The Crown's cast and crew aren’t having much fun preparing for Princess Diana’s death

For pretty obvious reasons (the real British royals hate the show enough already), the actual car crash that Diana and boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed (played in the show by Khalid Abdalla) died from will not be recreated for the show—something the people involved with The Crown seem very keen to repeat at every possible opportunity. Instead, the show will depict Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana getting into the car and leaving the Ritz hotel in Paris while being pursued by paparazzi, and then the aftermath of the crash with Dominic West’s Charles (who was but a lowly prince at the time) going to retrieve her body. The Deadline story also teases “contrasting scenes” of Salim Daw’s Mohamad Al-Fayed experiencing “casual racism” as he tries to retrieve the body of his son.

It all sounds intense and sad, for both people who are invested in the real royals and the TV versions of them, but it does seem worth noting that the people making this show knew what they were getting into with this. It’s not like they thought they could make a drama series about the life of Queen Elizabeth II that charts decades of royal storylines without someday getting to Princess Diana’s death. This is the “can’t have your cake and eat it too” moment for the show, at least once it committed to getting this far in the historical timeline.

But this is all a ways off. Season five of The Crown premieres on Netflix in November, so season six—the one we’re talking about here—is at least a year away.