‘The Crown’ Finale Makes a Case for the End of the Monarchy

Spoiler alert: This text discusses particulars of The Crown Season 6, Half 2.

Each season of The Crown has not less than one—the episode the place the royal household wrings its palms over the future of the British monarchy. Generally the catalyst is public backlash to their profligacy. Different instances it’s the media’s impatience with the stodginess of an establishment that appears extra antiquated with every passing yr. Whereas such complaints are given some credence on the present, the answer that supposedly redeems the establishment tends to be superficial. A vocal critic is delivered to heel. A handful of commoners are invited to a glamorous occasion within the palace. A documentary is commissioned to humanize the Home of Windsor.

Within the second a part of the sequence’ sixth and closing season, that episode is titled “Ruritania.” It’s 1999, and Prime Minister Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) is having fun with the type of approval rankings that will make any current occupant of the White Home weep. Queen Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton) has a nightmare by which she’s wandering smoky, chaotic streets as Blair is topped King—and wakes up resolved to enlist his assist in enhancing the picture of a monarchy that’s been particularly unpopular since Princess Diana’s death. Although he’s uncomfortable with the project, the PM has his crew write up some wise suggestions: Be extra clear. Let royals marry Catholics. Make do with much less employees; what even is a “Lord Excessive Admiral of the Wash”? The proposal offends Elizabeth. Finally, she decides that (like, paradoxically, the Catholic Church) the household ought to keep its arcane mystique: “That is our obligation: to raise individuals up and transport them to a different realm—not deliver them all the way down to Earth and remind them of what they have already got.”

The second of six episodes that arrived Thursday on Netflix, “Ruritania” units the tone for a pensive, if uneven, closing arc that touches on The Crown’s most evident query—who’s Elizabeth actually?—however appears extra invested in exploring whether or not the British monarchy can presumably escape irrelevance within the twenty first century. The reply we’re left with, as Staunton’s Elizabeth marches towards a brilliant mild behind an open cathedral door within the sequence’ portentous closing shot, is a powerful no. In actual fact, whether or not or not the crew behind it acknowledges as a lot, the present has at all times functioned as a strong argument for the tip of the establishment at its middle.

Creator Peter Morgan, who has written or co-written all 60 episodes, is hardly a radical. “I in all probability am a monarchist, however out of appreciation for what they do once they do it nicely,” he lately told Variety, echoing different statements he’s made about his allegiance through the years. But in the identical paragraph he admits: “I believe if we’re all adults, we’d say that the system is mindless and is unjust within the fashionable democracy.” In different phrases, Morgan appreciates the monarchy on a sentimental and, judging by the present’s luxurious manufacturing design, aesthetic degree, whilst he understands that it’s a essentially irrational establishment.

The final days of Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville)

Justin Downing—Netflix

His sympathy for the royal household, as individuals, has been evident all through the sequence. Claire Foy’s younger queen, thrust onto the throne at 25 after the dying of her beloved father and pressured by the Agency into making choices that drove wedges between Elizabeth and the individuals she cherished most, was significantly compelling. We’ve additionally met three generations of “spares” who languish within the shadow of an endlessly scrutinized inheritor. (Princess Margaret will get a fond send-off on this season’s greatest episode, constructed round Lesley Manville’s beautiful efficiency as a septuagenarian get together woman undone by a sequence of strokes.) The truth that Mohamed al-Fayed, performed by Salim Daw, emerges as an even bigger risk to the royal legacy in later seasons than Prince Andrew says rather a lot about how far Morgan is keen to go in vilifying particular person Windsors.

By the center of the primary season, when Foy’s Elizabeth yields to her elders’ insistence that Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) be prohibited from marrying the divorced love of her life, Peter Towsend (Ben Miles), the sequence has revealed its central perception: The Crown could seek advice from an individual in addition to an establishment, nevertheless it’s not possible to be each on the identical time. It’s a must to select. Again and again, we watched Elizabeth put her tasks earlier than her humanity, and that of her kinfolk, ostensibly with a view to defend the royal household’s function in British society. Which explains why The Crown had develop into repetitive even earlier than it traded Foy’s forged for Olivia Colman’s.

Morgan has made viewers of all political orientations really feel compassion towards the repressed royals, even when we additionally disdain their insularity and selfishness—which, to his credit score, he additionally depicted in episodes like Season 4 standout “The Balmoral Test.” But he’s by no means actually made a convincing case that the ache they endured, willingly or not, to maintain the monarchy afloat yielded something of worth for his or her topics. Sure, a few of their ploys to court docket the general public succeeded. However to what finish? If Britons cherished Blair greater than they cherished Elizabeth, why was that an issue for anybody exterior the palace partitions? The implication of a later scene, by which indignant residents protest Blair’s assist of the Iraq Struggle, is that the sovereign, resistant to the vicissitudes of politics, can present a larger sense of stability than a PM. However when it’s premised on energy that’s purely symbolic, how can that picture of stability be something greater than a comforting phantasm?

Wills (Ed McVey) in his reluctant-heartthrob period

Netflix

As Season 6 progresses, teenage Prince William (Ed McVey, cannily splitting the distinction between the actual Wills and a younger Brad Pitt) will get sucked into the maelstrom of fame, regardless of wanting nothing to do with a media machine he blamed for his mom’s dying. And Morgan returns to a hypothetical state of affairs he’s entertained in previous seasons: What if Elizabeth had abdicated years, or many years, earlier than she lastly handed away at 96, and allowed a youthful Charles to develop into King? The creator has mentioned that he has “enormous sympathy” for Charles, and he proved it in a fifth season that not solely showcased his reformist views, but in addition, at one level, featured a prolonged tribute to the charitable work he pursued in lieu of the throne.

The Crown ends, anticlimactically, with Elizabeth allowing her divorced son (Dominic West) to marry the divorced love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams)—a choice she frames as not hypocritical, in mild of what she put Margaret by way of a half-century earlier, and even progressive however pragmatic. A King can’t “dwell in sin.” She is, you see, really poised to cede the throne to him. Colman returns to induce her exhausted aged self to retire. However Foy’s dutiful Elizabeth, making her personal cameo, wins out. “This technique is a dreadful factor to inflict on individuals,” she tells Staunton. “However you appear to thrive in it. And, extra importantly, it appears to thrive below you.”

Charles (Dominic West) and Camilla (Olivia Williams), collectively eventually

Justin Downing—Netflix

Morgan revised the final season after the real Queen’s death and funeral, so possibly these strains are extra beneficiant than what he may need in any other case written. Then once more, possibly we’re purported to learn the imaginary younger Elizabeth as delusional. In spite of everything, episodes like “Ruritania” and the numerous cases by which Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) outmaneuvers the Agency within the court docket of public opinion, steered the monarchy was not, in actual fact, thriving below her over the last many years of her reign. By no means thoughts that the present wraps up in 2005, liberating Morgan from the necessity to deal with Harry and Meghan’s accusations of racism, amongst different horrors, throughout the royal household and limiting his obligation to both condemn or apologize for Andrew.

It’s exhausting to consider that so many modern scandals would have unfolded that a lot otherwise had Charles develop into King in his 50s. However within the sequence’ closing moments, Morgan frames Elizabeth’s resolution to persist, dooming the UK to many years of 1 geriatric monarch or one other, as a trigger for grief. Now empty aside from the Queen, Charles and Camilla’s wedding ceremony venue, St. George’s Chapel, takes on a funereal air. “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep”—the bagpipe lament that her piper would play 17 years later, as she was laid to relaxation, which provides the finale its title—blares. And The Crown turns into a requiem for the British monarchy. It’s a stunning scene. But it surely may need made a more practical farewell to a present, a girl, and the establishment she represented if Morgan had ever articulated why, precisely, we had been purported to be mourning.

Contact us at letters@time.com.