Yahoo News ‘The Crown’ Season 6, Part 1 Marks a Morbid, Ghastly Beginning of the End
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains light spoilers for “The Crown” Season 6, Part 1.]
When the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales, first appears, she says, “Ta-da!”
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Narratively speaking, her cheeky apparition arrives in response to Charles (Dominic West) talking to himself. He’s just left Paris after examining her body — a sight spared the viewer, who’s just witnessed Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw) weep over his son’s corpse — and, on the plane ride back to England, he’s awestruck by his ex-wife’s sway over the world, even in death. “Paris,” he says. “One of the busiest cities in the world, and you brought it to a standstill.” And then there she is. No longer silent and still on a surgical table, but sitting right across from the father of her children. “Ta-da!” she says, as if Charles, let alone any of “The Crown’s” viewers, are in the mood for a magic trick.
Peter Morgan’s Netflix series has long chosen dark, dour avenues as its path through Royal history, but Season 6, in the first four episodes that constitute Part 1, is particularly ghoulish. Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) is its sole focus. The opening scene flashes forward to witness her tragic car accident, and the closing episode sees her sons, William (Ed McVay) and Harry (Luther Ford), walking behind her casket. No room is made for departure episodes, like “Aberfan,” where an event or constituent takes center stage as a way to reframe the evolving role of the Queen, and little room is made for the Queen herself, despite “The Crown” still ostensibly being built around Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton). Both could find time in the remaining six episodes (out in December), but it’s unclear what Morgan’s guiding light will be for the final part of his final season. In part, because there’s no pure light left at all.
Beyond the ghosts that haunt Episode 4, “Aftermath,” the start of Season 6 makes for a grisly reverse-mystery. We know who dies, we know how she dies, and we know when she dies. We’re waiting, mainly, to see it happen, and then shake from the harrowing results. The first episode sees Diana seeking peace. It’s been a year since her divorce from Charles, and everyone is trying to move on.
For Ms. Spencer, that means spending time with her children, distancing herself from the overcast skies of London, and carving out a career of her own. She dreams of continuing to work as a public servant, but her former family isn’t helping. Elizabeth has cut ties with her and encourages others to follow suit. Charles is trying to elevate his new wife, Camilla (Olivia Williams), into the same rapturous popular favor his first wife still sees. So she takes solace where she can: accepting an invitation to Mohamed’s seaside estate, where his son, Dodi (Khalid Abdalla), has been positioned to entertain her.
The series emphasizes Dodi’s quick break-up with his fiancé, while downplaying Diana’s role in it. He’s tempted, gives in, and suffers the consequences, but there are few insights into Diana’s feelings about splitting them up. She is but a passenger on a yacht, on a plane, in a car, and he’s the one behind the wheel. Once again, “The Crown” is more comfortable depicting its central women from the nearest man’s perspective. Dodi’s daddy issues dominate his scenes with Diana, leaving her tenderest, most telling moments with the kids, and those — especially their last conversation — are steeped in generic platitudes that come across as over-calculated attempts to generate tears.
Even nods to Diana’s humanitarian endeavors are filled with morbid foreshadowing. When she talks about her inspirations to remove landmines, she references a quote from a man who lost both his legs to the underground bombs. “He said to me, ‘Every survivor has a date: the day they stepped on a landmine.” When he told Diana his date, she told him hers: “My wedding day.” Earlier, in a documentary-style interview staged for an unknown audience, a paparazzo talks about how they have to be “like hunters, killers” to get the right shot. Later, in a phone call with her therapist, Diana is warned about her “risky” relationship and how things can “go really wrong.” Conversations just keep calling to mind Diana’s death, in a way that feels disingenuous to someone whose passing came as a complete surprise. Yes, the audience knows it’s coming, but with each ominous reference and blatant tease, it becomes harder and harder to believe her final days were anything like this.
Forgetting verisimilitude, it also makes for vapid drama. “The Crown” is so preoccupied with one of the Royal family’s most infamous tragedies, it does little to develop anyone else. Charles, Dodi, and Mohamed dominate screen-time, along with their male advisors, drivers, and assistants — all rotating around their blonde sun goddess — while Elizabeth’s Part 1 arc is reduced to jealousy over Diana’s beloved international status. She sits, she stews, she makes exactly one (1) concession, and only after her son badgers her into it.
Even Elizabeth, in that dreadful fourth episode, has a posthumous chat with Diana, and all Morgan can imagine they’d talk about is a petty squabble over Britain’s heart. “I hope you’re happy now,” Elizabeth tells her dead former daughter-in-law. “You’ve finally succeeded in turning me and this house upside down.” Ghost Diana’s gracious response helps teach the old dog a new trick, but it hardly justifies her phantom’s reappearance. The TV commentators were saying the same thing minutes earlier, making it more likely the Queen listened to them than conjured a spirit to repeat their guidance.
Such overreaching, such redundancy, such ghastly plotting overwhelms the clean, handsome staging and costumed elegance “The Crown” has leaned on for years. (Though the spectacle is less striking in Season 6. Scenes feel cramped and constricted, which would be fitting for the oft-trapped Diana, but the claustrophobic framings also restrict the rest of the characters.) Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that as the Royal family fell out of favor, as Elizabeth’s influence shrank in favor of the future king’s, the series had to shift focus, as well; to downplay the Queen as a way to convey the world passing her by. I don’t know if I buy it, and the heavy-handed metaphor driving Season 5’s finale already covered as much anyway, but I do know this: Talking to the dead, even in a palace, is still a cheap trick.
Grade: C-
“The Crown” Season 6, Part 1 premieres Thursday, November 16. Part 2 will be released Thursday, December 14.
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