Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page (Drama) features standout drama series scripts in 2025 Emmy contention.
The Diplomat creator Debora Cahn loves a cliffhanger. After leaving multiple major characters’ fates up in the air at the end of the first season of the Netflix thriller, Cahn throws another huge wrench into international relations between the U.S. and the UK by the end of Season 2.
The breakneck six-episode season picks up right where things left off in Season 1, plunging viewers into the panic that broke out after a car bomb exploded in the heart of London, killing Parliament member Merritt Grove and leaving Kate’s (Keri Russell) husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) as well as her deputy chief of mission Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh) severely injured.
Kate and British Foreign Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi) have just started to think they might have solved the mystery surrounding the bombing of a British aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. But, as they soon learn, the truth is far more complicated than they could have ever imagined, and their quest only becomes more thorny with the arrival of U.S. Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney).
Written by Cahn and directed by Alex Graves, the Season 2 finale, titled “Dreadnought,” does provide both the audience and the characters with the answers they are desperately seeking. But at what cost? A pretty steep one, that’s for sure.
Russell earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as the ambassador to the UK, and Season 2 has already racked up a few major nomination including a DGA Awards nod for Graves and Golden Globes recognition for Russell and Janney.
Here is the script for “Dreadnought” with an intro by Cahn, in which she describes how she tried to do a “non-sh*tty” version of the idea for the big “Hal kills the President” finale plot twist that may have sounded “stupid” and “problematic” at first, and the one line in the script that reassured her that they have pulled it off.
Debora Cahn
Rich Polk for Deadline
Every idea, when it first drops, sounds stupid. Maybe not every, but a lot of them, and “Hal kills the President” sounded particularly stupid.
The Vice President has done a very bad thing. Hal, believing his wife Kate would be a better vice president anyway, tells the President about the bad thing and the President drops dead.
It was problematic on a number of levels. One, our fictional president was a white male of a certain age, who bore a passing resemblance to Joe Biden, who was, when we were writing the story, running for a second term. Our season was slated to drop four days before the election. Suggesting that a white male president of a certain age hears a piece of bad news and drops dead in the Oval seemed uncharitable.
Even if it didn’t rhyme with the real election, President clutches chest and expires behind Resolute Desk sounded lame. But it was the finale, and anything finale-worthy was likely to sound lame in its baldest form, so I found myself saying, “Yes, but we’ll do the not-shitty version,” like that was some sort of literary device I’d learned from a close reading of Pinter.
The not-shitty version required underplaying pretty much everything. We didn’t want to see it happen, we just wanted to see Hal telling Kate. We didn’t want to see Hal freak out. We wanted to see him caught in some kind of administrative snaggle – he needs to call his wife, he needs his cell phone, but he’s in the CIA station and they don’t allow cell phones in the station, so somebody’s getting their assistant to call Kate’s assistant and he finally erupts – slams his hand on the glass wall and says, “Get my wife on the phone.”
It seemed important that the eruption be both vocal and physical. We’d delayed it and contained it and this would be the only place where the magnitude of the situation was visible. I try not to write a lot of stage directions so that when they appear they make an impact. I even used all caps, which I also try to avoid. SLAMS. When we were filming the scene, I asked our director, Alex Graves, if it felt like a SLAM or just a slam because I really wanted it to be a SLAM, and Alex pointed out that if Rufus Sewell hit the glass any harder it would shatter, and perhaps we could make the slam a SLAM in post.
And then there was Hal’s delivery of the news. Hal struggles to find the words, and lands on, “He got really upset.”
That’s when I decided it would be okay. Which is what happens. An idea sounds implausible or trite and you spend a lot of time trying to build it out and ground it and support it with a great deal of research and nuance and complexity, but ultimately you have to fall in love with some piece of it, and for me it was that line, describing the cardiac death of a president.
“He got really upset.”
Debora Cahn
Here is the script:
