Peter Morgan’s final word on Elizabeth’s reign hits with all the subtlety of a two-by-four to the face.
Peter Morgan loves a stag-hunt scene. It’s the kind of thing The Crown does best: deploy a motif throughout the show so The Crown can say something without having to actually say it. Elizabeth and Porchey go stag-hunting in season two, for instance, in a scene that quietly suggests Elizabeth’s remove from political affairs and also her own marriage. In season four, two stag-hunting scenes balance against one another, allowing the same image of stalking an animal across the moors to imply both Diana’s fitness as a potential royal mate and Margaret Thatcher’s inability to pierce the insular royal-family traditions. The stag hunt returns yet again in the first half of season six, this time as a mark of William’s maturity: He gets venison blood smeared on his face just as his mother is about to die. All of it plays like a theme and variations, especially when taken together with the climactic stag-hunt scene in Morgan’s The Queen, which used a stag to stand in for Elizabeth contemplating her mortality.
The Crown has thrived in the realm of show versus tell, its instinct veering toward dramatic setpieces and distinct settings to make arguments through demonstration rather than with dialogue. Philip feels useless? Time for a preoccupation with the moon landing. Margaret struck with self-destructive ennui? Enter: her long dalliance with a photographer, who emphasizes and pushes against her vanity. Margaret Thatcher doesn’t fit in? Stag hunt! It’s theme expressed through repression — characters rarely say anything direct to one another, and instead all their feelings come flooding out sideways, via obsessions with horse breeding, or a fixation on boarding school, or the task of giving a speech in Welsh. In most of season six, though, it’s as though The Crown is suddenly overwhelmed by an anxiety that viewers might not understand exactly what it’s been building toward. Where the show once lingered on misty landscapes or distant images of an ocean liner, quiet shots interjecting ideas that elide more explicit language, The Crown’s final episodes are shot through with the most overdetermined dialogue imaginable. There’s an element of desperation to it, a terror of being misinterpreted. All the nuance has been shaved off, leaving only the baldest, most obvious thesis statements imaginable. Monarchy is dignified, and the new generation doesn’t get it. Elizabeth was special! The Windsors are bad fathers. Camilla good! Harry bad.
This show was not always so facile. In “Paterfamilias,” from season two, a flashback to Philip’s time at boarding school becomes a heartbreaking portrait of how little emotional support he ever got, and, without signaling too explicitly, makes it plain that Philip had no models for how to deal with sadness and vulnerability, which then made it impossible to raise Charles without recreating the same patterns of abandonment and distance. This type of storytelling is not just more suggestive and subtle than a monologue would be in its place. It also works by recreating exactly the same problem these people have with one another: They don’t know how to speak about emotions or needs, so all they have are these experiences they carry around with them, hoping desperately that someone will magically register what they’re going through.
By the time we get to season six, though, it’s as though The Crown realizes it only has a few more chances and it’d better make sure everything gets said once and for all. Charles, on the phone with Camilla and worrying about William, says he’s trying to make things better with his son, but “it’s not as though I was given the best example to follow. The Duke of Edinburgh was hardly the most communicative or affectionate father to me. Hardly surprising given the delinquency of his own father’s parenting.” It’s not a nudge, it’s being whacked over the head with a two by four. Do you get it? It’s a generational pattern! We’ve been tracing all these inept fathers and now it’s come to this! Those lines alone would be sufficient, surely, and yet Charles goes on: “I’m afraid we don’t do fathers and sons very well in this family.” You don’t say!
There’s plenty of overdetermined dialogue to go around. “Is it possible you’re angry at [Diana] for having been all the things you’re not? Comfortable in the spotlight. Confident in front of an adoring crowd, which you think you now have to be?” asks Philip, suddenly a thoughtful family therapist despite all previous evidence of his total emotional constipation. Maybe the lessons of the early seasons, lessons about Elizabeth’s sacrifices and the slow erasure of her private self, have gotten a little lost in the recent Charles-and-Diana drama and fuss about the monarchy’s gradual decline. But the finale is ready to hammer things home. “What about the life I put aside? The woman I put aside when I became queen?” the elderly Elizabeth asks a ghost of her younger self, played by returning Claire Foy. “For years now, there has been just one Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth. If you went looking for Elizabeth Windsor, you wouldn’t find her,” says the younger Elizabeth. This seems plenty clear, but still she continues. “She’s gone. Long gone. You buried her years ago.”
Then, in one last speech that may as well be written in bold Sharpie, Philip gets the final word. “You are one of a kind,” he tells Elizabeth. “We’re a dying breed, you and I. Oh, I’m sure everyone will carry on, pretending all is well. But the party’s over.” Philip wryly points out that while everyone else will struggle, at least he and Elizabeth will be dead and won’t have to deal with it anymore. Season six is full of overly direct dialogue, but the finale proves it can be brazenly superficial without using words, too. In the last scene, Elizabeth slowly circles a vision of her own coffin, then marches determinedly out of Westminster Cathedral toward a door with a very bright light shining on the other side.
When stories draw toward a conclusion, they often reach for straightforward single-mindedness. Plots begin with so much room for possibility; endings are about gradually paring away all possible outcomes and following one path. But even in its earliest episodes, The Crown was working toward a predetermined ending. It could only ever follow the big milestone events in Elizabeth’s reign, and in spite of that, its strength was always in its ability to allow for multiple perspectives on these people, their lives, and monarchy as a concept. Some of the earliest seasons are so unflinching about the cruelty and senselessness of these ancient traditions: Margaret denied her love match, Elizabeth’s total loss of herself, the way monarchy encourages inhumane family relationships, the increasing divide between the royal family and the British public. It’s possible to read the first four seasons of The Crown as a real indictment of the entire institution, even when they’re also expressing intense sympathy for Philip and Elizabeth, and later for Charles.
But season six takes great pains to eliminate any uncertainty in that regard. Monarchy may be dying, but it’s a terrible shame, and it’s because the world no longer appreciates what it once had. “The spell that we cast, and have cast for centuries, is our immutability,” Elizabeth tells Tony Blair in episode six, when he has the temerity to suggest that the royal family might consider economizing. It’s a speech The Crown has given to Elizabeth before, but in previous seasons her conservatism is cast as laudable but quaint. Here, it’s unreservedly victorious. “Tradition is our strength. Respect for our forebears, and the preservation of generations of their wisdom and learned experience.” In the next scene, Elizabeth’s private secretary tries to modulate that stance, to give it a little more softness. “I tend to see things as binary,” he tells her. “Either you keep things as they are, or it’s closing time in the garden of the West.” He suggests that’s too rigid, that he’s resigning his position because it’s actually possible for the Queen to learn to be flexible. But The Crown won’t let that level of ambiguity stand. After pausing on Elizabeth’s debate over whether to embrace modernity and hand things to Charles, its last scenes are a celebration of her decision to stay the course, to fulfill her duty. All it can see is the end of Elizabeth’s life, which it does then depict as closing time in the gardens of the West. After so many seasons of fruitful interpretive openness, at the end, The Crown can only make simplistic proclamations and shut the door.
