Recap & Review – The Crown Season 3 – Episode 3 Aberfan
In this latest episode we start in October 20th 1966 in a small Welsh town of Aberfan in what is a quiet school day in the pouring rain with the echoing song of ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ being sung by the school kids around the town as the coal workers return home to help learn the words.
The next day with school starting, the workers returning to work and the sun shining, Aberfan is going about a normal day, only the mining area is collapsing unlike anything seen before. This leads to disaster in this small mining town, when a landslide buries the town killing 144 people including 116 school children who were right in the path of the disaster.
Harold Wilson heads to the site to visit learning about all the safety risks that had been broken, demanding people of authority visit the location to address why the disaster happened, demanding changes an investigation into what happened and dealing with the parents who have been calling for help for years.
While Harold Wilson reports the tragedy to Queen Elizabeth II suggesting she visits the site to comfort people, to show how she a mother would have been affected by the tragic loss of life of over 100 children, in a community that would be broken.
Harold is facing his biggest problem, with the problem being a Conservative mistake, which the Labour are facing the consequences needing to push the Queen to do the unthinkable for her to face a tragedy head on, only she has been waiting too long to face the tragedy, even after her husband Prince Philp’s visit attending the memorial service.
The whole episode is focused on whether the Queen is doing the right thing by not visiting the disaster, reflecting her public image, almost needing to be forced to visit the tragedy, rather than showing her human side, by just doing the right thing an attending, however difficult it will be for her to break the traditions of the crown, to try and save face in the public light.
This is one of the hardest episodes of television you will ever watch, it is reflected in how the positive song the true tragedy that finally bought around change for the mining community that the law hadn’t ever considered. It showed one of the biggest changes in the Queen’s mentality and somehow it became a political problem. This will leave you emotionally broken when watching any of the disaster side of the episode.
Rating 10/10
