Netflix The Diplomat season 1 recap guide: All episodes explained

The Diplomat episode 7 recap: Keep Your Enemies Closer

A post-coital Hal and Kate discuss their marriage and partnership. They’re still working out the kinks of this new dynamic, but they are trying to make things work, more or less.

Elsewhere, Eidra tells Stuart she wants to wait to go public until the Russia thing is played out. They still haven’t figured out exactly who issued the demand, and all the backchannels are dead. It’s weird. Something isn’t adding up.

As for Kate, she’s set to meet with Russian Ambassador Oleg Balakin and tell him the plan. Britain knows the Lenkov Company, commissioned by the Russian government, attacked their warship, and they intend to take action against Lenkov in Libya with America’s blessing within the next 24 hours, finally putting an end to a series of escalating moves.

Except, that doesn’t happen. When Kate gets into the room with Balakin, he secretly slips her a note sending her to a wine shop nearby while he pretends to keep their meeting going with a long lecture that the others can hear outside the door as Kate sneaks out. She meets a contact who informs her that Lenkov will be staying in his daughter’s villa in France on the 30th for three days. They’re handing Lenkov over, which means either Russia is screwing with the US, or they didn’t do it.

That throws a new wrench in the plan as they must now quickly change gears. Kate and Stuart debrief Eidra about this. Eidra says even if Lenkov is just a scapegoat, they should take it anyway since he is a bad guy. Eidra thinks this makes sense, though, since it’s been looking more and more like Russia didn’t orchestrate the attack.

Kate is put on a plane and sent to DC so she can go to the Oval Office and tell them about the change in plans. There, Ganon basically steamrolls her in a room full of 90 people, including the President, dismissing Libya altogether and making her look foolish. Kate is rather dumbstruck, so she goes out with her old friend Jill and gets drunk.

Meeting with Jill turns out to be a devastating blow for Kate because she finds out that not going to Kabul put the kibosh on their plans to get into Afghanistan and help people out. Jill says she hasn’t been allowed entry into the capitol because Kate’s changing assignments made them put a pause on the whole thing. There are still around 35,000 people they want to help, and many of their contacts there have been killed, beaten, or thrown in jail.

Elsewhere, Hal takes a meeting with Billie, who informs him that the president plans on firing Ganon. Like Kate, Hal also goes to dinner with a colleague of his who suggests Hal is going to try to become the new secretary of state and replace Ganon. It seems like Hal is considering it.

When Kate returns to London, she’s hungover and upset by everything that happened in DC. To make matters worse, she has to contend with a pissed-off Trowbridge who had just announced they were sending troops to Libya and accepted the country’s thanks, only to be told 12 minutes later by Ganon that the plan was off.

The episode ends with a tense conversation between her and Hal where Kate seems inclined to turn to Dennison for comfort rather than her husband. He suggests she call Dennison in the morning. They get ready for bed in silence.

Written by Maddy Lennon