The first four episodes of The Crown’s breathlessly anticipated sixth season—now on Netflix, with the second portion of the final season due to drop in December—are a mixed bag. The show opens with the tragic death of Princess Diana, in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, as witnessed by a Parisian walking his dog. Mercifully, it plays out off screen—we hear a thunderous crash, see the flood of paparazzi race into the underpass after her, and the dog walker call the police—and then, we turn back the clock by two months to discover how the royal, and her reported boyfriend of some weeks, Dodi Fayed, got there.
The first two episodes—which feature Prince Charles (Dominic West) throwing a party to mark the 50th birthday of Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), while Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana and Khalid Abdalla’s Dodi get closer after holidaying together in the Mediterranean at the invitation of Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw)—are a tad baggy, but the second episode ends with a crescendo: Diana’s anguish at photographs of her and Dodi kissing hitting front pages, and her being inundated with questions about it at a press conference following her historic walk through a minefield. Faced with a hostile crowd, she keeps her composure—but, alone in her hotel room, we see her holding back tears, biting into one of her fingers and leaving a mark.
Debicki, wonderful in Season 5, has visibly grown into the part and is even more extraordinary this time around—relaxed and playful with the young Princes William (Rufus Kampa) and Harry (Fflyn Edwards), and in her moments of solitude, even more brutally weighed down by the media scrutiny, as well as the difficulties of fulfilling a public role while also being left out in the cold by The Firm. She ends the second episode staring out to sea, sitting on the edge of the diving board on the Al-Fayed yacht in her ice-blue swimsuit, her feet dangling as she contemplates her future—an image which graced the Season 6 poster, and nods to a real-life photograph, haunting in its depiction of Diana’s isolation and vulnerability.
It leads us to an explosive third episode, “Dis-Moi Oui”—a taut, 53-minute thriller which takes us on a breathless ride through the final days of Diana’s life: calls with her therapist in which she seems uncertain about her relationship with Dodi; getting mobbed in Monte Carlo when they decide to go ashore for ice cream; and the set of coincidences and near-misses that led them to Paris, to the Ritz, and finally, to that tunnel. Through it all, the press loom ominously in the distance—on boats in the ocean, racing down cobblestone streets in pursuit of her, banging on her windows as she cowers in distress—an ever-present harbinger of imminent doom.
When, in the fourth episode, “Aftermath,” the call comes into Balmoral to say that Diana has been involved in a car crash and, later, when she and Dodi both perish, I felt myself choking up—partly at the memory of this inconceivable loss that reverberated around the globe (seeing my own family dumbstruck by the news on TV, as a three-year-old living in Kolkata in eastern India, remains my first memory), but also by the show’s handling of it: Mohamed Al-Fayed’s despair at seeing his son’s body; the eerily silent scene in which a surgeon informs officials of Diana’s death and sees his own staff break down; and the similarly silent sequence in which the queen, Prince Philip, and Charles receive the news, and the latter all but collapses.
But, much of that work is undone by the appearance of Diana’s ghost, she who made headlines last month after news leaked that the princess would be shown speaking to Charles and the queen after her passing. The Crown’s creator, Peter Morgan, has been at pains to stress that she is more a vision than a “ghost” per se—“It was her continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she has left behind,” he explained to Variety. “Diana was unique, and I suppose that’s what inspired me to find a unique way of representing her. She deserved special treatment narratively.” Still, “ghost” does feel like the most efficient way to describe what we see—a black sleeveless turtleneck-clad Diana who is suddenly conjured out of nowhere, and smiles wistfully at her ex-husband from across the table of the royal jet.
“You were always the most beloved of all of us,” he tells her, and she looks appropriately bashful. “Thank you for how you were at the hospital,” she then coos. “So raw, broken… and handsome. I’ll take that with me.” A mascara-stained tear trickles down her face. “You know I loved you so much, so deeply, but so painfully too,” she continues. “It’s over now. It’ll be easier for everyone with me gone. Admit it. You’ve had that thought already.” Charles shakes his head and assures her that he hasn’t. “The only thought I’ve had since the moment I heard is regret,” he replies, but she insists that that will pass.
It’s a scene that raises a lot of questions: are these things that Diana, at least in The Crown’s conception of her, would say? Would she really believe that it’d be easier for everyone with her gone, even her young sons? Or, is it more likely that this is simply a projection of Charles’s mind—one which flatters him, assures him of her undying love, articulates his own thoughts back to him, and (posthumously) gives him permission to forgive himself?
The latter seems far more likely, but what follows confuses matters further. After Dodi’s funeral, his ghost (again, clad in all black) appears in his father’s study—but this spirit isn’t one that massages Mohamed’s ego. Instead, it gently admonishes him for placing so much value on how he’s viewed in the West, and for the outsized expectations he thrust onto his son instead of accepting him for who he was. This manifestation of Dodi seems to be far closer to the character we get to know in earlier episodes than Diana’s ghost is to The Crown’s real-life Diana.
But it’s the third apparition that is perhaps the most bizarre. After a tense conversation between the queen and Prince Charles, in which the former defends her decision to mourn Diana privately rather than publicly, Diana is shown sitting beside her on the sofa and reaching out to hold her hand. “I hope you’re happy now,” the queen says, unable to look at her. “You’ve finally succeeded in turning me and this house upside down.”
Diana murmurs that that was never her intention, but the queen continues: “Look at what you’ve started. It’s nothing less than a revolution.” Diana corrects her: “It didn’t need to be. But by making an enemy of me, not of me personally but of what I stand for, then it starts to look like one. They’re trying to show you who they are, what they feel, what they need. I know that must be terrifying, but it needn’t be. For as long as anyone can remember, you’ve taught us what it means to be British. Maybe it’s time to show you’re ready to learn too.”
It’s an odd moment—The Crown has always presented the queen as someone too level-headed and no-nonsense to have a vision of this kind, and this Diana, in turn, feels more like a figment of the imagination, a visiting angel sent down to set the queen on the right path, than the flesh and blood woman who, at least in the show’s portrayal, had a frostier relationship with the monarch than what we see here.
It’s an exchange that marks a turning point for the queen—she returns to London, delivers a televised address to the nation, and wins back the public, all in the space of six minutes.
In a sense, I understand why Peter Morgan chose this approach—after all, he penned 2006’s The Queen, the royal drama which earned Helen Mirren an Oscar for her embodiment of Queen Elizabeth II, and follows the latter as she navigates the days after Diana’s death, torn between staying behind palace walls and bowing to the political pressure to show emotion and comfort her subjects. Over its almost-two-hour-long runtime, it examines her growing realization that the country she governs, and what it demands of her, has changed, and that she must be willing to bend to its will in order to protect the future of the monarchy.
It’s natural for Morgan not to want to rehash the same scenes (though he does at points in Episode 4, including with that TV speech, which Mirren delivered with the same steeliness as Imelda Staunton), but couldn’t there have been a fresh approach that didn’t rely on the ghosts of Diana and Dodi? Could we have seen more of the events play out from William or Harry’s perspective, or even from the point of view of someone on the ground, someone who felt an intense kinship with Diana despite never having met her? The Crown, with its frequent standalone pocket episodes—the one about Lord Altrincham, who criticized the queen’s speaking style, or Michael Fagan, who broke into her bedroom at Buckingham Palace—has a formal fluidity that a film could never mimic, but instead of taking advantage of this, “Aftermath” is largely straightforward and far too truncated. It also, most strangely, seems to suggest that the queen’s actions, rather than being the product of days of reflection and turmoil, were swayed by a vision of the Princess of Wales.
In short, it’s something of a wasted opportunity—and the show’s most significant misstep to date. The first two seasons of The Crown are, in my mind, close to perfect, though it has wobbled since then, with plot lines involving Prince Philip’s obsession with the moon landing, his interest in carriage driving, his fascination with the Romanovs, the Queen’s attachment to the royal yacht Britannia, and so on. But, even at their worst, those diversions were simply dull—this, on the other hand, feels like a serious lapse of judgement. My only hope is that, as we head into the second half of the season—which is expected to chronicle Prince William and Kate Middleton’s romance at St. Andrews, as well as the run-up to the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles—these ghosts don’t come back to haunt us.
