through a divorce, Hal becomes jealous when he learns that Kate almost slept with the UK foreign secretary, Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), because he sees it as a personal betrayal. And It’s a sign that Kate may be more committed to the British agenda than the American one. When Kate prattles on about putting herself forward as the vice presidential candidate, Hal accuses her of running away from her own ambitions because he’s worried about what too much power might do to her. his ego. Diplomat It scripts the couple’s arguments, in which Hal shrugs off Kate’s ethical concerns about his job and Kate becomes enraged at Hal for behaving like “a man with no moral compass”; vague confrontations that are arguably meant to serve as larger interrogations of American influence—how people love Hal and Kate often handle things through secret meetings, backroom deals, and gratuitous schemes rather than public negotiations—but they rarely feel as meaningful as they should. (The most we get is Kate observing her growing alliance with Britain’s conservative prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge: “I guess we have this idea that we’re going to be friends with the bad guys and manipulate them to our will, and actually, we’re just friends with the bad guys.”)

This cycle becomes ingrained in the second season: Hal does something out of bounds, Kate is annoyed by it but then recovers, talks to him about the realities of their profession, and grits his teeth and decides to do something. his way. If Diplomat‘s big point about centering this marriage is that serving American interests is like having the worst partner in the world, which would be fun! But it probably isn’t, because Hal is often right about the way the world works, even when he makes a big mistake. The season finale reveals that Kate’s latest secret plan to secure the Vice President position will result in the president’s death, which will likely be made up for in some way in the third season, as this show isn’t bold enough to turn Hal into a truly bad guy.

This is a continuation of one of my biggest frustrations. Diplomat‘s first season: how the show uses the pain of brown people for character development of its white protagonists. Kate mentioned the people she and Hal left behind in Afghanistan as a way to show how much she regretted American policy. But the series didn’t even care to show these people; We only knew that their suffering under the Taliban or other authoritarian leaders had an impact on Kate. In the second season, Diplomat Kate takes this casual racism a step further with her constant reference to the Middle East compared to the “normality” of the western world. Living in Lebanon and Afghanistan is supposed to make Hal and Kate more empathetic and resourceful, but their descriptions of the region are either traumatizing or dismissive.

When Kate learns of the explosion in London, mistakenly identifies her location as “Beirut” and meets with a British government official who tells her how many times naval bombings with questionable intentions have occurred in the Gulf “…more than once”, Kate does not object. Both scenes imply that the Middle East is a place where violence is expected but Europe should be peaceful and pure. When Kate and Hal debate whether the Americans should help overthrow the British prime minister, Hal says, “This isn’t Kabul,” as if a coup was expected in the Middle East but wouldn’t be acceptable elsewhere. In a rare light moment, the couple joke about bribing government officials and orchestrating illegal schemes, and how cheap both would be in Afghanistan, because it’s funny how cheap the Afghan currency is (probably partly US government freezes It meant billions of dollars to the people of the country). Ridiculous! At one point, Kate’s colleague Stuart (Ato Essandoh) complains about himself and Hal: “The Wylers are so cool. “They talk to terrorists, hug warlords and drink llama blood.” It was meant to be sarcastic, but it sums up how it is Diplomat He treats that part of the world and its people like exoticized ornaments.

Recent political demonstrations have settled into a mode of suggesting that the proletariat is stupid – imagine how Regime It depicts the people of his unnamed country cheering on Kate Winslet’s mustard-fetishizing autocrat. At least Regime He suggested that people should become like this after years of authoritarian rule! DiplomatOn the contrary, he loves the concept of democracy, but this season he’s hurtling down the same “Oh, guys” path. Kate repeatedly describes how her new boyfriend, the vice president, is so much smarter than everyone else, and how sad it is that the world will never know his genius and sacrifice. This is a cheap way to make a character seem special and excuse morally questionable actions because we’re told they already know better.

Kate is shocked to realize that British people support the extrajudicial execution of a Russian mercenary on their own soil, and says she thinks “things are different here” compared to her own bloodthirsty country. When he learns that the British prime minister planned to cover up the murder and that a naval explosion that killed dozens of sailors was ordered by members of his own administration, he is horrified and vows to bring the entire group down. But after American vice president Grace Penn convinces Kate that truth is more important to the survivors than revenge, Kate abandons her old position to preserve “global stability.”

One conversation and all of Kate’s morals go out the window – she’s completely okay with aiding in a series of lies that she’s about to expose barely a day or so in narrative time. When Kate confronts Grace about her role as the mastermind of the naval attack in the season finale, Grace pulls out a map of the world, pinning it with nuclear weapons locations and routes by which Russia could attack the United States, embarrassing Kate (she also has experience in nuclear nonproliferation with the brilliance of her strategy Once again, Kate’s sense of right and wrong is easily swayed when one person reveals a complex, unexpected series of events that Kate had not considered.

In essence, this is a further advancement of the false flag trope, in which soldiers and government officials are sent into war zones or killed by corrupt politicians for personal or agenda gain. Terminal List, Lioness, Night AgentAnd without regret in the last few years. But, Diplomat He leaves this series by saying that lying to people is actually good because it will keep them repressed and/or safe. Hiding and fixing government as a valuable policy is a foolhardy approach. DiplomatIt’s a show with ostensibly liberal politics, but it presents Kate’s self-censorship as one of the most sensible things she’s ever done.

Photo: Alex Bailey/Netflix

The casting of Rory Kinnear as the British prime minister in the show’s first season immediately locked us in: This man, like many of Kinnear’s recent characters, was going to be an asshole. While the second season has dialed back the level of evil by pinning the deception operation on a rogue underling, Trowbridge is still a racist and sexist jerk that Kate has a hard time working with — and we have to applaud Janney’s Grace for that. Penn portrays his desire to be honest as naive and uses nationalist rhetoric to explain that keeping the story secret is better for everyone’s career. Kate often looks like an imitation of Janney’s character, CJ Cregg. West Wing – artsy, witty, disinterested in fashion – and so casting Janney as a foil to Kate was inevitable. Same with Janney doing the typical Janney thing here: we see her take-no-shit personality here too. I am Tonya; Spy; Creative; And Palm Royale.

As the American vice president, Janney wears a suit, glares, and tells Kate she sucks at her job when she tries to talk about a meeting they just had. Admittedly, it’s pretty fun to see if you hate watching this series like me. But giving Janney this kind of role reveals exactly where the story will go, which removes the element of surprise in a series that should be urgent and tense. Even the exciting event of the season doesn’t seem that surprising because Of course Janney would stay just like that Of course Hal was a bit scarred after the bombing incident last season. If there is anything Diplomat suggested in both seasons, maybe like C.J. he once famously saidWe are fools for expecting anything different.