What Are We Meant To Make Of Vice President Grace Penn In ‘The Diplomat’?
Spoilers below for The Diplomat season two.
In a recent interview with Tudum, Netflix’s editorial site, actress Allison Janney described her character in The Diplomat season two as a 'formidable woman.' She also shared that she looked directly to Hillary Clinton as inspiration. The parallels aren’t difficult to notice: Vice President Grace Penn’s platinum-blonde bob and burgundy power suits nod to Clinton just as strongly as her strategic stoicism.
Janney added, in a separate interview with Vanity Fair, that 'it’s unbelievable, the experience [Clinton] has and how incredibly smart she is, yet she’s still polarising—she’s respected, she’s admired, she’s hated.' Now, as The Diplomat season two plays across Netflix screens mere hours before the 2024 presidential election, I think it’s telling the ways in which Janney (and The Diplomat writ large) are positioning Grace as a sort of mirror to 2016-era Clinton.
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Grace herself is mired in controversy. Much of The Diplomat season two centres around Ambassador Kate Wyler uncovering a conspiracy in which Grace compelled the U.K. government to attack itself, an act of violence she incited with the aim to shut down Scotland’s bid at independence. The attack, however, went disastrously wrong: What was meant to create a mere dent in the side of the HMS Courageous instead ended the lives of 43 British citizens. Grace’s initial rationale, as explained in the season two finale, was simple: Scotland is home to a nuclear submarine base, the only base in Europe where the U.S. can dock its nuclear subs. Had Scotland gone independent, Grace believes the country would have shut down the base, therefore opening the U.S. (and the U.K.) up to attacks from Russia. As Grace asks Kate, 'Is there a universe in which the U.S. could afford to lose the base in Scotland?' To which Kate replies, 'No.'
And so Grace called the 'Tory operative' Margaret Roylin, whom she convinced—with the help of Roylin’s allies—to hire the Russian mercenary Roman Lenkov to hit the Courageous. Although Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge eventually goes after Lenkov, he remains unaware until late in season two that his own government pulled Lenkov’s strings. And Trowbridge still hasn’t the slightest idea that Grace Penn (and the U.S. by extension) was the mastermind behind it all.
Kate, equipped with this information but unable to tell the public (lest it further destabilise the U.S. and democracy the world over), confronts Grace directly. She finds it 'convenient' that Grace wants to cover up the Courageous debacle, ostensibly to protect the U.S. president. But Kate also believes she might have made the same terrible choice, had she been in Grace’s position. As showrunner Debora Cahn recently told IndieWire, 'Kate finds out what [Grace has] done, and then hates her again, and then finds out why she did it, and then [realises], "I would have done exactly the same thing."...[We’re] trying to bring the audience into the thinking of characters who are facing something that’s complicated enough that, yeah, it’s a horror show. It turned into a massive bloodbath. But the alternative was a bigger bloodbath. It wasn’t no bloodbath.'
Similarly, when asked if Grace acted with the right intentions, Janney told Tudum, 'Yes. In her mind, it was the right decision. It was a hard decision to make. But her moral compass is good. At least, that’s how I play it, which is that she was absolutely in the right...I don’t see her as being morally reprehensible.'
That’s a fair perspective. And yet. There’s a reason why the big reveal in episode 5—that Grace was behind the Courageous attack—is...well, played as a reveal. It’s shocking. It’s supposed to be shocking. And it’s shocking because a theoretically well-intentioned person did something awful: Their decision led to the deaths of dozens of innocent people.
The term 'necessary evil' pops up frequently in politics. It has popped up hundreds of times, on my own social feeds, in the days leading up to the 2024 election. And though this article’s intent is not to wax poetic about what does or does not constitute a 'necessary evil' in the context of current American politics, I do think it’s worth scrutinising this fictional character and the way she’s represented onscreen. How 'necessary' was the attack on the Courageous? Is it really true that the attack was her only option, the only tool with which to halt Scottish independence? Or are we simply told it was her only tool? Are we meant to believe Grace and Kate’s decisions are good ones simply because they’re the avatars of American democracy on-camera? Or are their decisions actually good?
There’s so little we, as viewers of The Diplomat, know about Grace Penn right now. We don’t know her policies, or whether her supposedly smart choices are informed as much by ambition as they are by diplomacy. And if Grace is based on—or, at least, inspired by—Clinton, what does that say about her position on The Diplomat’s political chess board? Yes, she’s smart and capable, but what does her party think of her? What do her opponents think of her? Can she lead with honor if she’s also covering up the Courageous catastrophe at the same time? Will the public rally behind her? Is she a hero? A villain? Worse, is she someone who finds 'convenient' reason to confuse the two?
We can’t be sure yet. But I hope that The Diplomat season three (in which it seems Grace and Kate will feature prominently) doesn’t try to position Grace as some near-unimpeachable architect of sound logic and good intentions, if complicated results. The Diplomat will serve itself well if it sharpens its self-awareness. I think it’s correct to view Grace Penn with a critical eye—and, for that matter, to view Kate herself with one. They have both climbed into positions of tremendous power. There, indeed, their choices will define them.
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