‘The Crown’ Season 6 Episode 7 Recap: When Will Met Kate

These final episodes of The Crown promised us a Prince William-Kate Middleton origin story, and we’ve finally gotten it with Season 6, Episode 7, “Alma Mater.” The episode does show the heir and his future bride meeting for the first time at St. Andrews, where they both attended university, but in order to create some drama around the meeting, the episode throws in quite a bit of bonus content that may or may not be the truth: Did Kate (played by Meg Bellamy)really bump into William and Princess Diana in 1996 as a young teen? Did Kate’s mother Carole really orchestrate Kate’s choice of school, her travels abroad, and eventually, her romance with William? Let’s go back to the beginning before we fact-check the whole things, shall we?

The show begins around Christmas, 1996, with young Kate shopping with her mother Carole (Eve Best) for a holiday dress. Outside the department store, Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki, back for just the one brief scene, which she steals), and William are selling charity issues of a magazine, and Kate buys one. Diana is warm and friendly and tells William to “Say thank you to Kate,” and though it’s a perfect setup to the royal romance, it’s confirmed that it never really happened.

But in the world of The Crown, Kate develops a crush on William after the brief encounter, cutting out pictures of him for her wall, and her mother, often accused of being a social climber in real life, gets to become the mastermind of the relationship for this episode and for the season. Carole plants the see in Kate’s mind that no one is too good for her, not even a future King.

Three years pass, and now we see William, who is graduating from Eton, trying to decide where to go to college. Any time he gives a press conference that hints to his plans for the future and where he might be going to college, Kate’s mother is shown listening with pricked-up ears, as if to make a mental note of it to push Kate in a similar direction. Ultimately, he decides to take a gap year to travel the world, including an expedition in Chile and a rhino sanctuary in Kenya, before heading to St. Andrews in Scotland.

Guess who also goes on an expedition to Chile? In real life, Kate was planning to go to Edinburgh University, but she too decided to take a gap-year, and went on the same trip that William took, weeks apart, before deciding to switch schools and attend St. Andrews. Was it orchestrated or mere coincidence though? The show would like us to think that Carole was planting the seeds for all of this, but I guess we’ll never really know.

At St. Andrews, Kate and William both take art history courses together, and while they’re both considered to be big catches, they don’t actively pursue one another while at school. William starts dating the wealthy blue blood Lola Airedale Cavendish Kincaid (who is a stand-in for his real-life girlfriends Arabella Musgrave and Carley Massy-Birch), but he just keeps running into Kate while swimming, jogging, and art-historying.

While doing some research for their art history class, Will finds Kate in the library and they start chatting. It’s clear that there’s a spark between them as they discuss the expedition in Chile hey both had – especially clear to Lola Airedale Cavendish Kincaid, who busts in on them unhappily and makes snarky remarks to both of them about how cute and outdoorsy they are. The tension is broken (just kidding, it’s actually made worse) when another student comes over asking Will for an autograph and he screams at her to leave him alone. Kate and Lola are both entirely turned off by the outburst (“That was… weirdly rage-a-holic,” Lola says) and while they started the conversation as enemies, they walk out commiserating about how they, too, are on the receiving end of unwanted attention as women, and boo-hoo to William for not being able to handle people looking at him. He makes some dumb comments about how, sure, of course fit girls get unwanted attention, and they can’t believe the words that are coming out of his face and leave in a huff.

The actress playing Lola Airedale Cavendish Kincaid, Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter of Tilda!), is only in this episode briefly, but she definitely makes an impression and I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank her for committing so hard to being awful and wonderful all at once. Brava.

With both women in his life mad at him and moving on, William decides to bail on St. Andrews’ traditional “Raisin Weekend” festivities which involve shaving cream and dressing like clowns, I guess, in favor of a weekend partying at Balmoral. He gets super drunk while listening to Portishead (college in the ’90s really was the best) and speaks to a friend who tells him that Kate’s been flirting with another guy, Rupert Finch (Finchy), so he wallows for a while before deciding that he needs to apologize to Kate for being such a dick in the library.

At Christmas, Will heads home to be with his family, and hints that he’s unhappy at school. Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) has a nice scene with her grandson where she attempts to give him a pep talk about his love life, but it’s hard to relate when you met your husband during the Stone Age. (“[Dating.] I don’t know that word,” she tells him. “In my day, we met someone, then married them, then got on with it.”) She tells him not to lose faith though, God has a plan, etc. A plan to marry Kate!

Meanwhile, at the Middletons, Kate has brought Rupert home for Christmas and he seems perfect, except that he’s not a prince. Carole seems to study him and while he’s perfectly charming, she just seems to disapprove. Eventually, Kate confronts her mom, saying, “You’ve always had your sights set on someone else for me,” then revealing the series of “coincidences” that she says her mother set up: the Chilean expedition, persuading her to attend St. Andrews, an art history course in Florence that William was meant to be at. “I thought you’d thank me! You said you liked him!” Carole tells her daughter. She then reveals that she’s heard “on the grapevine” that William is miserable and wants to drop out of school.

Harry confronts William at the palace while on a smoke break, telling him he’s not allowed to drop out of school. “Stop muscling in on my territory. I know my job to be the fuck up of this family,” he says, not quite joking. Around this time (in 1999/2000) Harry was known for being a troublemaker (the incident where he wore a Nazi uniform wouldn’t occur till 2005, though), and he tells William that their dad caught Harry with weed, and wants him to visit a drug rehab center as a punishment. “It’ll be in all the papers and make me look like a lost cause, again,” Harry explains. “People will say ‘poor boy, ever since his mother died…”

“There’s no need for a number two in this family, except as entertainment,” the spare tells the heir. While it sucks to be Harry in that situation, it definitely also sucks for William, a person for whom there is no room for error. Harry’s sad pep talk might have helped William realized that dropping out’s not an option, but what really seals the deal on that decision is when he gets a middle-of-the-night text from Kate, telling him, “Please don’t leave uni.”

Amid the dim green glow of William’s phone, he smiles because everything just changed.

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.