Main cast: Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Anthony Anderson, Chantelle Humphrey, David Olusoga, Doria, Silver Tree, and Abigail Spencer
Director: Liz Garbus
Episode #1.2 is all about the persecution of Harry and Meghan and, perhaps paradoxically, the elevation of these two—by themselves, naturally—as truly selfless and giving activists. More importantly, it’s all about Meghan Markle, sainted martyr of racism and elevated superior human being.
I’m supposed to believe that there are screaming hoards of people wanting Meghan dead—when these two want to create a narrative that they are being hated by all—or loving them to pieces and stalking them 24/7—when they want to create a narrative that they are victims of fame, all in the same context. Sure, it’s possible for these two different situations to exist simultaneously, but discounting the cottage industry of slagging these two for social media clout, are there actually a stampede of people paying attention to these two?
I have my doubts.
Doria, Meghan’s mother, makes an appearance, along with a few more potted plants that are certainly not paid in any way, to give superficial chatter that don’t add anything insightful aside from how awesome Meghan is.
Indeed, the bulk of the episode is all about how awesome she is, how amazing she is that she manages to capture the affections of Prince Harry by her presence alone, and how everyone should love her for what a superior, humble, munificent person she is. Aside from the potted plants, she also plays the narrator of her own awesomeness, affecting this breathy, squeaky little girl voice that has me convinced of the real reason as to why her acting career dried up.
Meanwhile, she’s also a victim of racism. Oh, she has no idea what racism is, she insists, until she is subjected to it! Now, she knows: everything that doesn’t fall onto her lap, every time she doesn’t get her way—it’s all because she is a victim of racism!
In the same episode, her agent shares that he thought all along she’s just a tanned white woman. Well, that’s one way to keep the narrative consistent.
Is it possible for the Royal Family to be racist? Well, let’s see… a full-white bunch of out of touch people that can’t even squeeze out their own toothpaste onto their toothbrush, being racist against people that are not like them. Sure, I can buy that. Can I believe that the tabloid coverage of her is racist? Well, we are talking about tabloids here, they’d be racist or woke depending on which bring on the most sales.
However, Meghan then extends the narrative to talk about how she and her husband—well, mostly her—are now activists of the first order. They get awards from NAACP, they talk about Black Live Matters, and… well, they generally talk a lot and receive a lot of awards for talking.
Inspired by what a munificent person Sainted Meghan of the Markle is, I do a quick check of her activism and her podcast topics, which sadly boil down to her whining about how she is a victim of everything from racism to sexism. It’s all complaining and whining, but she offers very little in terms of advice, solution, or even assurance.
She’s just using activism as a platform to make herself more of a victim for attention, and that’s just sad for a woman approaching 40. She has a wealthy husband, nice kids, a lifestyle beyond most persons in this world… and she’s trying so hard to be that girl jumping up and down in the party and screaming, “Look at me! Please look at me!”
Perhaps the truest thing she says here is how she tried so hard to make people like her.
The biggest “drama” from this episode is her doing a mocking curtsy to her mother-in-law in a failed effort to be spunky and cute. She passes this off as her thinking that the act of curtsy is a joke and she’s an American, so she can’t be expected to understand this. She isn’t British, she can’t be expected to know what a curtsy is, hee-hee!
Well, this would be a non-issue except that there are soon reports that this thing never really happened and was a product of editing for the sake of narrative. Oh, and there is a clip of her from that TV show of hers doing a curtsy.
Most of this episode feel like flimsy lies created to build up Meghan, with her husband as an afterthought. She wants people to believe that she is an activist before she meets Harry, that she compromises her activism to be with Harry. What activism, well, why are you all being so specific? How dare you demand details from a strong woman of color! You must be racist!
The problem with Meghan and Harry is that most of the narrative they have been constructing since they married had been debunked. That infamous interview with Oprah had many “revelations” disproved by the people involved in whatever bull they said or by the surfacing of evidence showing that these two had far more imagination than honesty. Therefore, I’d think they would be more circumspect this time around, perhaps by spinning things that will be harder to disprove, but no.
Sadly, also, they are not that good of an actor to pull off the crap. I especially laugh when the episode opens with these two in traffic, and they proceed to act like they are being stalked by paparazzi. They are stuck in traffic. Am I supposed to believe that these paparazzi people are somehow phasing through traffic to get to them like some extras in those The Matrix movies? If they were really being stalked, why didn’t they show the actual people chasing after them?
Instead, they show some pics of Meghan walking on the street and such as “evidence” of her being stalked even when she was in Canada. How do I know these aren’t pics from her favorite collection of pics of herself? Also, there is plenty of talk and evidence that Meghan and Harry paid the paparazzi to take staged pictures of them out and about, so it’s so disingenuous of them to whine that they are victims of the very same people they hire to keep themselves in the news.
If there were to be any lessons to be learned from this episode, it’s that Meghan is such a deluded narcissist that she is completely unaware of how poorly she comes off as here. A super privileged woman whining that her being a victim of racism is equivalent to actual immigrants trying to get a new life in a new country, whining that her life is so hard because she can’t be arsed to follow protocols of a royal family she married into… yikes.
As for Harry, this episode just reinforces what most people believe him to be: an idiot and a gullible twat that is so desperate to marry his mother that he settled for being the doormat of a woman that cosplays as his mother.
This is a sad, sad episode and I may feel sorry for these two if they weren’t such deluded, self-absorbed bores that thought I’d be thrilled to listen to them whine about the same things that they’d been whining about for years.
