Remember when the U.S. and Canada were pals? Before “Elbows up”? It was then—before Trump began his spat with his neighbor to the north—that the Canadian author Louise Penny sat down to write The Black Wolf. Even she could not have predicted how prescient her words would be.
The scope of Penny’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series has grown over the years, from cozies that traded on the snowy charms of Gamache’s fictional hometown of Three Pines in Québec to thrillers that address more global and existential concerns. Three Pines and its core characters remain, but now they function as a refuge—and comic relief, since Penny is always up for a joke even in moments of peak tension—rather than players in a crime scene. Penny’s last book, The Grey Wolf, ended with Gamache and his team from the Sûreté du Québec stopping a plot to poison Montreal’s water system. The instigator—a man they called “the Black Wolf”—was the deputy prime minister of Canada, now safely in prison. Ça va bien aller.
But maybe not. Gamache’s people find clues left over from the poisoning case that indicate there’s more to come, a new threat they don’t yet understand.
What if the U.S. were running out of natural resources that Canada possesses in abundance? Would the U.S. invade if it became desperate enough? And how would Canada respond to such a threat, when faced with the far mightier forces of the U.S. military?
Those questions are put to Gamache by an American general in a private meeting at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House. The library is bisected by the border straddling Vermont and Canada. The two men meet there so that they can talk securely, each in his own country.
Using what he learns from General Whitehead and others, Gamache discovers that the plotters have concocted a cataclysmic plan that would combine environmental aggression with personal gain. He knows it sounds insane, but he risks his reputation and his life to uncover the specifics and identify the powerful, high-level people involved, with the ever elusive Black Wolf at the center.
Penny is sounding the alarm with The Black Wolf, showing what happens when Internet conspiracy theories and political divisions spin out into reality and the unthinkable becomes possible. Working confidently in this more expansive arena, she brings her customary thoughtfulness, storytelling gifts, literary allusions, and humanity to a warning wrapped in a thriller that should resonate on both sides of the border.
The Black Wolf takes the crisis between Canada and the U.S. seriously, even apocalyptically. And now, in its third season, The Diplomat is starting to regard the so-called special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. with more gravity. Its head-snapping plot twists and the combustible chemistry between Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., and Rufus Sewell’s Hal, her husband and a career ambassador himself, remain intact, however.
Season Three deals with the toxic fallout of the discovery that Prime Minister Nicol Trowbridge’s (Rory Kinnear) rogue adviser orchestrated a fatal false-flag attack on a British ship, pinning it on the Russians. The truth about the situation turns out to be even worse, but in ways that are beneficial to Hal, who never met a corner he couldn’t see around. Too big a personality to remain behind the scenes forever, he is about to step onto his largest stage yet.
Through a series of improbable incidents—including triggering the president’s fatal heart attack when he drops some shocking information about Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) into a phone call—Hal becomes the new president Penn’s choice for V.P. This is a direct hit to Kate, who was considered for the job when it seemed Penn might lose hers. Kate has officially had it with Hal, but in a nutty attempt at multi-tasking, she agrees to be both Second Lady (publicly at least) and U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Since the latter is an actual job that puts her an ocean away from her husband and the show is called The Diplomat, that’s her priority.
Meanwhile, the special relationship frays as the revelations about the attack emerge, and President Penn travels to England to appease the volatile, self-regarding Trowbridge, who’s not as smart as he thinks he is. In a show that fields one of the best acting ensembles around, Kinnear’s Trowbridge, a bombastic man-child frequently in need of special handling, is especially fun to watch. He fights to maintain the appropriate reserve, but his ever present fear of being outplayed is never far from the surface.
Trowbridge has a thing for Kate, but her new love interest is Callum Ellis, a British operative played by Aidan Turner, who’s best known for starring in the period drama Poldark. Because, honestly, after losing the V.P. job, what better revenge than cheating on Hal with Poldark, whose tangled black locks and occasionally bare chest drove all the PBS ladies wild a decade ago, here reconstituted as a hot M.I.6 agent. The hair is still excellent, by the way, just shorter. Also welcomed this season is Bradley Whitford, re-united with West Wing co-star Janney as her beleaguered, overqualified First Gentleman.
For so many reasons, Hal and Kate’s marriage has iced over to a purely ceremonial front. The ins and outs of diplomacy were the Wylers’ love language; nothing turned them on more than fixing an international crisis. But now Hal has a new partnership with a more powerful woman that approaches Macbeth territory. Woe be unto anyone who tries to out-scheme them, including their spouses.
What began two seasons ago as a Sorkin-esque geopolitical screwball comedy looks to be headed for something darker. But who knows? This show is full of surprises. No alliance lasts long, and the mood is always changing. When it began, I thought it was clever and stylish, if preposterous. Now the times have caught up with it, and nothing, it seems, can be preposterous enough.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mysteries for Air Mail. She lives in New York City
