Yahoo News The Crown, season 5 episode 6, Ipatiev House, review: Russian blood, broken hearts and zero subtlety
The sixth episode of The Crown begins with scenes that are genuinely horrific. We witness the execution of the Romanovs in 1918. The Tsar and Tsarina, with their children, are taken from their beds and herded into a room on the pretext of being escorted to a place of safety. They believe that their appeal to “Cousin George” – King George V – has succeeded, and he has arranged their evacuation to England. Instead, they are put before a firing squad. The children, huddled in a corner and begging for their lives, are bayoneted.
Why is the writer, Peter Morgan, subjecting us to these grisly scenes in a soap opera covering the 1990s? Because he has alighted on the fact that the Queen welcomed Boris Yeltsin to Buckingham Palace, and that in 1994 she became the first British monarch to visit Moscow, representing a major shift in the global political landscape; and that the Duke of Edinburgh (Jonathan Pryce) helped to identify the remains of the Romanovs by giving a sample of his DNA.
The question posed at the beginning – did King George and Queen Mary condemn the Romanovs to death by their refusal to give them sanctuary? – is never satisfactorily answered. Although there is a point at which the Duke of Edinburgh suggests that the British royals have blood on their hands.
The strengthening of Anglo-Russian ties is an interesting slice of history, and there is some skilful storytelling involved in linking events from a century ago to the modern British monarchy. Really, though, Morgan is using all of this as a narrative device to gossip once again about the Duke of Edinburgh’s close friendship with Penny Knatchbull (played by Natascha McElhone).
Penny is everything that the Queen is not, according to this show: beautiful, bright, intellectual. The Queen only gets excited when playing with her corgis, like an overgrown toddler playing with toys. When Philip tells her that he is providing a DNA sample, he is exasperated that she doesn’t ask about the science behind it: “Aren’t you curious? Not even a little bit?” Morgan paints her as being pretty thick. Penny, by contrast, waxes lyrical about DNA being our essence, a glorious language, and other things I stopped listening to because I was distracted – like Philip – by her lustrous looks.
Everyone involved with the series has insisted that the inclusion of Penny among the characters is not meant to signify anything untoward. Oh, come off it. True, there is no sign that they were having a sexual affair, but in this series they are certainly having an emotional affair.
It all comes to a head when Philip tells the Queen that they have nothing in common, and he has been forced to “seek companionship elsewhere”. In conversations clearly plucked from Morgan’s imagination, the Queen shoots back: “She’s half your age. Couldn’t it just be a secretary? A nice girl from the typing pool with a short skirt and adoring eyes?”
Eventually, the two women have a showdown of sorts. Penny posits her theory that Queen Mary refused to grant refuge to the Romanovs because the women were rivals, and Mary was jealous of the Tsarina for being prettier. Do you get the hidden message here, folks? There may as well be a neon arrow pointing to Penny’s head. The Crown has never been subtle, but here we’re being bludgeoned.
