‘The Crown’ Season 5 Episode 2 Recap: The Diana Tapes

The arrival of Diana to the royal family sparked a massive increase in tabloid coverage of the monarchy, but the early ’90s is when things really got messy. In this episode of The Crown, we start to get a better look at how the controversial 1992 book Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton came to be, how the creation and aftermath of the book was a turning point for the tumult within the family, and how it opened the floodgates to all manner of salacious Diana and Charles coverage forevermore.

First, let’s begin with carriage driving. Ever heard of it? As a sport, I mean? Me neither! But Prince Philip’s obsession with it takes up an inordinate amount of this episode. After an injury landed Philip on the sidelines of the polo fields, he turned to carriage driving, where he excelled and found great pleasure in it. As this episode opens, Philip is giving an interview to an Italian interviewer who he thinks can’t understand him, (was he actually a grumpy old man with no tolerance for foreigners, or is that just what I’m pulling from this scene?) when he’s informed of some bad news and excuses himself. Then we see the whole Windsor family at the funeral of Leonora Knatchbull, the 5-year-old daughter of Norton Knatchbull, Philip’s godson, and his wife, Penny (Natascha McElhone). You’ll recall that in the season premiere, Leonora and her family joined Prince Charles and Diana on their cruise around Italy, where we learned she was in remission from cancer. (In real life, Leonora’s cancer returned shortly after returning home from that trip and she passed away in October, 1991.)

While the whole royal family is devastated by the loss of the little girl, no one is more affected than Philip, who pays a visit to her parents and finds himself alone with a grieving Penny. As they visit little Leonora’s grave, which is beneath a tree at the Knatchbull’s estate, Penny confides that she wanted Leonora’s final resting place there so she can be near to her, but now she feels confined to the family home and confined to her own marriage. It’s a feeling Philip can relate to. You know what helps him? His hobby! Carriage driving! Penny shows Philip an old carriage in their barn, and a delighted Philip agrees to restore it. Penny, like most of us in Buy Nothing groups, is delighted to have someone who’s willing to take a huge thing out of her garage, and he tells her he’ll be in touch once he restores it. (To which she is like, “Please, don’t be in touch.”)

After a montage of men making wagon wheels, Philip shows Penny his restoration and she is actually delighted. “Is it even the same carriage?!” she asks, and then he offers her the chance to ride in it. She is shocked to find that she enjoys it. The relationship between Philip and Penny is not depicted here as romantic, though there was tabloid speculation that it was, instead it seems that it’s one born of a shared understanding of grief. Philip shares that he too feels grief and loss over the death of his favorite sister, Cecilie, whose death in a plane crash was featured in a season two flashback. (Cecilie, who was married to a German noble, died in 1937 after going into labor onboard a plane. When the pilot attempted an emergency landing to get her to a hospital, the plane hit a building, killing everyone aboard, including Cecilie’s newborn. The story is wild and awful, made even more…complex by the fact that Cecilie and her husband were also members of the Nazi party.) Philip shares that his way to cope with grief is to continue to find new things to be happy about, and that’s why we find ourselves immersed in the wild world of carriage driving this episode.

Back in London, Diana pays a visit to the hospital where her friend Dr. James Colthurst works. The crowd mobs her, but there’s one person who continues to remain close to her at every turn – who is this man in a trench coat and glasses (who, it should be noted, was also on the dock as she and Charles departed for their second honeymoon in Italy last episode)? It turns out, he’s a royal correspondent named Andrew Morton. His name will eventually become forever entwined with Diana’s thanks to the events of this episode. After the hospital visit, James calls Diana to tell her that this reporter approached him to let him know he planned to write a book about Diana, which she scoffs at. On this call, Diana realizes that her phone is likely being tapped and the news of this unauthorized book is no longer just a conversation between two friends.

James assures Diana that he has no plans to tell Morton anything, but that they did make plans to play squash, and after that fateful game, James brings Diana more news, mainly that Morton has already begun his book because he fears that Charles’s camp has their own tell-all book, a “hatchet job,” James says, already in the works. James relays Morton’s message to Diana that if she were to secretly cooperate on his book, she could have control over the final edit, and it would be a more sympathetic story of her life. “I don’t want to be responsible for starting a war,” Diana says, to which James assures her that Morton has promised total confidentiality.

With James acting as an intermediary, he passes Morton’s questions to Diana, who provides her responses via audiotapes. Over the course of these interviews, Diana would provide some of the most shocking revelations of her marriage that would eventually become part of her tragic legacy: her multiple suicide attempts, including one while pregnant with William, her knowledge of the prince’s infidelities and her own interactions with Camilla, her eating disorders. Bombshell follows bombshell in these tapes, and while Morton and James are the only ones privy to Diana’s story, they’re all still being surveilled. Someone else knows what they’re up to, and the intimidation begins.

Morton’s apartment is ransacked and James, while bicycling, is run off the road. Despite the dangers, they proceed with the project. But when Prince Philip catches wind of it, he decides this cannot stand and he pays a visit to Diana. You might recall that in the season four finale, at the royal Christmas celebration, Diana and Philip shared a moment, when the two talked about both being outsiders in this family. At that time, Diana confided her desire to divorce Charles, and that’s where she lost Philip’s support. Both during that conversation, as well as in Philip’s conversations with Penny throughout this episode, he has made it abundantly clear that marriage – and especially marriage to a royal – comes with a commitment. No matter how far you drift apart, the fact is, you’ve committed yourself to an institution… a system. Back in season four, Philip told Diana, “Everyone in this system is a lost, lonely, irrelevant outsider, apart from the one person, the only person that matters. She’s the oxygen we all breathe. The essence of all our duty. Your problem, if I may say, is you seem to be confused as to who that person is.”

This time around Philip, having been informed by Penny that rumor of the Diana book was circulating, confronts Diana about the matter in her apartment at Kensington Palace. “I’ve always had a soft spot for you. Maybe because you’re young, maybe because you’re a beautiful woman. Maybe because I often share your frustration with your husband,” he says, telling her that he’s on her team. “You’re not a novice anymore. You’re long past the point of thinking of us as a family. That’s a mistake people make in the beginning, but you understand, I think, it’s a system,” he says, using that word he used last season. “We’re all in this system. You, me, the boss, the cousins, the uncles, the aunts, the lepers. For better or for worse, we’re all stuck in it, and we can’t just air our grievances and throw bombs in the air as in a normal family, or we end up damaging something much bigger and much more important. The system.”

“Don’t rock the boat. Ever. To the grave,” Philip warns her.

Despite this, Diana doesn’t heed Philip’s warning. We watch a montage of Morton as he makes the press rounds the book having been released to massive sales and global infatuation. She’s gone through with it. The first shots in this war have been fired, and the system has been broken.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.