The Crown finale sets up more than it settles
Everyone is fighting for their place in New Britain
TV Reviews Elizabeth II
Well, we’ve come full circle. Season five opened with a boat metaphor and it closes with one: “Decommissioned” might tell the story of Britannia’s final voyage, but it’s Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) who feels like she’s on her way out.
The Fayeds are also back in the finale, with Dodi (Khalid Abdalla) excited to introduce his father Mohamed (Salim Daw) to a special someone. The Crown plays with expectations here, knowing the audience assumes he’s talking about Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), but surprise! It’s model Kelly Fisher who has his heart (for now).
Post-divorce, Diana is holed up in her Kensington Palace apartment, watching a live special debating the merits of the monarchy. When the host tells the audience to call in and vote yes or no, Diana pulls up her phone’s antennae and keeps her finger on that redial button. “You have voted no for the monarchy” an automated voice tells her over and over again. Girl, move on with your life! Put that £17-million settlement to use and go do whatever you want! But she’s caught in her obsession over the possibility of a “King Charles and Queen Camilla.”
At this point, the show feels a bit stuck on what to do with Diana. The divorce has been played out to death, dominating the second half of the season. Season six will obviously wade into the tragedy of her death and the seismic impact it had on the royal family. But between now and then, what are they to do with her? Watching her mope around the apartment and get chased by paparazzi over and over again does not make for interesting TV.
The rest of the royals are gathered for Elizabeth’s birthday. As they sit down to eat, the conversation turns to the impending victory of Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel), who is projected to give the Labour Party its first win in 18 years, and Hong Kong’s sovereignty transferring from Britain to China. “China is taking Hong Kong away!” says the Queen Mother (Marcia Warren) to admonishment from the table. “They’re taking it back, Granny,” says Charles. Speaking out against colonialism! What won’t this season do to make Charles look good?
Turns out Tony Blair does win, in a landslide, and in his victory speech he says, “We have the opportunity to change Britain.” For the rest of the finale, the royals make this sentiment all about them. Will that change mean the end of the monarchy? Or will it mean, as Charles is hoping, a new monarch?
Elizabeth has a tender goodbye with Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller), telling him she will miss his calm and stability, and that he ranks highly on her list of prime ministers. I was struck during this scene by how many times we’ve seen Elizabeth do this now—say goodbye to an old PM and welcome in a new one.
As Major leaves, Blair comes in for his welcome, and essentially their first order of business is the damn yacht. The Labour Party is committed to decommissioning it, but Blair has a proposed alternative: A new yacht, not paid for by the government, but by a private company that will then lease it back to them. “Like Avis?” mocks one member of the royal family when Elizabeth shares the idea with the group. The real punch to the gut is he would want to name the yacht New Britain. “Wasn’t that his campaign slogan?” scoffs Margaret (Lesley Manville). Elizabeth tells the new prime minister she would rather the yacht be decommissioned.
“After 43 years of service, a million nautical miles around the globe, the royal yacht will be retired,” the queen says miserably. Her last voyage will be Charles’ return trip from Hong Kong, as everyone agrees it’s not a good look for Elizabeth to attend the ceremony. Later, in conversation with Camilla (Olivia Williams) and Mark Bollard, Charles notices what the rest of us have been aware of all season. Elizabeth is not sad about Britannia, “her grief is for herself, for the institution she represents, like she was being decommissioned.” Glad you’ve caught up there, old sport. Still, he’s excited to go to Hong Kong because it’s an opportunity to sneak in a meeting with Blair.
Meanwhile, we get a little time with the Fayeds. Dodi requests Daddy send the jet to Los Angeles to pick them up (“Kelly, meet G4”), and they have sex and run lines and do some coke on the private plane. They’re having fun, but when they meet Mohamed and his wife Heini over dinner, the two men talk in Arabic and it does not go well. “Isn’t it enough just to fuck her?” Mohamed asks, unimpressed by his son’s new flame and irritated that his movies have all been flops lately. He wants more than a swimwear model for his eldest son. Someone like…a princess?
At a production of Swan Lake, Mohamed catches sight of a melancholic Diana alone in her box and invites her out for a meal after. They’re hounded by paparazzi, and when Diana shares the palace nixed her plans to take the boys to America for the summer, he invites them all to his house in Saint Tropez instead. There will be jet skis for the boys and “sunshine and shopping” for Diana, another callback to the premiere. She says she’ll consider it.
Charles attends Hong Kong’s official breakup with Britain, giving a speech in the pouring rain as the British flag is removed and the Chinese one goes up, marking the end of 156 years of British rule. Afterward, Charles welcomes Blair onto Britannia for a meeting, and the new PM says his tour of the yacht has him regretting decommissioning her. He’s struck by her “sense of tradition,” but Charles tells him not to bother. “There’s no point in clinging to the past. We must be excited about the future.”
Of course, Charles can’t help but make the conversation about himself. He says he wants the two of them to work together as young, modern men of Britain, bettering the country, but he quickly pivots to how he should be allowed to marry Camilla. Blair is impressed by his “genuine desire to engage and make a difference,” if a little surprised by how eager he seems to be throw his own mother under the bus.
But word of this meeting—and Charles’ use of the yacht to take a little holiday with Camilla on the way home—gets back to Elizabeth, of course, setting up the final confrontation of the season. She summons him and says she’s surprised by his use of the yacht for his affair. “My affair?” Charles protests. “I’m an unmarried man.” Things go south from there, with her reprimanding him for meeting with Blair, and him suggesting her holding on is damaging the future of the monarchy.
“In Hong Kong, I saw how easy it is to dispose of us,” he pleads. “If we don’t move with the times, the world will move on. And those who come after you will be left with nothing.” It’s the episode’s most dynamic scene, mostly because The Crown is at its most interesting when all the big, historical context becomes personal. Just two people airing grievances and fighting for control.
As Elizabeth attends her own private farewell to Britannia, Diana packs for her trip to Saint Tropez, Dodi proposes to Kelly, and Mohamed jets across the water. It’s the end of an era, but it’s also the edge of a cliff; so much of “Decommissioned” feels like setting up dominoes to be knocked down by the turmoil we know is about to erupt. See you for season six!
Stray observations
- At Elizabeth’s birthday, everyone gives her gag gifts (she loves the singing bass from Andrew [James Murray]) except Charles, who misses the mark with a framed landscape.
- John Major leaves a note for Tony Blair on the desk: “It’s a great job. Enjoy it!” Classy! And goodbye to Jonny Lee Miller, who has inspired complex feelings for many by making Major hot.
- The funniest moment of the episode is when Bollard tells Charles he hasn’t been able to get him out of business class for the flight to Hong Kong. Camilla, a gem: “You’re going to have to be very brave. But I promise you, you’ll survive.”
- Runner up: Elizabeth wants to turn down Diana’s request to take the boys to Saint Tropez but acknowledges it’s her turn with William and Harry for the summer. “I’m told it’s what divorced parents call parenting.”
- I’ll admit that by the end of the season, there wasn’t a trace of Umbridge in Imelda Staunton’s Elizabeth.
31 Comments
Really how do you solve a problem like Diana? It would be a dramatic way to end the season if she died, hell the Hong Kong handover was in July and she died in August so its not that far off. But then it makes all the Fayed stuff feel too rushed, not that they’ll give Dodi much material next season beyond fall in love and die. Do you do the tunnel at the end of the first episode next season? Do you just put a frame that says *Watch The Queen Here* and skip to like 2000? I don’t know what the right answer is but I don’t feel it was handled gracefully this season.PS, Diana being petty and voting no for the monarchy was kinda the most endearing thing she did this season, that’s probably a bad sign.
I’m guessing we see Diana and Dodi date in episode one and two, car crash in episode three, Morgan will do something different than what he did with The Queen and then see the deaths of Margaret and the Queen Mother. Maybe it ends with her Golden Jubilee in 2002 or Diamond Jubilee in 2012 if they want to show Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2005.
Probably yeah. Post Diana I can see them just doing one episode each for the characters as we time jump to them dying. Maaaaybe the last episode has a modern day epilogue or a post script at least.
I wouldn’t put it past Morgan to take a page out of Six Feet Under and fast forward to Phillip and the queen’s deaths, and perhaps the weddings of William and Harry.
Oh god now I’m imagining a montage of everyone dying set to I Vow to Thee My Country. I can see this being done in maximum sappy fashion.
Gods, I hope that S6 only has minimal Diana in it. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the show reaching that part of the royals’ story, so my tolerance for all of it has been… low. If she appears at all in S6 (which rumors say she will), I hope it’s only very briefly – as in no more than an episode – before her death.
The first couple of episodes of Season 6 are going to be way drawn out. They’ll have to have Dodi dump Kelly and “fall” for Diana over a couple of episodes if they want to make this Fayed arc stick.My understanding is that Diana was in love was Dr. Hasmet Khan, whom she had dated for two years but who didn’t want to alienate his conservative family by marrying her. They broke up and she decided to hang out with Dodi in hopes of making him jealous. Diana was not intending and would not have married Dodi. She was absolutely savvy enough to know that the elder Fayed wanted to acquire her like a prize and Dodi was willing to go along with it. She wasn’t willing to be acquired, but she was willing to let the press and her ex-in-laws and ex-boyfriend think she was. It’s just horrible that thanks to Fayed’s crap security, he was able to rewrite the narrative. But Morgan has a weird amount of sympathy for the desperate nuevo riche Fayed and is weirdly teasing that there is something to the conspiracy theories he believed.
I didn’t know much about Dodis dad and oh boy is he not a great person from just his Wikipedia page alone. Terribly creepy with women across his career and he milked his sons death pretty hard.
And Morgan seems to be trying to find something deep in Fayed’s story, like he was a poor little boy who just wanted to be part of the royal circle. But he was a sleazy, desperate and vulgar hanger-on. The royals rubbed shoulders with plenty of brown people and muslims, just ones with a better pedigree. It’s not that racism and colonialism didn’t inform the story, it just was not the center of it.
The show also really skipped over how he made his money and framed any question of his wealth as racism. I’m sure high society French people were racist towards him, but honestly even a cursory glance reveals, yeah how he got rich is at least interesting and at most something that is worth looking into.
One of the big questions for this show is increasingly: what will the show do when it reaches Diana’s death? Because Morgan has obviously done that story already, and done it incredibly well. Given that this show is essentially a spin off of his 2006 movie, it’s an open question of how to handle it, and given that Morgan has moved her death to season 6, I don’t think Morgan himself entirely knew how to handle it.
Another question posing the show is: how do you top Michael Sheen as Blair? Since Sheen is a masterful actor and he’s completely perfect as Blair. The final question for the show is, where do you end this thing? I get the sense that if they knew beforehand, they would have tried to end the series with Elizabeth’s death. Right now, that’s not impossible, but would likely require either a major jump of a couple of decades, or more likely, some tacked on epilogue scene. I would suspect that if Morgan had known how much huge monarchy stuff was going to happen while he was shooting season 6, he would have never slowed season 5 to such a crawl.
Its also hard not to look at the actress playing Blairs wife and not recall Helen McCory, and how much it sucks she isn’t available. I imagine since last season isn’t done filming that they’ll make the last episode do some time jumps and end with her dying. Its too much for Morgan to pass up.
how much it sucks she isn’t available It really sucks for Damien Lewis
It does. Those two genuinely loved each other and didn’t hide it. It was really cute and his statement on her passing was genuinely hard to read. I don’t think I made this clear enough, her sudden death was really painful.
I read an article that it’ll end in the mid 2000s once William is in his early 20s. (They’re supposedly going to show him meeting Kate, but not going so far as their wedding.)
If that’s where it ends, well that’s aggressively lame. What a weird place, Morgan and the show are hardcore pro monarchy but said monarchy think its anti monarchy.
Morgan has said he’s not comfortable portraying historical events without a hindsight buffer of at least ten years, though he hasn’t ruled out doing a bonus season after that time has passed.
Hang on wasn’t The Queen from 2006? Diana dying was 1997. Yes I know I’m being pedantic. Also what in five years we can have Helen Mirren in a short season about how shitty Andrew is, the family is racist to the black woman and then she finally drops dead?
Practically no one in the crown’s audience even know about that movie much less has seen it
How eventful were the naughties to the teens for the monarchy really? I’m not exactly invested in the royal family, but as I recall, the only really big events were something like:Charles marries Camilla
Harry wears a nazi costume to a party then ‘fights’ in Afghanistan
William flies a helicopterThe Queen jumps out of a helicopterWilliam marries a slice of plain white breadHarry marries an actorHarry and the actor leave and do OprahAndrew gets revealed as a peodophile
Phillip diesQueen diesI guess the Queen Mother and Margaret die in there somewhere. Can’t see Peter Morgan doing much more than hinting at the Andrew revelation vaguely. The rest is probably too recent/too boring/not quite finished yet to really cover.For my money, I’d finish it with the Queen’s London Olympics bit, since I reckon that was probably a highwater mark for her popularity, contrasted to the disaster of the 90’s. Then maybe flash forward to old man Charles sitting behind a desk, opening a red box.
I have my problems with this show, but if they ended it with the queen in that Olympics sketch, it would undoubtedly become one of my favourite shows of all time. The sheer hilarity would be perfect, particularly how that would make the show the story of a young woman from a mysterious, publicly distant royalty gradually modernising to the ridiculous times and being far more loved as a result.
Harry really did some fighting in Afghanistan. Unlike the rest of his dad, uncles and Aunt (although Andrew did fight in the Falklands War) he actually earned his uniform.
goddamn what a stupid show!
At this point, the show feels a bit stuck on what to do with Diana.And THIS is why I think the show should open S6 immediately following her death. They have to deal with it. It is a Buckingham Palace sized elephant in the show. But I just don’t think there’s much else they can do with the character. It’s not like they haven’t time-jumped between seasons before. Jump to the immediate aftermath of her death and let the show start moving on from the soap opera that was Diana.
They where just filming the paparazzi car chase with the car entering the tunnel in Barcelona (posing as Paris) so the death is definitely getting shown next season. Hopefully a cold open to an earlier episode.
Maybe open it with Charles at her funeral and then use flashbacks to tell the story in the first episode? Idk… but I thought Diana was wonderfully mesmerizing and I think the show, just like the royals, won’t be as good, but perhaps I’m wrong.
The real question is, will Harry Enfield be back playing King Charles anytime soon?
*le sigh*Britannia’s final “voyage” in the show was actually her last mission on behalf of the UK Government, namely to bring back the then-ex-governor of Hong Kong (Chris Patton) and Charlie Boy. The actual last voyage was up to Leith, where she’s been ever since. (It’s very popular with the waddlers when they’re not being arseholes in central Edinburgh) You’d know that, dear, if you bothered to edit or use a fact-checker or something once in a while.Anyhow.My partner and I cracked up at the end of this episode. It was all very Brookside rather than Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth one, not the millennial one with Keira Knightley and her caterpillar brows) and, oh fuck me, the dialogue was crunchier than a raw poppadum. Don’t like who they’ve cast as Tony Blair – Blair was…Blair was not as much of a fuckwit as he appears in this show. (I’ll explain later) The definitive Tony Blair will always be Michael Sheen (it helps, if you’re going to play Tony Blair, that you’re a comedian who can do a near-perfect rendition). Now, onto Blair…Blair, in my opinion, gets too much flak for getting involved in the USA’s illegal invasion of Iraq. What this man inherited from John Major (who was distinctly not sexy and not as competent and charming and cuddly as this show made him out to be) was a fucking mess. It’s a shame that The Crown chose to ignore the social upheavals that were rippling through Britain all through the eighties and nineties. Then, you need to give the plebs what they want and the plebs want Diana looking coy and Charles being a cunt. Thatcher (not the sexy one as done by Gillian Anderson, LOL) had pretty much devastated entire swathes of this country and socially we were falling apart. Add in racial tensions (notably the Brixton Riot of 1981, not to mention the murder and then enquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence), mass unemployment, chronic under-investment in our most basic services (police, teachers, fire brigades, transportation, defence, the national health service (you know, Communist Medicine that means none of us goes bankrupt?) and the list goes on)…even nastier little things like attempts to roll back the decriminalisation of homosexuality (ahoy, Section 28, may you never sail these seas again) and limit or curtail equal rights (not just gay rights, but also pay parity between men and women, equal employment opportunities regardless of age, sex, gender, religion or race) and you start to see why my partner and I cracked up. Blair inherited what the next Prime Minister – and I think it’ll definitely be Keir Starmer, as much as I loathe him – will get: a broken country. Blair attempted to undo as much of the damage as he could. He really, really tried. Mind you, he got involved in illegal wars and helping deal with the USA’s daddy issues, so whatever he was able to reverse or even smooth out was pretty much undermined by the Credit Crunch and the arrival of Pig-Fucker Cameron.And that’s just a base description of the man (Blair, not the Black Mirror tribute act). The fact is – and this is something that was glossed over in favour of soap opera – Blair came in on a landslide victory. He was the last Prime Minister of the 20th Century. Another thing that isn’t mentioned in the show is that his wife, Cherie Blair was unlike any Prime Minister’s spouse we’d seen before. For a start, she wasn’t some meek doormat – Cherie Blair is a barrister (British for a type of lawyer who represents you in court and on telly are the ones you see mincing about in the discount Sith Lord gowns and with a scalped poodle on their bonces) and became a Queen’s Counsel in 1995 (now King’s Counsel. The title changes on the gender of the ruling monarch, dontchaknow. The KCs are like senior lawyers – and they wear black silk gowns in court (avec scalped poodle) so they’re like Goth Jedi). And what do we get instead? More moping from the Charles and Diana Variety Show and Camilla being a slut. Le sigh.
Carvel was really good as Blair. Not quite on the level of Michael Sheen but he gets the voice right.
Michael Sheen was so unbelievably good that no one could top him… absolutely uncanny.
The Crown is a brilliant pamphlet against the absurdity of a monarchic system. Too bad those who make it don’t seem to be aware of it.