When I finished watching the feverishly anticipated sixth and final season of The Crown this week, I closed my laptop, paused for a moment and wondered: when was the last time I’d thought the Netflix royal epic had released an instalment that was truly, unequivocally good? Season one, in my eyes, was pretty much flawless. (I maintain that episode two, “Hyde Park Corner”, the one where Claire Foy’s then Princess Elizabeth becomes Queen upon her father’s death, is one of the most masterful episodes of TV ever made.) Season two was wonderful, too; season three was painfully dull in parts, but had its moments; and much of season four, with the delightful Emma Corrin as a young Princess Diana and the frosty Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, was genuinely riveting.
It’s when I come to seasons five and six, though, that I find it increasingly difficult to justify the show’s existence. Sure, both feature a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of an older and more frustrated Diana courtesy of the impressive Elizabeth Debicki, but they also cover a period that is far too recent and too present in the public consciousness. The Crown was at its strongest when it shed light on things we didn’t know or had somehow forgotten—a newly married Elizabeth’s idyllic, sun-soaked life in Malta before taking the throne; Princess Margaret’s rebellious antics; the Duke of Windsor’s links to Nazi high command—but here, we were being fed the same stories about Diana’s Panorama interview, her revenge dress, and the run-up to her divorce from Prince Charles that had been dissected to death over the last three decades; stories which even younger viewers who may not have been around for the initial uproar are surely familiar with too, given the number of documentaries made about Diana and the general hagiography that continues to surround her.
It would be fine, even, if the show decided to do something inventive with these already over analysed periods of recent history, but, in most cases, it doesn’t. There are a few notable exceptions in season five – I loved “Mou Mou”, the fleet-footed deep dive into the life of Mohamed Al-Fayed, for instance – but beyond that, the show’s penultimate instalment is made up of plot lines that go nowhere (Margaret and Peter Townsend’s reunion, Princess Diana’s dalliance with Hasnat Khan), ones that threaten to send you to sleep (the royal yacht Britannia, the carriage driving, the Romanovs), and ones that simply recount tales we’ve all heard countless times.
It felt like the series, after six years and weighed down by its 21 Emmys and ever increasing expectations, was starting to run out of good ideas—and in season six, it finally did. The first four episodes of the most recent instalment, which cover Princess Diana’s final summer, her tragic death and its aftermath, feel oddly truncated: we speed through her romance with Khalid Abdalla’s Dodi Fayed, and before we know it, Rufus Kampa’s Princes William and Fflyn Edwards’s Prince Harry are walking solemnly behind her coffin.
There are moments that inspire genuine emotion, including when the world hears of Diana’s passing, but this perhaps has more to do with our own memories of that time than Peter Morgan’s depiction of it. The showrunner, for his part, barring the occasional artistic flourish (the eerie silence in which Prince Charles receives the devastating news), seems largely content to just tell the story as it was. When, in episode four, “Aftermath”, he finally takes a big swing and introduces the “ghosts” of Diana and Dodi, I felt obliged to give him credit for at least trying something new, but also obligated to report that this addition was more misjudged than anything the show had ever done before.
Which brings me to the show’s final six episodes which… well, on the whole at least, have no real, valid reason for existing. We begin with episode five, “Willsmania”, in which a teenage Prince William, now embodied by Ed McVey, mourns his mother and seemingly finds solace in letters penned to him by young girls who write things like “I’m sure you’ll look really sexy when you become king”. If that wasn’t enough, there are then actual shots of girls from around the world writing these notes in their childhood bedrooms and reading them aloud – girls who we, of course, never hear from or see again.
At the end of the episode, William’s silent dejection gives way to an explosive outburst directed at his father, who he blames for his mother’s death. It’s a powerful scene, but rather than giving those emotions more space to breathe, Morgan rushes everything to a bafflingly neat conclusion—Jonathan Pryce’s Prince Philip pays William a visit at school, they have a heart to heart in which Philip tells him that the anger he’s showing his father is something he actually feels towards his mother for her leaving them, and then William arrives to see Charles and gives him a big hug. Job done.
Up next, is “Ruritania”, which places the Queen head to head with Tony Blair, whose popularity appears to be soaring as hers is declining. It begins with a confounding, panto-esque dream sequence in which the monarch sees the prime minister being crowned the new king, while Philip, Charles and co look on, all but shaking their fists. Then, she wakes up, alarmed. It’s a sequence that is about as far as it’s possible to get from the subtle and profoundly moving earliest seasons of The Crown.
This nightmare apparently triggers a bout of soul searching for the Queen, who considers further modernising the monarchy on Blair’s recommendations, but as she debates trimming some of the ceremonial roles, she—and, you sense, Morgan, too—become misty-eyed. We’re treated to a montage in which royal employees with increasingly outlandish titles (the warden of the swans, the Queen’s herb strewer, the yeoman of glass and china pantry) wax lyrical about their jobs as sentimental music swells in the background. The moral is clear: the priority should be the upholding of tradition even in the face of basic logic and accusations of extravagance. “Modernity is not always the answer,” asserts Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth. “Sometimes antiquity is, too.”
It’s a very different message from the one delivered in, for example, season two of The Crown, when Claire Foy’s monarch bristles at the criticisms levelled at her by the outspoken Lord Altrincham, but eventually engages with him and accepts that the monarchy must adapt to the changing demands of society and, so to speak, lower the palace walls. Back then, this was a show that was willing to poke holes in and ask difficult questions of the institution—of how it’s treated the public and how the monarchy itself has limited and damaged those within it—but now, none of that thorniness seems to be left.
Thankfully, the next two episodes, “Alma Mater” and “Ritz”, are rather better. The former, an enjoyable if slight self-contained rom-com charts the meeting and burgeoning romance of William and Meg Bellamy’s Kate Middleton at St Andrews. It has a distinct Lifetime movie feel, but is undeniably fun, with two hilarious cameos – Tilda Swinton’s accomplished daughter Honor Swinton Byrne as the fiery and impossibly posh girlfriend of William before Kate, and Oli Green, Sienna Miller’s partner, as Kate’s university boyfriend before William.
“Ritz”, is starkly different in tone: an account of Lesley Manville’s wildly glamorous and then suddenly bed-ridden Princess Margaret, as she approaches the end of her life, plagued by strokes and bored out of her mind by the recovery exercises she’s forced to do. In one side-splitting moment, she sees her staff staring at her with concern as she naps, and yells, “I’m still alive!” The episode veers expertly from tragedy to humour and back again, and is intercut with another story that played out decades ago: the unbelievable true tale of the fresh-faced young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret sneaking out of Buckingham Palace on VE day for a night on the town. As a study of the pair’s lifelong bond, it all works remarkably well—but then ends with a fumble: the incredibly on-the-nose moment when the boundaries between these two timelines blur, and an older Princess Margaret tells a younger Princess Elizabeth, “I’ll always be by your side”, after which we’re told of Margaret’s death.
Then comes episode nine, “Hope Street”, which ticks all the boxes it needs to—the ongoing investigations into Princess Diana’s death, that infamous St Andrews runway show, the Queen mother’s passing, the Queen’s golden jubilee, and William and Kate’s decision to move in together—before bringing us swiftly to the very last episode, “Sleep, Dearie Sleep”. In it, the Queen is made to oversee her own funeral arrangements and contemplates stepping down to make way for her son as he prepares to marry Olivia Williams’s Camilla.
It’s then that two new, or shall we say old, “ghosts” appear—Claire Foy and Olivia Colman as younger iterations of the Queen who offer their advice as she struggles to make a decision about her future. In one of the best moments of the episode, and the season as a whole, Foy’s Queen urges her older self to remain in post. “What about the life I put aside, the woman I put aside when I became Queen?” Staunton weeps. “For years now, there has been just one Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth,” Foy replies coldly. “If you went looking for Elizabeth Windsor, you wouldn’t find her. She’s gone, long gone. You buried her years ago.” It’s a devastating gut punch of a moment that works only because Foy is and always has been an incredible performer, but I’m not convinced that these “ghosts” were necessary.
There’s a lovely scene towards the very end, after the wedding, when the Queen and Philip banter and you can see in them glimpses of the natural chemistry Foy and Matt Smith shared in those roles—but then, he leaves her side, she walks past her own imagined coffin, followed by the “ghosts”, and strolls towards the light that lies beyond the doors of the chapel. Then, it cuts to black. The effect should have been tear-jerking but, for me at least—given the clumsiness of this attempt to draw parallels between this moment and the Queen’s real-life passing last year, with her dressed in angelic white and her predecessors in the part in funereal black—was predictable and cringe-worthy.
The thing about The Crown, though, is that it’s never unwatchable—far from it. The acting is too strong, the production too lavish, the true stories it dramatises too compelling. Even at its most trite, it has moments of pure brilliance, but still, I’m not sure that warrants this latest season. It’s one that drags, going through the motions of this story and giving us very few illuminating new insights along the way.
Morgan had once confirmed that the show would end with season five, but then stated that as he began working on it, it became clear that six instalments would be necessary. In truth, the series should have ended years ago—perhaps with season four, which concluded with Diana’s sudden isolation, as the royals decide to freeze her out at Christmas. As she joins them for a family portrait, Emma Corrin’s expression is one of quiet shock and despair. We all know what happened next. Did we need to see it?
This article first appeared on Vogue.co.uk
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