Savoring the Opulence of "The Crown"--"Couple 31" (S5, Ep. 9) and Decommissioned (S5, Ep. 10)
The final two episodes of the fifth season bring its narrative to a satisfying conclusion.
“Couple 31”
Well, we did it, kids. We made it to the final round of analyses of individual episodes of The Crown. It’s been a lot of fun, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. I personally find it very rewarding to do a deep-dive into what makes a particular episode of television work (or not), particularly when it’s a show that I love as much as I do The Crown.
In any case, let’s stop beating about the bush and get down to brass tacks, shall we?
When the episode opens, Elizabeth is in the midst of writing a heartfelt and wrenching letter to Charles and Diana, urging them both to divorce. As she narrates the contents of said letter, we get to see how much heartbreak this causes her, both as a monarch and as a mother. As someone who has always taken the institution of marriage very seriously–to say nothing of the fact that she is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England–this whole affair clearly wounds her deeply. However, say what one will about the Queen, she is willing to face a crisis head-on, and when it becomes clear that the marriage is damaging the two people too much (to say nothing of the damage it’s inflicting on the royal brand), she ultimately has to cave to necessity.
After this moment, Elizabeth sort of fades into the background, as she has many times this season, and the stage is set for Diana and Charles to once again take the main stage.
One of the notable shortcomings of this season has been that we get to see remarkably little of Diana and Charles together. Thus, the breakdown of their marriage seems to take place largely off-screen, and we’re left to infer some of the things that happened between the end of the fourth season and the beginning of this one. At long last, however, we finally get to see the two of them in the same room at the same time for an extended period of time, and at first it seems as if they are, finally, going to have the kind of conversation that many divorced couples no doubt wish they could have, in which they speak openly and even fondly about the things that went right, and the things that went wrong, in their relationship.
Whether or not the two of them ever exchanged anything close to this type of actual conversation, it does speak to some broader truth, and it gives their fictional versions a means of expiating some of the ghosts of the past. For Diana, it’s a chance to tell Charles how much she did love him, even though she wasn’t necessarily happy for him. For Charles, it’s an opportunity to tell his ex-wife just how difficult it was being married to her. There’s a raw intensity to both Dominic West’s and Elizabeth Debicki’s performances here, and yet there’s a tenderness as well. One gets the feeling that one is bearing witness to a real, authentic conversation.
Unfortunately, as so often has been the case between these two characters, it all comes tumbling down in mutual acrimony. Diana, perhaps foolishly, opts for honesty, and her words come out more harshly than she had intended and Charles, never one to back down from a fight–particularly when his honor and sense of self are at stake–lashes back. It’s really rather heartbreaking to watch, for who hasn’t been in a similar set of circumstances? Charles takes particular umbrage at Diana’s assertion that he might not be suited to be king and that, more to the point, it might bring him much more misery than happiness. It certainly doesn’t help that she’s probably right, but Charles isn’t in the right frame of mind to see this.
In the end, Diana and Charles are just like so many of the other couples that we see seeking out divorces. For all of their vaunted status, the truth is that they are just two people who were never quite suited for one another and who discovered, only too late, that fairy tales don’t always end happily. In fact, they far more frequently end in misery for both parties. It’s a bit of a bleak message, to be sure but, as the many scenes in the divorce office show, this is a reality of the Britain of the late 20th century. Everyone has their own heartbreak story.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the attention that this episode also gives to Camilla. She’s another of those characters who has sort of hovered off-screen this season, but in this episode we see the toll that the whole affair has taken on her. After all, her only mistake was being in love with a man who she couldn’t marry, and so it makes sense that Charles would employ someone to help massage her public image. As we in the 21st century know, however, it will take a very long time indeed for these efforts to bear fruit.
Overall, I thought this was a very strong penultimate episode of the season. It really does allow us to appreciate the wrenching humanity at the heart of this whole tragedy. These days, it’s far too easy to look back at this whole affair as some sort of sordid fairy-tale-gone-wrong, but The Crown restores the humanity to the situation. While no one comes out of looking particularly good, nor do they emerge particularly evil. And that is quite an accomplishment.
“Decommissioned”
And now, at last, we come to it, the conclusion to the season. Elizabeth, and the Royal Family–hell, even the institution of the Crown itself–have endured quite a few blows during these episodes, and so we have to bid farewell to this particularly dark period. Most of this episode focuses on the winds of change that are currently sweeping through the air, not just in the UK–where a general election brings the Labour Party into power–but also across the world, as this episode marks the moment when Hong Kong is transferred from British to Chinese suzerainty. And, of course, it also comes full circle, in that we finally get to learn the fate of Britannia.
Way back at the beginning of the season, we saw Elizabeth attempt to convince the Prime Minister to refurbish the ailing royal yacht, in the hopes that the people of the UK would be willing to foot the bill. With the introduction of a Labour government under the premiership of Tony Blair, however, this seems very unlikely, and the best they offer a sort of cost-sharing agreement. A very put-out Elizabeth very definitively scuttles this idea, and so it is decreed that the ship will at last be decommissioned, much to her heartbreak and chagrin.
Meanwhile, Charles continues to chafe at the restrictions placed upon him by the institution of which he is a part. Fortunately for him, he gets the chance to be the royal representative at the handoff in Hong Kong, since Elizabeth will be visiting Canada at the time. This being Charles, he’s not one to let an opportunity like this pass him up and, though the rain pours down, he manages to convey the royal dignity, after which he has a very portentous meeting with Tony Blair. It’s another of those probably-imagined conversations, but it nevertheless is the clearest indication yet that Charles is no longer content to just sit on the sidelines. With a forward-thinking ally like Tony Blair at his side, it’s entirely possible that he fight more success than he has before.
Not that Elizabeth herself is going to go down without a fight, and she’s not afraid to confront Charles about the fact that he has, once again, stepped out of bounds with this unauthorized conversation with the Prime Minister. While he might be the heir waiting in the wings, she is still the sovereign, and she is not afraid of telling him this. Of course, we who have been with the show from the beginning know that this isn’t the first time that she has had this conversation with the person who will one day sit on the throne, but it now has a sharper edge. They have both grown, but in very different directions. Elizabeth has grown more brittle with the passing years while Charles, whatever his flaws, is far more dynamic than he was when he was a young man. He wants to make changes, and this scene shows just how far he’s willing to go to bring those to pass.
And so we come to the final scenes of the episode, which juxtapose Diana having the time of her life on-board Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht while Elizabeth sadly wanders the deserted halls of Britannia. There is, for me, anyway, something strangely moving about the sight of the Queen’s tiny form, dwarfed by the derelict majesty of this mighty ship. It’s not that I’m particularly sympathetic toward her desire to have the ship refurbished; it’s more that I feel for her sense of obsolescence. When she first boarded this ship, she was a young monarch, with all of the future and its potential spread out before her. Now, she has to contend with a world that is not only strange but also, increasingly, hostile. In some ways, she seems even more out of place aboard this icon of royal largesse than she has at any other time or place we have yet seen.
The obvious question of course is…whither goest thou, The Crown? This seems, to me, to have been a good place to call it quits, before chaos erupts with Diana’s tragic death. Unfortunately, we know that this sequence of events is going to make an appearance and, since we have already met Dodi–and his father–the tragedy is going to be all that much more impactful. Hopefully, The Crown doesn’t opt to just retell the same story as we saw in The Queen, and not just because Imelda Staunton, whatever her other tremendous gifts, simply can’t hold up to a comparison with Helen Mirren. It would also be rather tedious to see the same argument played out again. However, I do have faith that Peter Morgan knows what he is doing.
I know that this season of The Crown hasn’t been everyone’s favorite, but I’ve appreciated the way that it has been a little more harshly critical of the Royals than in previous seasons. What’s more, it has continued to elaborate on the central thesis laid out way back in season one: namely, that the Crown is a heavy weight that crushes the life out of those who are forced to wear it (or to be near it). And, because we’ve gotten to see this play out over several years, our temporal experience of this phenomenon is a microcosm of the one that the characters themselves face. We’ve witnessed the burden of both the Crown and History, as they have borne down on Elizabeth and her progeny and their wives and lovers, until they have all become part of this many-headed organism.
Peter Morgan, and the series he has created, deserve a great deal of credit for the insight they have given into the workings of the Crown. Even if, as we have seen throughout the season, there are some notable liberties taken with established fact and history, the series, like all of the great period dramas, does get to some other form of truth, something beyond the merely factual. It somehow manages to shine a light onto the phenomenon of the Crown and the individuals who make it up, as well as the strange alchemy that allows the British people to continue to believe in such an institution, even as it increasingly comes to seem like a relic from another age.
And that is, perhaps, The Crown’s greatest achievement. It makes us like it and appreciate the Crown–and the Royal Family–in ways that we might not have done before. While we may be puzzled by it, there remains, somehow, something of the divine about it. This series, and the many dazzling personalities who have brought Queen Elizabeth and her family to light have, through the magic of the moving image, remystified the monarchy, when all along we thought it was doing the opposite.
And that is a strange magic, indeed.