Who Shot Grace Penn in The Diplomat? The Windsor Attack Explained

Kate helps him prepare for his new duties. Keri Russell described this stretch to TVLine: "It's the closest they have been to what they both really wanted: to be that close to power, to be in the room."

Hal's time with those powers is brief. Grace comes through surgery and, by Episode 3, is back in charge.

Grace Penn after the shooting

Grace returns short-tempered, and Todd cannot get her to slow down. She recovers, but the people around her, Todd above all, notice she is not the same. "Grace starts to doubt herself but doesn’t want to show it," Allison Janney told Netflix's Tudum, adding that Grace hides it by doubling down on decisions that scare everyone else.

Those decisions pile up. Todd ends up in London as a special envoy, a posting that, according to Netflix, spares Grace his probing into her mental health. She orders Kate to warn Britain's new prime minister that the US will send warships unless Russia is called off. At a tense dinner with the Wylers in Episode 7, when Kate tells her that her behaviour has changed since the shooting, Grace concedes that something may be off, then keeps her course and sends Kate away.

In the finale, Kate's deputy, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), writes a dissent cable objecting to the warship plan, and Grace recalls him to Washington. At the G7 summit, she admits to the other leaders that the US took the Poseidon and threatens to fire on interfering countries, allies among them.

Does the shooting explain Grace Penn's behaviour?

Creator Debora Cahn told TheWrap that the uncertainty around Grace is deliberate: "I never really wanted it to be clear what was happening." We think the shooting explains less than the characters seem to think.

Before she became president, Grace conceived the attack on the British aircraft carrier HMS Courageous without the knowledge of President Rayburn (Michael McKean). The plan was meant to halt the momentum of Scotland's secession movement. The attack killed more than 40 people, deaths Grace says she never intended. The Poseidon theft also predates Windsor: Grace told the British prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), that the US had sent a drone, when she had actually sent a submarine big enough to hold the weapon.

She was willing to bypass a president and deceive an ally before anyone fired at her. The stronger explanation is continuity: someone who already trusted her own judgement over the president's now holds the office herself. We also read Trowbridge's public address in Episode 4, announcing the death of his foreign secretary, as another possible influence on her impatience with Britain, because its remarks appear to target the US and Grace.

Could the shooting matter in The Diplomat Season 5?

No fifth season had been announced by Netflix as of 24 October 2026.

If the show returns, the thread Season 4 has built looks like Grace's fitness for office, not the gunman. In Episode 7, Stuart tells White House chief of staff Billie Appiah (Nana Mensah) that he believes Grace is unfit to be president. In the finale, Kate resigns in front of Grace at the G7 summit, and Billie resigns after her.

Keri Russell, meanwhile, told Tudum: "Physically, something's definitely going on with her." The shooter's motive is never fully explained, so a fifth season could reopen it. On the evidence of Season 4, though, Grace's health and judgement look like the likelier subject.