"The Crown" Season 6 Has Lost the Thread
Creative License Does Some Very Heavy Lifting in This First Drop
(Spoilers ahead. Obviously not about what happens, but HOW they portray what happens.)
One of my favorite performances of Princess Diana is, surprisingly enough, Kristen Stewart. Spencer takes us back to December 1991 and imagines what the final Christmas before Charles and Diana separated looked like from Diana’s POV. It’s a psychological thriller that the audience clearly isn’t supposed to take as gospel. Stewart does an excellent job bringing Diana alive in her scenes with young William and Harry. It really shouldn’t work, but it does.
There’s a way to tell the story of Diana, Princess of Wales that’s fresh and compelling. For whatever reason, the final season of The Crown episodes 1-4 decided to trod a well-worn path. Even Elizabeth Debicki’s incredible turn as Diana could not overcome that script. (All four episodes are credited to Peter Morgan as the writer.) One of the best things The Crown has done is find two perfect people to play Diana.
Instead of giving a beat by beat review, I’m going to provide some broad-strokes analysis about the first four episodes, starting with what I believe structurally went very wrong.
The Crown Season 6, Part 1 Is Not About The Crown
In my opinion, The Crown shines when the monarch is at the center, which makes this episode drop feel off-kilter. That’s the magic of the earlier seasons. In Season 6, Queen Elizabeth is in the background and a rather flat character. Even when we’ve had stories involving other senior members of the royal family, it always makes its way quickly back to the Queen at the nucleus. We’re always reminded that while this is an institution, she who wears the crown is the sun that everyone else orbits around.
There’s an argument that she was, in fact, sort of not there in real life, especially after Diana died. Also, that Diana was a part of the institution, forever, whether the Queen liked it or not. There was an opportunity in this show to delve into how the Queen viewed the Diana of it all and concerns among the palace courtiers about her relationship with Dodi. I would have also loved to see an interpretation of how Mark Bolland managed this setback for Operation CPB and The Prince of Wales’s subsequent plummet in popularity.
Secondly, four episodes is too damn long to focus on the weeks-long romance of Dodi and Diana. For a show that spans decades, they gave an inordinate amount of time to this storyline. One episode would have been far more effective. The pace is lost when you’re watching hours of this couple. One episode would have been jarring and left us wishing for more Diana. Making the time we have with her in this final season abruptly end could have acted as a larger metaphor for how short her life was and unexpected her death.
I am reminded (unnecessarily) by people that The Crown is fiction. Of course it is, but why not take the story there? Why focus on the most predictable, picked apart, moments of her last year of life? Why not shift the focus on lesser-covered stories around that time?
Diana in Crisis or Diana Starting Anew?
Going into Season 6 I knew that this was going to go one of two ways: Diana was either going to be portrayed as a woman in crisis or as a woman starting to come into her own. We unfortunately got Season 5 Diana, which is to say a slightly unhinged, unstable, love-obsessed individual. But there were so many signs of Diana forging her own path, like her anti-landmine work, which was ridiculed relentlessly by the press. Her relationship with Dodi is framed, presumably by her therapist whom she is on the phone with, as another reckless decision and a sign of spiraling. Can’t a girl have a freaking summer fling? She’s been divorced for a year. Why is this proof of some grand mistake? Well, it’s because of how Morgan chooses to portray Mou Mou and Dodi.
Who’s the Villain?
This was another crossroads for Peter Morgan. What is the impetus for the events leading up to Dodi and Diana’s fatal car crash? Who is the villain? In this telling it’s Mohamed Al-Fayed (Mou Mou), and to some extent, his bumbling, spineless son, Dodi. Morgan pins Mou Mou as the one who called the paps on his son, leading to that infamous kiss photo, and the person who forced Dodi to reroute Diana by flying into Paris before going home to London.
Morgan does take a beat to note the racism that Dodi and Mohamed experience from the British, especially the papers, but doesn’t consider the racism in how Mohamed is played as a caricature of a greedy, Middle Eastern man in this very show. The whole thing felt bizarre. In real life, after the death of his son, Mohamed ran with theories that the Palace killed Diana and Dodi. While I don’t typically delve into, “is the Palace influencing The Crown?” conversation, could this be a little bit of payback for that? To plant a new theory? (Even though it’s fiction, I promise you we’ll see blustering opinions presented as “facts” based on plot points from The Crown.) Morgan did receive a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2016, but I’m hesitant to say that influenced his writing of the show. Although a nod in that direction would be that, between the actor and the script, Prince Charles has a notable glow-up in Seasons 5 and 6. Also there’s a softening on Camilla Parker Bowles who, in this part one drop, suddenly becomes a labrador puppy with no stakes in the operation Private Secretary, Mark Bolland, has concocted with the enthusiasm and buy-in of Prince Charles to win the Queen (and the public’s) approval.
Ok Let’s Talk About “The Thing”
Prince Charles sits forlornly in his private plane as it flies from Paris to London, his dead ex-wife safely ensconced in the cargo hold. He allows a slight, sad, grin as he mutters that only Diana could shut down the busiest city in the world.
And then we hear “ta da” AND IT’S PRINCESS DIANA’S GHOST.
If the jump scare wasn’t enough, the dialogue nearly took me out. Diana’s apparently done an about-face in heaven, telling Charles how seggzy he looked when he came to Paris, how she loved him terribly, and the world would be better off without her in it. Zero mention of the boys.
The only way this remotely makes sense is if it’s interpreted as the conversation Charles would have wanted with Diana. What he wanted to hear.
I might have been able to stomach one of these scenes, but it doesn’t stop there. Mou Mou is sitting at his desk and then…DODI APPEARS. It was from then on that any time a character was alone or staring out in the distance I tensed up, wait for an apparition to appear.
By the time Diana gets around to visiting Queen Elizabeth, I was hysterical. Probably not the reaction they were hoping for, but I’m also grateful it was heavy-handed and contrived because my grandfather recently died and I cannot handle that shit right now.
This was the option someone would pitch in the SNL writers’ room. It’s so unbelievable and above what a prestige television show (?) would resort to. There is a way to do this and Elemental Elsa gave an excellent idea on my TikTok video, writing that they could have had Charles speaking to Diana, but all we have are her facial expressions. To add on to that, maybe have her cut in and out so we see this conversation he’s having in his head across from an empty chair. Again, there’s a way to do this that is arresting and moving. This just wasn’t it.
Perhaps The Crown has overstayed its welcome.
-Meredith
I have some sympathy for Peter and trying to tie this series up into a bow. Totally agree th series best work was when it really did center around the “crown” even when the plot isn’t about Elizabeth. I also think what made previous seasons work was the fact that there was far less of a collective memory or experience of what had happened from the audience. The 90’s and beyond still feel very present day and the topics he is attempting to cover will never leave us satisfied because of the MANY ways we could talk about these events. Previous seasons had the benefit of history that gave the story its gravitas. While I think some aspects of season six have deviated from its original narrative of the “burden of the institution” (in some ways) I also think it would have been difficult NOT to center around Diana in the way that it did for several episodes. In a way, her presence in real life did represent a hijacking of the crown and the Windsor family’s way of life. Even if I haven’t enjoyed everything, there have been a number of beautiful/powerful scenes that should be acknowledged (the first 6 minutes of episode four as an example).
Such great observations! I do wonder if part of the reason the focus was on Diana for 4 full episodes is because there was a chance at the time that her death and her star power could have eclipsed the steadiness of the Crown. It also seemed that there were some Easter eggs that flashed backwards to the way the Duke and Duchess of Windsor left a lot for the RF to deal with, and then flash forward to future situations with Harry/Meghan that history was repeating itself.