‘The Crown’ Season 5 Episode 5 Recap: A Forward-Thinking Man

One can’t help but think that when Princess Anne, having read all about her brother Charles’s phone sex tryst with Camilla Parker-Bowles, tells him that his dirty talk “was a little gynecological for my taste,” Charles’s intellectual mind probably took it as a compliment. This conversation between Anne and Charles — dropped right in the middle of The Crown Season 5 Episode 5 (“The Way Ahead”), after Charles was humiliated by the public release of his intimate phone conversation where he wished to be one of Camilla’s tampons in an affair that came to be known as Tampongate — acknowledged the fact that these are two siblings who understand all too well the struggles of being trapped in a family that forbids things like divorce and public displays of emotion, and they’re both sick of it.

Charles, knowing that he’ll be king one day, is especially fed up with the monarchy as a whole in this episode, and every little thing he does, from demanding a separation from Diana, to busting a move with breakdancers, proves that he wants nothing more than to breathe new life, and a new image, into the institution he was born into and suffers at the hands of.

“How does one describe being Prince of Wales?” Charles asks at the top of the episode while at a dinner party. “It’s hardly a job, still less a vocation, simply a predicament,” he laments, calling himself a “useless ornament, stuck in a waiting room gathering dust.” His dinner guests don’t know how to respond to this diatribe of self-pity, until one of them mentions the good works he does with his charity, The Prince’s Trust, which offers scholarships to under-served students and builds community centers for them. It’s perhaps the one great thing that Charles can claim as his own, and he’s rightfully proud of it.

Charles has been angrily whining all season about how under-utilized he is within the royal family, and this episode illustrates that the one person who is there for him through all of his hardship is Camilla Parker-Bowles, played by Olivia Williams. Williams finally gets to speak in this episode, and her first big moments with Charles are by phone as he rings her up around Christmas in 1989 to get her opinion on a speech he’s written to deliver at Oxford. Camilla is not just his emotional support but his copy editor, and as he drones on in his speech about the importance of the English language as king for her opinion, we cut away to a man with some kind of radio interceptor adjusting his frequencies until his speaker snooping through myriad conversations until he lands on the conversation between Charles and Camilla which eventually veers from stodgy speech to phone sex. This man realizes the luck he has and presses record in his tape player once he hears the prince’s voice. The man brings the conversation to the Daily Mirror who agrees that they are indeed a goldmine, but one they won’t actually release to the public… not yet anyway.

The feeling in 1989 was that if the Mirror ran the tapes, they would be the ones blamed for the destruction of the marriage between Charles and Diana, so instead, they bought the tapes and hedged their bets, holding on to them until the perfect opportunity arose. That opportunity presented itself when news of Charles and Diana’s separation was announced three years later.

Speaking of Diana, she’s barely in this episode, and I’m starting to worry that this season is a waste of a perfectly good Debicki. In this episode, she mostly exists in reaction shots to Charles’s big public displays just so we know that despite the separation, she’s still impacted by the things he says and does. Charles, though, seems liberated by the separation, according to his mother, and as a result, he starts by criticizing the task force assembled by his parents and named “The Way Ahead,” which was set up to help modernize the traditions of the monarchy. Charles claims it doesn’t go far enough to bring the monarchy into the 20th century, barely addressing and real and important issues they’re so often criticized for ignoring. His newfound frankness comes at the exact time that the Mirror decides to release the recording of Charles and Camilla professing their “need” for one another several times a week, and the detail of him saying that he wished he could live inside Camilla’s trousers. “What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers?” Camilla asks him. “Or, God forbid, a Tampax, just my luck,” he jokes. The conversation is, above all else, silly and stupid, and the whole of England, including his estranged wife who has been hinting at this very thing all along, reads it in the paper when they wake up the next day. But Diana hardly feels vindicated by this proof that Charles cheated, instead, it’s just one more tiny dagger in her heart, further solidifying that he never loved her.

“It’s no secret I think over the years you’ve brought a great many problems upon yourself, but no one deserves this,” Princess Anne tells her brother when she comes to console him over the release of the tape’s transcripts. She admits to being kinda disgusted by the whole thing, but says that it had a whiff of “two teenagers of a certain age being so gloriously human and in love.” That’s the thing about being divined as a future king, isn’t it? You’re not supposed to be human, and to do so is a scandal. That’s been Charles’s (and Elizabeth’s) problem all along, and it’s what prompts Charles to agree, in response to this bad press, to provide some good press instead, by appearing in televised documentary about his life.

Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role was a documentary that took a year and a half to make – filming began in 1992 and the final product aired in 1994 – and it featured interviews between Charles and noted TV presenter Jonathan Dimbleby. While Charles earned some respect for his progressive views as the future leader of the Church of England and, in particular, his role as the “defender of the faith,” he was also honest (to a point) about his marital infidelity, telling Dimbleby that he was faithful “Until it became obvious that the marriage couldn’t be saved,” at which point he “rekindled” his friendship with Camilla. All of these wishy-washy responses don’t please anyone in his family, but he seems oblivious to any criticism, seeing the interview as a grand success.

In the show, Diana is seen seething as she watches the interview, knowing full well that Charles is bending the truth. Following the airing, she’s seen arriving to a benefit wearing what would come to be known as her “revenge dress,” a fitted, off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress that she looks incredible in. In reality, Diana wore the dress to the benefit at the Serpentine Gallery on the very same night that the documentary aired, perhaps as a little F-you to anyone thinking she’d be sitting around at home moping about Charles.

And Anne, who had thrown her support behind her brother in the wake of the phone sex scandal, seems less supportive now that his interview has aired. Charles continues to think that the public’s interest in him is pure and has to do with his modern ideas and insights about art and education and the environment, telling her, “People are interested!” but Anne snaps at him, “Maybe not as interested as you think.” Charles tells her that he’s set up a rival court in opposition to his mother’s, which Anne finds disrespectful, and she goes home to her parents to tell them what Charles is up to. She tells the senior royals, “He might be as mad as everyone thinks, but he’s not as weak as everyone thinks. The Charles I saw today was strong, confident, mature. Not only does he have what it takes for the job, but in some ways, he’s already begun.” Everyone is surprised and exasperated, but the joke’s on all of them, because Charles would still have to wait thirty more years to begin his reign.

As the episode concludes, Charles gives a speech to the students whose educations he has funded through The Prince’s Trust. “I’m sure that each of you has something within you, an unacknowledged greatness, a talent, that deserves to be recognized,” he tells them, speaking from personal experience, to great applause. The scene fades out and then comes back up on a dance floor where we see a group of students breakdancing. They encourage Charles to join in and it is jaw-droppingly awkward, but just like with his documentary, you can’t fault the man for trying his best to be seen as cool and relevant. And now, 30 years later, he finally has his chance.

Lest you think that the breakdance moment was pure fiction, I’ll leave you with this:

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.