The Crown PEOPLE Review: The Final Season Stumbles with Diana’s Death

Crown returns for its final season.

The abdication crisis of 1936, in which the foolish King Edward VIII demoted himself to the Duke of Windsor for the sake of the woman he loved, haunted Crown and has shaped the psychology and actions of its royal protagonists since Season 1.

Returning with the first four episodes of its final, sixth season, the show may be having a different kind of abdication crisis. You might want to leave it.

You won’t, of course, with only six more episodes scheduled for December 14th. The first five seasons, after all, were exceptionally good television, always engaging, often deeply moving and just as often wryly funny — not to mention impeccably acted.

Netflix releases official trailer for Crown Season 6, Part 1: See the royal drama to come

However, this first part of the 6th season could come into play Crown version of jumping the shark (or, given the show’s impeccable British pedigree, maybe snark). And this is exactly the wrong time for that to happen: We’ve reached the point where the series confronts the fateful, fatal romance of Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla). At the end of the fourth hour, the two of them will be driven into that tunnel in Paris and on into eternity.

The problem with these key episodes, oddly, is that Crown he tries his best to be nice. This time, the show seems painfully well-intentioned, determined to spin a traumatic story as gently as possible.

This could be in response to complaints from the likes of Dame Judi Dench that Season 5 took too many liberties with history. Additionally, the circumstances of Diana’s death, and her own emotional state while she and Dodi flirted on his family’s yacht in the summer of 1997, were always going to be a major dramatic challenge (or obstacle), requiring tremendous sensitivity.

Then, too, there is now much more historical perspective to be sensitive about. Elizabeth II – played by Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton respectively – died aged 96 in September 2022.

Queen Elizabeth’s cause of death revealed to be ‘old age’

And so the play tiptoes, like a Lady-in-waiting who does not want to wake her sovereign. Better to let the sleeping lions lie.

It’s hard to imagine the real Charles, who sighed in previous seasons about wanting the mummy to die in a helicopter crash, unhappy with his latest iteration, played by Dominic West. This Charles is weepy and pensive and howls to heaven with grief. He is not a man who, as a king, would lose his form because of a leaking pen.

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Episode 3, which deals with Diana’s last day in Paris, is where things start to go seriously wrong – especially when we’re introduced to her final, intimate conversation with Dodi at the Ritz Hotel.

The sight is not necessarily implausible, given what is in the public record. Even if Dodi did not propose that same night (as he does here), there is evidence that he may have intended to. And it’s not out of the question that Diana would have decided that same night to end their whirlwind, two-month romance (as she does here), with the intention of returning to the more stable role of humanitarian and mother to the future king. Who knows? Why not?

Charles (Dominic West) with heir and backup: William (Rufus Kampa) and Harry (Fflyn Edwards)).

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

But after letting Dodi down in the kindest way possible, would Diana then try to rally him – more or less toughen him up – to defy his powerful abusive father, Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw)? Speaking of which, would Dodi then fake a phone call to Mohamed, who has fiercely decided to join his family with the Windsors, to tell him the romance is bad? Well, maybe. Like almost all private chat exchanges Crown, this falls under the domain of dramatic license.

The problem is that the whole encounter seems so comfortable, inoffensive, and sentimental—banal. It plays like the lost royal chapter from Actually love.

Crown Season 6: Everything you need to know about the final season

Then off they go into the night and into the tunnel, poor Diana and poor Dodi, with no hint in an otherwise highly speculative scenario as to why Diana, shown wearing a seat belt in previous scenes, now chooses not to buckle up.

This brings us to episode 4, where the season ends and the show goes off the air. It turns out that Diana decided to stay, at least for a little while, after her death. He returns in several scenes as a ghost, haunting – with sad, self-deprecating humor and wisdom – both Charles and the Queen. (Dodi also appears ghostly to his father.)

These scenes are executed with delicacy and tasteful restraint. Not that Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium, was invited to the palace. You could also argue that everything Crown he did create a metaphor for Diana’s undying spirit and importance. Or you might also point out that royal ghosts have a prominent literary antecedent in Shakespeare’s works.

“The Crown” season 6.

Netflix

Crown Creator Peter Morgan reveals how the death of Queen Elizabeth changed the end of the series

But Shakespeare wasn’t the head writer of the Netflix hit – Peter Morgan was. Diana’s ghost is a ridiculous device and far more offensive to Elizabeth than anything else Crown maybe threw or will throw at her.

In the 2006 film Queen, not coincidentally written by Morgan, Elizabeth Helen Mirren is reluctant to express grief in memory of Diana. Her opinion, and probably the opinion, is the result of pressure from Prime Minister Tony Blair and her own twitch of dismay at how the Windsors are being portrayed in the media.

Instead, there is a dead Diana swaying here, gently squeezing her hand and kindly hinting – dead Diana is a real ace at tactical evasion – that now it’s time to show a grieving nation some emotion. This implies that Elizabeth, for all her intelligence and sense of duty, was as much a moral fool as the Duke of Windsor. (Diana was the one who consulted the psychics, by the way.) She is less convincing, dramatically, than Mohamed Al-Fayed, who is played by Daw with a strong, tragic sense of roughness, grasping pride and folly.

Maybe Morgan just couldn’t resist milking Debicki’s unusual reconstruction of the princess for a few more minutes. She is more like Diana than Diana ever was.

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Part 1 of Crown season 6 is now streaming on Netflix. The second part will conclude the series with six episodes that will be released on December 14.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education