I am through with episode 3 and I agree. Its good and well balanced. Very much on point with what the papers said about the summer.
Maybe its a bit much to assume that the old man Fayed pushed so much for the marriage and made Dodi propose that night (Diana said no) but of course thats the direction it was going all along.
We know for a fact that the ring existed but there was speculation that Dodi wanted to propose at his apartment after the car ride and did not do it as shown in the episode at the Ritz beforehand.
I am in the camp that never believed that Diana wanted to marry Dodi let lone was pregnant, therefore a consistent story line for me.
I felt the depiction of the relationship between Mohamed and Dodi was well done. It left me feeling sympathy for both of those characters as I think it made them feel real. Flawed, of course, both of them, but real. He wanted to please his father, as so many people do.
Over all these years there has been much speculation about the ring not being a typical engagement ring, and not one that Diana would have chosen, and why they left the Ritz rather than staying where it was relatively safe, and
The Crown offered what I thought to be very reasonable explanations for both. I have always thought that it was crazy for them to not stay at The Ritz that night, but the simple explanation that Diana's things were at Dodi's apartment and as she was leaving in the morning she thought it best to go back there, made perfect sense.
The events of those last few weeks in 1997 have given rise to an enormous amount of speculation over the past quarter century, occupying untold hours and hours of time in investigations and inquiries and documentaries and thousands of pages in newspapers and magazines and books and official reports, yet it all comes down to simple decisions made by ordinary people, that had tragic consequences. I think the ordinariness of the explanations offered in the show, and the manner of the telling the story, give it a real poignancy.
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