TV Show Episode Review: The Crown, season 6, episode 5 (“Willsmania”)

I took a break from watching The Crown for a while. I had finished part 1 of the last season and was just really saddened when Princess Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki) dies in a car crash with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed (played by Khalid Abdalla) while they are in Paris. I just didn’t think I would be able to continue to go on with the show after that part. But I decided I wanted to finish the series because it has been incredible to watch, and I wanted to know what happened next. I totally forgot that I had watched this episode, “Willsmania” before, but it was helpful to watch since it has been a few months since I finished part 1 of the final season. In this episode, Diana’s sons, William and Harry, are grappling with the death of their mother and the grief process. This episode mainly focuses on the grief that William is dealing with. Harry appears in a few scenes, but mostly this episode was focused on William. William finds himself studying extra hard and also missing the extracurricular activities he once did, and the headmaster checks in on him often. There was a scene in the episode where William finds two bags of letters in his dorm room. One bag has letters from fellow students at William’s school, and the other bag is full of letters from young people around the world, many of them teenage girls who have a crush on him. When William comes out of the car and the Royal Family is walking past the crowds, Queen Elizabeth is miffed when she finds that the crowds aren’t focused on her, but instead are focused on William. When William comes out, a bunch of girls scream and fangirl as he is walking. They are shaking and leaning over the fence and also crying, holding signs expressing their romantic feelings for Will. It was kind of a stressful scene to watch. To be honest, I probably would have been like those girls in the crowd, freaking out when I see a famous person walk by. But now that I am older, I realize that celebrities might not always want that public attention and that they just want to live life like normal human beings. William ends up throwing the letters from the girls because it is really overwhelming, and honestly, that is fair because he going through a lot of grief. He also harbors a lot of anger and resentment towards his father, Charles, because Charles had an affair with Camila while in his marriage to Diana. In one scene, Charles meets with William to patch things up, but while Charles walks on eggshells, William calls him out for not taking accountability for Diana’s death. Charles explains to him that he is going through his own grief and that he, too, is still grappling with Diana’s death. Philip, who is Charles’s dad, meets with William over chess and tells him that William isn’t actually angry at his dad, but that he is actually angry at his mom because she was comfortable in the public eye, and he is not comfortable with all the publicity around him. William ends up hugging his dad later on.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about William or Harry before watching The Crown, other than watching a clip from the royal wedding between Harry and Meghan Markle. I’m sure I learned about them in history class, but that was so long ago, and I haven’t kept up much with news about the royal family. However, I watched a documentary last year (I think it was last year) called Harry and Meghan, and it was pretty good. I know it left a lot of people divided and people had a variety of opinions about it, but I don’t know enough intimate details about Harry and Meghan other than what they covered in the documentary to give an in-depth critique about it.


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Author: The Arts Are Life

I am a writer and musician. Lover of music, movies, books, art, and nature.

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