The Crown spins its wheels in an episode about Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage
The low-stakes “Ipatiev House” feels more in line with earlier seasons of the show
TV Reviews Elizabeth
[Editor’s note: The A.V. Club will publish episode recaps of The Crown’s fifth season every weekday at 1 a.m. Eastern through November 22. The following details episode six.]
This episode was a throwback for me, frantically googling Russian political events and just exactly which George was King of England in 1917. (It’s George V, Elizabeth’s grandfather.) Season five of The Crown is playing mostly in events from the 1990s, and even if you weren’t forming conscious memories during Charles and Diana’s divorce, you’ve probably absorbed at least some of the history from a family member who was obsessed with it. But “Ipatiev House,” named after a merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg where the Romanovs were murdered, felt more in line with the earlier seasons of The Crown, when people (surely not just me) had several Wikipedia articles open to figure out what actually happened back then.
We open on the British royal family in 1917, with King George V, Queen Mary, and their son talking about hunting tallies over a meal. George has a parrot on his shoulder for some reason (likely to make him seem frivolous and annoying). They get a letter from the prime minister saying because of the ongoing war, he wishes to bring the Romanovs (cousins to the royal family) to safety in England but doesn’t want to do so without the support of the monarchy. George passes the decision to his wife.
Juxtaposed against this stuffy lunch and inconsequential hunting excursion, we see the Romanovs celebrating word of their rescue, only to be led into a basement and executed by firing squad in a brutal scene. So what does that have to do with our royals in the ’90s? News coverage explains that there’s drama in Moscow as Russia has elected its first democratic president, Boris Yeltsin, but there’s a coup to restore communist rule. Seems like the Romanovs are bound to come up.
Philip (Jonathan Pryce) is about to leave on a three-week tour across the world to give some talks and do some carriage driving (enough with the carriage driving), causing tension between him and Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton). “Don’t you ever get tired?” she asks. “Only by sitting still,” he replies. On this tour is Penny (Natascha McElhone), the mourning mother from a few episodes back, and she and Philip seem to have grown close. We’ll come back to that.
After returning from a trip to Russia, Prime Minister Major (Jonny Lee Miller) informs Elizabeth that Yeltsin is something of an Anglophile and is obsessed with meeting the queen. Flattered, Elizabeth welcomes him to the palace for a visit, but before he arrives, an aide informs him that while Yeltsin was a local official in the 1970s, he ordered the demolishment of Ipatiev House, an act of disrespect to the murdered family.
During their visit, Yeltsin requests a state visit to Moscow from the queen, and she leverages this ask to criticize what happened to Ipatiev House. To her face, Yeltsin assures her he will restore the dignity of her family with a decent burial. In Russian, he is furious that she criticizes him: “She should watch what she says, or she’ll end up with a bayonet up her ass too.”
Wow! This is a horrifying but irrelevant development, as it’s not referenced again for the rest of the episode. But Yeltsin is true to his word. Forensic scientists are sent to the area by Ipatiev House and dig up the burial site of the Romanovs. Their identities are hard to confirm because they were doused in acid, but bone DNA sequencing makes it possible when a blood sample from Philip confirms familial relation.
This connection to his Russian relatives awakens Philip’s interest in his Orthodox roots, as well as frustration with Elizabeth for not being more curious. Penny, on the other hand, hangs on his every word as he explains DNA sequencing, and Philip clearly loves the attention.
This, of course, all comes to a head when Elizabeth and Philip embark on the trip to Moscow in October 1994. As they’ve grown apart due to a lack of common interests, she views the visit as a “shared adventure,” but they hardly see each other, as he takes the opportunity to do further exploring and research. When she complains, he lobs a bomb and says the trip has reinforced how much he gave up when he married her. “My career, my autonomy, my faith,” he notes. Whew! Both strap in for one of those marriage-rattling fights.
Once again, Philip criticizes her lack of curiosity, claiming it has left him lonely and disenchanted. He ventures that he has had to seek companionship elsewhere, in his carriage driving group. When Elizabeth presses him for a name, he admits to growing close to Penny, and she is aghast at this development. He refuses to sever the friendship (“I don’t want to be asked to give up something when I’ve done nothing wrong”) and in fact boldly asks Elizabeth to befriend Penny herself to legitimize the friendship. “You might learn something too,” he adds, as the final bit of condescension in an episode full of it. (Penny has a theory about the death of the Romanovs.)
So Penny comes to visit Elizabeth at Windsor and explains that she’s read a lot of accounts from the time and believes that the British royals in 1917 actually opted not to rescue the Romanovs. With what Philip would say is a lack of curiosity, Elizabeth dismisses this theory immediately, claiming her grandfather could have never ordered their deaths. But Penny asserts that Queen Mary and Tsarina Alexandra had grown up together as young princesses in Germany and had a rivalry, and Mary didn’t want Alexandra overshadowing her in England.
But Elizabeth shuts her down, claiming that her grandmother opted not to rescue them to protect the monarchy, because the royals couldn’t afford to be seen as pro German during World War I. “Queen Mary was devastated,” Elizabeth says. “One cannot show those emotions, so one buries them.” She cites no sources for this information, so it’s unclear if this is her own working theory or she’s just saying something to shut Penny up. My theory is that it’s weak writing that’s trying but failing to tie the theme of this episode up in a nice bow.
But after rejecting Penny’s theory, the queen invites her to ride in her car to church on Christmas so that no one will bat an eye when Penny and Philip are seen together in public. Many early episodes of The Crown were devoted to the challenges of Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage, and this episode is not unearthing anything new by revisiting those themes.
To close out “Ipatiev House,” the queen and the prime minister exchange congratulations at upcoming wedding anniversaries, and Major shares a quote from Anna Dostoevsky that the key to a happy marriage, even when there’s nothing in common, is to not try to change each other. And we get a final clip of Elizabeth happily playing with her corgis as Philip reads, in case the message was unclear.
Stray observations
- Even in the early episodes of The Crown when Matt Smith’s bad boy Philip was mucking up their marriage, the show never depicted actual infidelity. It just hinted heavily. Philip claims his “companionship” with Penny is intellectual and spiritual. In real life, Penny Knatchbull was extremely close to Philip and one of only 30 people invited to his funeral because of COVID.
- The Christmas scene would have been from 1994, and Elizabeth Debicki’s Diana makes her only appearance in the episode here. Her outfit is reminiscent of what Kristen Stewart wore in the church-going scene in Spencer, but that movie was about Christmas 1991.
- There is no talk of the drama between Charles and Diana in this episode, not even a passing mention, even though Jonathan Dimbleby’s The Prince Of Wales: A Biography came out during the Moscow visit and overshadowed it in the British media. The season is suffering from some pacing issues, with storylines picked up and dropped without a coherent flow from episode to episode.
46 Comments
Okay as someone who has worked a fair deal in writing historical theories and gathering primary sources let me say, Elizabeth was being a real biiiiiitch to Penny. She read multiple primary sources and consulted with historians and comes up with a possible explanation, which is immediately dismissed because Elizabeth knew the person in question and doesn’t even stop to think, well maybe its a mixture of it all? That came off like a gut instinct I liked this person therefore they couldn’t, what an asshole.Side note but the execution of the Romanovs was kinda worse? It went on for half an hour because the daughters had diamonds sown into there dresses. The bullets didn’t pierce through so they were alive longer then depicted. The soldiers fired so many bullets that they couldn’t see what was happening from the gunsmoke. Many were bayoneted and bashed, it was messy to put it mildly.
It did seem really weird that after what was apparently a bunch of research, Penny only came up with the most superficial and kind of sexist motivation possible.
Maybe it wasn’t the grudge against a romantic rival, maybe it was just being a bitch because she could, but if Mary & George did what they did by claiming the rescue would cause the British people to try to overthrow the monarchy is as much bullshit as any other theory. Who cares why or if she did it, or if she & George decided together. It was a shitty thing to do to your family. Elizabeth was constantly making up excuses for facts she didn’t care for. Oh you read a lot of actual facts about my family being a bunch of assholes? Well I’m going to throw my only trump card, protecting the monarchy, which I use whenever it suits me. In the middle of WWI I think people of Great Britain had other things on their minds than whether the Romanovs were rescued.
I actually had access to the correspondences of the British Foreign Office during the Russian Revolution and Civil War for a research project. In reality, it seems as though George V was initially wanting to help the Romanovs, but Lloyd George was cautious about it because he felt under threat from the Labour Party at the time, who were largely sympathetic with the revolution and not exactly fans of the Winsors OR the Romanovs There was all this back and forth about supposed anti-monarchist sentiment in the UK. It was almost the exact opposite of what’s presented on the show. Also remember that not that long before England had been AT WAR with Russia, under the command of the tsar. Harboring them could also have been a royal scandal. Eventually, fwiw, Lloyd George is willing to go through with it, and George V changes his mind, which I guess is what the show depicts, but it was a much longer and more complicated decision.
Yeah that sounds about right. Criman War wasn’t that old by 1917. George wasn’t even PM that long by this point, HH Asquith had left in 1916 so keeping your foot in the door was definitely something to keep in mind. I will say that bit about Russia and Britain being mostly friends did get a solid laugh out of me.
Crimean War was over 60 years prior, I meant to edit that to be “had been adversarial with Russia” – which they had been, more or less, for most of the 19th century. But yes, the bit about them being mostly friends is hilarious, and I also laughed out loud.
Actually better example. The diplomatic fuck up during the Russo Japanese War when the Russian navy randomly fired on British fishing ships because they thought they were Japanese. That a hair over ten years prior to the February Revolution and did not make many friends for Russia in England.
The idea of the Romanovs coming to Britain and suddenly revolution is absurd. Britain certainly wasn’t happy about the losses in the Somme but the Russian Revolution was decades in the making and WW1 was the last straw.Also the bit about Alexandra being German therefore bad is INSANE! THE ROYAL FAMILY WERE THEMSELVES GERMAN! They were Saxe Coburg and Gotha, they renamed themselves to Windsor during the war!
In the middle of WWI I think people of Great Britain had other things on their minds than whether the Romanovs were rescued.It was actually a major governmental concern at the time because of the pervading anti-German sentiment. It wasn’t so much about the people themselves, but expending resources to save Russian royalty who also had German connections was a big public issue. I mean this is the same time that the royal family changed their name to sound less German because of anti-German sentiment. Sort of the Freedom Fries of its day.The reality is that there is no public record of Queen Mary’s feelings on it. George’s private letters show genuine concern and sadness, but also concern that rescuing them would be unpopular.
Yes…the catty bitch!
Fair point, but monarchs are among the most petty of people you can research. I mean good lord, Charles 1 was so obtuse its no wonder he lost his head. With something like this, realistically there will be some petty bullshit factoring into a decision.
Yeah, especially since I think the Home Office made the decision and not the Windsors themselves. Like maybe if they had really pushed for it they would have been successful, but it would have been super bad for them, politically.
I do think there’s something to be said that Penny hasn’t thought about how talking about Elizabeth’s actual grandmother who she knew Elizabeth was close with (who was a character on this show for some kind) wouldn’t result in Elizabeth shooting her down. I think it does highlight the fact that what is known about the Royal Family especially the pre-internet, pre-paparazzi Royal Family and what reality was is often different. I think the point was supposed to be that the primary sources – none of which came from Mary herself – were inaccurate because people like Mary (and Elizabeth) can’t speak their minds openly.
Well by that metric how is Elizabeth somehow more on point if nobody spoke there minds openly? I genuinely hate that show just sides with her purely because she’s the Queen therefore correct. Peter Morgan has this habit in all his projects whether its The Queen, the Crown or Longford to just pick someone and say they are correct without much justification.
I don’t necessarily think it does always side with her. I mean Morgan is certainly pro-Elizabeth, but she also seems to very much get the blame for Charles’s shortcomings and Margaret’s unhappiness. Speaking their minds publicly and Elizabeth knowing her grandmother was upset about something aren’t quite the same thing. It’s also notable that Penny’s theory is based on the knowledge of the relationship. She has no sources to indicate that did play any role in them not being saved. She’s talking only about sources predating the execution.
True and the irony is, historically speaking, there’s no actual evidence Mary did anything with this. It almost certainly was just George V and PM David Loyd George who were involved. Also to me Morgan sides with her hard on the whole royal boat argument this season.
Agreed. I think there is something to be said that it is a show and some of it is metaphor. Obviously, the whole thing is really about the Elizabeth – Philip – Penny stuff. I will admit as a royal watcher, I’ve always found the friendship with Penny odd.
Very odd indeed. I can’t imagine telling a spouse so I prefer the companionship of this lady NOT SEXUALLY I SWEAR!
The description of the Romanovs’ execution and several attempts at disposing of their bodies is a nightmare fuel, and thankfully the episode doesn’t go into details of what actually happened that night.The episode also kind of fudges the timeline of events, both with the execution in 1918 and with the discovery of the remains. AFAIK, the requests to bring the Romanovs to Britain went on in 1917 before the bolshevik revolution, when the provisional government was in power. Nikolai II abdicated after the February revolution in 1917, and the bolsheviks took power in October (old style) that year. After that the civil war broke out and no one would even attempt at trying to officially rescue the Romanovs. The decision to execute them was made when the anti-bolshevik forces were getting close to Yekaterinburg (I don’t remember which army that was, probably Kolchak’s), and trying to save Romanovs was just not worth it, especially with the danger of them being freed and put at the head of the counter-revolutionary forces. The debate about sending them somewhere was long over by that point. Yekaterinburg was actually captured by the anti-bolshevik forces not long after the murder and several traces of body disposal were discovered, but there was not enough time for proper search and excavations of the area. The possible area of the burials was known and the remains of Romanovs were first discovered by a couple of amateur historians in 1979. Only when Glasnost came, the area was officially excavated and the remains of most of Romanovs and several of their servants were found, it was in late 80s. The remains of tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters were discovered only in late 00s and identified a few years ago, because the executioners burned their bodies and buried whatever remained separately but not far from everyone else, in attempt to confuse whoever would look for them. The show makes it look like the execution happened right after the British royals refused to allow the Romanovs into Britain, and the remains were found after Yeltsin’s state visit.What this episode gets right is that Yeltsin was drunk most of the time. I’d call him high-functioning alcoholic, but having lived in former USSR until late 1993 and following what happened there for years after I left, I wouldn’t call anything that he did as functional.
Well explaining that the Revolution was two stages and then having to bring up Kerensky and all that is something most people trip up on. I’m also very fine with not showing children repeatedly shot and stabbed and still not dying after 20 minutes. Drunk Yeltsin is always worth noting.
Drunk Yeltsin videos will never get old:https://youtu.be/pfCJmgb__Ic
On one hand I genuinely feel sorry for the Russian people that this was the head of state for a while. But on a purely selfish level, its absolutely hysterical and lightens up my day every time.
They should have wrapped this series up in the fourth season.
They should have wrapped up the entire monarchy in the fourth season.
As in the fourth season of 1603?**In 1603 James VI and I became the first monarch to rule over England, Scotland, and Ireland together.
This is the second time this show gives Philip a moment to reminisce about his beloved sister who died in a plane crash, and it’s like, the plane that was carrying at least two Nazis? Because she and her husband were Nazis?
The Royal Family ancestors were Germans, and they changed the name to Windsor in an attempt to get people to forget that.
It can be simultaneously true that a loved one dying in a plane crash, while pregnant, can be devastatingly sad and that you had in-laws who willingly aligned themselves with bad people. Given that Philip served in the Royal Navy fighting the Nazis, it’s pretty clear which side of the “are Nazis bad” argument he was on.
Philip’s sister, Sophie, spoke about how her husband and Cecile’s husband were both taken in by the idea that the monarchy was going to be restored allegedly and that was a primary factor in their husband’s joining the party in 1937. Given Cecile and her husband died that same year, it’s hard to say what they would have done or said about their membership in the party later in life (or even what they would have done during the rest of the war). Sophie’s recounting of events certainly makes it seem likely the Nazis killed her husband and made threats against her family.All that said, though, it doesn’t make them less his sisters or the face that Cecile died when he was only 16 likely less traumatic for him.
“George has a parrot on his shoulder for some reason (likely to make him seem frivolous and annoying).”Or, you know, because that’s actually something he did. Odd all that Wikipedia searching didn’t turn that up.
Maybe he actually did it to be frivolous and annoying.
Look, if I was researching a king for a dramatic portrayal and found out he did that, I would TOTALLY put it in the show.
Most of the stuff about Catherine The Great wasn’t true, but I’d still TOTALLY put it in the show!
C???A C for an episode that surrounds the single best performance in the entire series, Imelda’s Queen silently composing herself, trying to uphold the dignity and supreme standard of her role, as she heartbreakingly acknowledges her elder age?Absolutely no wheels were spun. This episode IS the series.
Agreed. Masterful tying of the past and present (just like earlier seasons), great performances, and a bunch of history I was learning for the first time. Plus the intro sequence of the Romanov was devastating.
In real life, Penny Knatchbull was extremely close to Philip and one of only 30 people invited to his funeral because of COVIDI could only dream of having 5 people attend my funeral, let alone 30.
“Philip…left lonely and disenchanted….has had to seek companionship elsewhere, in his carriage driving group.”
damn, Ray Davies could write an album about this.
Oh, Lauren. You clearly are useless at using Google, aren’t you my little poppet? Take yourself over to Google, pop in “George V” and “Parrot” into the search bar-thingy and this comes up…“George V (1865-1936) owned an African grey parrot from the Congo named Charlotte. George obtained her in Port Said, Egypt, when he was a young midshipman in the Royal Navy in the 1880s (although some say Charlotte was a pink-grey parrot and a gift from his sister Victoria)“The parrot was a pet, you imbecile.
Yet another episode hilariously pointing out that for all of her strengths, Elizabeth is no Rhodes scholar, nor does she have the interest or intellectual capacity to become one.
I don’t know that it’s fair to say she lacks intellectual capacity. That requires a lot of nurturing when you’re young. It’s well-established in the show and reality that she was not given much in the way of schooling beyond the constitution, which she does know inside and out. If she had been educated, she might not be a Rhodes Scholar, but she’d certainly know more.I do like that these episodes often draw attention to the fact that in the things she’s been allowed to be passionate about she is very knowledgeable – horses and horse breeding being a big part of that.
While it’s true that there is no hard proof Queen Mary was devastated by the deaths of the Romanovs, it is known that anti-German sentiment was a significant reason that they didn’t rescue them. I do think in terms of creating a work of fiction the juxtaposition and the emphasis that Queen Mary would hardly make a decision out of jealousy that would get their family murdered worked. I do think the Elizabeth-Philip fight also showed a sort of growth for the two. It *is* the same fight, but at the same time, Philip is much more straightforward in what he wants and much more articulate about his feelings. Elizabeth is less firey than she was and less likely to argue back in some ways. For me, it really worked.
Being based in the UK the press were forbidden to even hint that Prince Phillip was unfaithful, but when the internet came along I read a lot of news stories from the European press that heavily suggested he’d been repeatedly unfaithful. What I was wondering though is that is there any hard evidence that he did cheat on The Queen?
Also, in the UK it’s become a running joke (in very poor taste) that Phillip ordered (and orchestrated) Diana’s death – is that something which is ever spoken about outside of the UK?
“She cites no sources for this information, so it’s unclear if this is her own working theory or she’s just saying something to shut Penny up.”I just assumed she was working with information given to her by her family, that had been passed down. Which is not to say she shouldn’t have said that, or that Penny couldn’t have pointed out that family lore can also be unreliable and self-serving.
High school history failed you pretty badly if you had to Wikipedia the Bolshevik Revolution or what happened to Russia’s monarchy. I understand not knowing the finer details… but, yikes. Pretty major 20th century history there.I saw this episode as a way to address that the end of the Cold War was also happening at this time, and to contextualize that in a way that made sense for The Crown. There is a worthwhile reflection, too, about the diverging paths of Europe’s monarchies, given that “is the monarchy relevant?” has been a key theme this season. That said, I could have dealt without the more maudlin parts, i.e. Phillip seething over the fate of a Great Aunt he didn’t know. I also read the final moments in a meta way: Elizabeth is denying Penny’s theory while framing her denial in terms of something other than her jealousy of Penny, much as Mary years earlier denied asylum to the Romanovs while framing it in terms other than her jealousy of Alix. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve disliked Philip’s “intimate friendship” this season for a number of reasons. First of all, I really dislike Natascha McIlhone as an actress so seeing her play Philip’s near-saintly ladyfriend rankled. Also, Philip seems to have nothing but contempt for Elizabeth these days, regarding her as essentially stupid, when we’ve all seen her work hard at her job – and I do believe it was a real job – and also that he has seen her follow her instincts in unexpected ways that had a salutary impact. Maybe he did sleep with a ballerina early in his wife’s reign, or with a willing young woman in the South Seas, but that’s different than finding your ‘soulmate’ and humiliating and scolding your wife into receiving her. Or maybe I just want to believe that despite crisis after crisis, he loved her very much. It’s clear that she loved him.