If Albert doesn’t stop moping around and mumbling, I’m going to reach into my TV screen and strangle him. 
I feel like we’re being brought through Victoria’s learning process so we can appreciate how much she matures later on.
The gay storyline is so much twaddle. They’ve used the names of real people who, AFAIK, in real life never met each other and by all accounts seem to have been as conventional as you might expect (and a good deal older and less eye-candyish than they are shown here, as they have done with Melbourne among others). Also, as far as anyone can tell, thinking and attitudes about homosexuality then were such as to make the way the relationship is shown to play out completely implausible.
I do seem to remember references in other documentaries, books and dramas to rumours about Albert’s parentage, not necessarily in relationship to his uncle, but that may just have been jealous court gossip.
And thus began the royal family’s summer holidays in Scotland.
Trivia; Robert Traill, the rector from Schull, Ireland in the potato famine episode, is an ancestor of Daisy Goodwin, the producer and writer of the show. (She is his great-great-great granddaughter.)
OK, this one was a rather trivial sidetrack which, I presume, was supposed to bring some humor. The folksy folk were good, but I wasn’t sure if we were to understand that they knew all along who the royals were. The gay guys’ story line just seems so forced into the overall plot, and DR needs to stop channeling The Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey. I liked the dancing scenes out… wherever that was supposed to be.
Yeah, the Highlands episode felt like they’d handed the script outline off to the summer interns to write the dialogue.
A factory in London, owned by a young woman, whose husband helps her with the paperwork? And that prompts no follow-up questions as the group is spending three hours staring into the fire?
Not to mention pointless and boring as a subplot. Maybe now that they’ve had the Big Moment, they can just bugger off. Pun intended.
I wonder if the producers are already facing the problem that Victoria’s life wasn’t exactly a non-stop series of exciting and dangerous novelties.
On the one hand, they probably want to draw out the story of her early life as long as possible, while they have a cute young woman and can emphasize her love affair with her sexy young husband. But the brutal truth is that her normal life probably ran along a well-ordered pattern that basically changed very little for years and years at a time. She read those papers, got briefings from the current Prime Minister, got pregnant, had children, sometimes got shot at by attention seekers with unloaded guns.
And sooner or later they’ll have to recast an older actress to play the dowdier matron. Yeah, they’ll no doubt continue to have servants and maybe her attendants to fall in and out of love and have scrapes, and eventually the kids will get old enough to have romantic adventures of their own. And they can have the things happening in the outer world have echoes in the palace, but their central character is going to be awfully static.