Diana’s tell-all book threatens to break "The System" on The Crown

[Editor’s note: The A.V. Club will publish episode recaps of The Crown’s fifth season every weekday at 1 a.m. Eastern through November 22. The following details episode two.]

In its first scene, as we learn about Prince Philip’s (Jonathan Pryce) newfound love of carriage driving, I felt my expectations for “The System” plummeting. Oh no, not another Phillip episode. We’ve spent a lot of time exploring Philip’s inner life (see: season two’s “Paterfamilias” and season three’s “Moondust,” among others), and I feared The Crown was going to retread well-worn ground.

While giving an interview about his new hobby, Philip gets word that Leonora Knatchbull, the five-year-old daughter of family friends (the same ones Charles brought on the Italy trip last episode) has died of cancer. At Elizabeth’s (Imelda Staunton) suggestion, Philip tries to pay a visit to her father, his godson, but instead ends up connecting with her mother, Penny (Natascha McElhone).

Philip offers two pieces of advice on processing her grief: set up a charity in Leonora’s name and find a new activity as an escape. And wouldn’t you know it, she has an old carriage in the garage. Philip becomes obsessed with fixing it up so that Penny, too, can become a carriage driver.

“The System” devotes a lot of time to this development–shots of Philip overseeing work on the carriage, researching its make, sketching out ideas for refurbishment. Then once it’s ready, he takes Penny out to teach her to steer, and all the POV shots of them riding made me feel like an accident of some kind was imminent. But then nothing happens. Why spend so many minutes on this carriage and heartbroken mother when the other half of the episode offers us something riveting?

For the second episode in a row, we get a shot of a bespectacled member of the press corps, staring thoughtfully at Diana (Elizabeth Debicki). We learn that he’s Andrew Morton, the tabloid journalist, and via her old friend James Colthurst, he brings Diana an interesting proposition: He wants to write a book about her side of the story.

This is a huge risk for Diana, who is closely watched in Kensington Palace. Even on the phone with James, she hears someone else listening in. Cooperating with a writer for a tell-all book would be an act of war against the royal family. But she knows if she doesn’t get her truth out there, the family will paint her however they see fit in protection of the crown. She agrees to record herself answering Morton’s questions, with James acting as a middleman between them.

I must pause to say, once again, that Debicki is nailing it as Diana. When the princess is making a public appearance at a hospital, she perfects the head tilt and coy smile that Diana was known for. In private, she fiddles with her sleeves or chews her nails with anxiousness. The public and private personas are different, but they both feel true to Diana, and Debicki comfortably channels both.

As his first question, Morton asks Diana to explain why she’s doing this, and she says that if she doesn’t, people will never understand “how it’s really been for me.” It’s hard to imagine a world in which we didn’t have intimate knowledge of Charles and Diana’s terrible marriage, and we see Diana taking the first steps toward constructing our current reality. There’s a montage of her recording herself in response to Morton’s questions, sharing all the ways she felt unsupported and overwhelmed. We saw it last season, but to hear her saying it out loud, in her own words, talking and talking–to herself, to Morton, to each of us–feels different. You can feel her getting it out and processing what she’s been through.

Eventually, these two seemingly unrelated stories crash into one another. As Philip and Penny wrap up another conversation about grief (“That’s the point, isn’t it? To keep finding new ways,” he says of her experiencing happiness while on the carriage), she tells him friends have been approached about verifying claims in Diana’s book. To save face, Philip tells her he’s sure it’s just gossip, but immediately schedules a chat with Diana.

Diana is nervous for this meeting after some shady things happen in her orbit–James is knocked over by a van while riding his bike, and Morton’s house is broken into–and what we get is a direct callback to Philip and Diana’s last scene together in season four’s “War.” In fact, this whole episode is in conversation with that scene, in which Philip came to check on a pouting Diana at the Christmas gathering, and she told him, “Although we are both outsiders who married in, you and I are quite different.”

In both scenes, Philip begins the conversation trying to find common ground and convince Diana he’s on her side. And when that doesn’t work, in both scenes, he invokes “the system.”

• In “War”: “Everyone in this system is a lost, lonely, irrelevant outsider. Apart from the one person, the only person, who matters.”
• In “The System”: “It’s not a family. It’s a system. We’re all in this system…. Be creative. Break as many rules as you want. Make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness. As long as you remember the one rule. You remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family, in public.”

Neither instance sways Diana. Philip sees a likeness between them (people from unhappy childhoods who married into the royal family, struggling to find their place and purpose in a marriage to someone deemed more important). And this is where all of that focus on Philip’s inner life pays off. We know what he’s been through to find contentment at Elizabeth’s side, even in this very episode, obsessing over a carriage that ultimately has no meaning to anyone but him. He’s constantly looking for new ways to make it work within the system, but Diana is unwilling to do the same. She wants to break it.

Stray observations

• Diana’s balloon sweatshirt. The woman’s ’90s style was unmatched. I can’t wait to see all the Gen Z imitations.
• James Colthurst was friends with Diana before she knew Charles, and when he asks, “Why didn’t you call us?” upon learning of her suicide attempts, I had the same question. Where was he last season when she was having lunch with Camilla? If this girl had friends, where were they in the ’80s?
• Then again, when he asks her for friends that Morton can talk to in order to corroborate her story, she sends him to her aromatherapist, astrologer, acupuncturist, and bodyworker. The older royals are out of touch, but this is a nice nod to the fact that Diana was in a bubble too.
• Jonathan Pryce pulls off a masterful performance as Philip confronts Diana. Last episode, he came across as a doddering old man, but here he invokes the same power and contained anger as Tobias Menzies and Matt Smith before him.
• Other than a few scenes with Elizabeth, this episode belongs to Diana and Philip. Charles (Dominic West) makes an appearance in the closing montage but doesn’t get a single line of dialogue.
• As Philip and Elizabeth debate the merit of secrets between husbands and wives after his chat with Diana, she invokes her religion (“It’s what He knows”), which the show has long established as important to her.