‘The Crowded Room’ Episode 7 Is Cathartic for All the Wrong Reasons

The Crowded Room Episode 7, coincidentally titled “The Crowded Room,” finally admits the truth about Tom Holland‘s troubled Billy Milligan stand-in Danny. He has dissociative identity disorder, or as it was initially coined, multiple personality disorder. Rya (Amanda Seyfried) is an intrepid psychologist trying to prove that Danny suffers from this mental illness in a time where it was considered a total farce. Well, at least, it wasn’t considered grounds to acquit someone of a crime.

Over the course of the last seven episodes of the Apple TV+ show, Rya has pieced together that Ariana (Sasha Lane), Yitzak (Lior Raz), Jack (Jason Isaacs), Mike (Sam Vartholomeos), and Jonny (Levon Hawke) are all separate personalities within Danny. They take over Danny’s consciousness to protect him from various traumas and to navigate day-to-day life. She believes that this means Danny is innocent of firing a gun in the middle of Rockefeller Center because it was one of his alternate personalities — namely Ariana — who actually committed the crime. However, as we see in The Crowded Room Episode 7, Danny’s personalities are conspiring against this strategy.

I just have to be blunt: I have been incredibly frustrated by Apple TV+’s The Crowded Room. Mostly because Danny’s condition was fairly obvious from Episode 1. Even if you didn’t know that The Crowded Room was inspired by Daniel Keyes’s The Minds of Billy Milligan, the show leaves enough breadcrumbs for an intelligent viewer to piece together that Danny has dissociative personality disorder. The fact that we had to wait seven episodes for the show to own up to it has been excruciating. Even worse? Apple TV+ sent critics, like yours truly, a note from showrunner Akiva Goldsman back in April warning us that we weren’t supposed to mention multiple personality disorder or its modern name dissociative personality disorder in any pieces published before Episode 7 debuted. It was apparently a “spoiler.”

I suppose Goldsman and the rest of The Crowded Room‘s creative team wanted to give Danny some measure of dignity. They wanted to unravel the emotional events that would cause a mind to create alternate personalities in order to survive. The problem with this approach is that it undermines the audience’s intelligence. The big question at the heart of this story — and that of real-life subject Billy Milligan — isn’t the main character’s diagnosis. It’s how did psychologists and lawyers convince a courtroom to acquit a person of a serious crime on the grounds of dissociative personality disorder?

The Crowded Room Episode 7 “The Crowded Room” is cathartic to say the least, but maybe for the wrong reasons. Instead of being able to enjoy Holland and Seyfried’s work as actors, I’m more relieved I can call a spade a spade. I can call The Crowded Room a show about dissociative personality disorder.