The Crown’s Surprisingly Touching Finale

Last month, reporting here on the first part of the sixth and last season of The Crown, I was, if I say so myself, a mite snotty. I more or less accused the series’ creator, Peter Morgan, of shamelessly squeezing every last bit of suspense, sensation, and pathos out of the grim demise of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki). In fact, I described the episodes as “death porn” and accused Morgan of violating the bounds of decency.

I’ll stand by that verdict, and then some. But I must say that the final part of The Crown — episodes five through 10 of season six, which dropped on Dec. 14 — isn’t anywhere near as offensive and, at moments, I daresay, is rather touching. Diana is gone, and so the focus shifts back to the queen (Imelda Staunton), who’s not getting any younger, and the rest of the clan.

To be sure, this new batch of episodes doesn’t start off very promisingly. In the first one, episode five, Prince William (played by Ed McVey, who looks just like the real thing) struggles with his new role as an international teen heartthrob. Yawn. But there is a nice scene in which Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) helps William — who’s had an ugly confrontation with his father — to understand that he’s not really angry at Prince Charles (Dominic West) but at Diana. It’s an intelligent, touching, beautifully written conversation — and it’s one that you can’t possibly believe that these people ever really had. Alas.

The queen herself is almost entirely absent from episode five. That’s made up for in episode six, wherein we get a taste of her relationship with Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) — who, at this juncture, is riding so high politically that she has a nightmare about him being crowned king. Blair — that slimy, slithery creature for whom “modernizing” is all — urges her to update the monarchy by eliminating (among much else) male primogeniture, the ban on Catholic sovereigns, and ancient titles like Astronomer Royal. Charles agrees readily, saying that he’s eager to see the monarchy become “more rational and democratic.” (We’ve witnessed this conflict before, as it happens, in Morgan’s 2006 movie The Queen.)

But Elizabeth disagrees firmly: The monarchy, she insists, isn’t “rational and democratic,” and the rabble — not that she uses that word — don’t want it to be. They want “magic”; they want “mystery”; they want “the transcendent.” This, it’s clear, is a language that’s as alien to Blair as is Aramaic. Yes, he himself, at this point in his career, exudes something akin to magic — for some voters, anyway — but the logic of royalty is lost on him. Over the course of The Crown, we’ve heard the argument for the constitutional monarchy more than once, but to Blair the whole thing is just a lot of creaky mumbo-jumbo that’s well past its sell-by date.

On to episode seven. William, now an undergraduate at St. Andrews, meets and falls for Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy). He makes some friends, but his younger brother, Harry (Luther Ford), chides him for being uptight and boring. Well, let’s face it — they’re both boring. So is Kate. This episode might almost have been designed to demonstrate the truth of the queen’s line about her subjects wanting mystery: William and Harry belong to a generation for whom nobody’s remotely mysterious; they live in an era in which even the pope has an email address. The whole point of William and Harry is that, like their mother, they chafe at the trappings of privilege and protocol and just want to be ordinary, accessible folks who joke and hug and kick back (or, at least, want to be perceived as wanting to be that way) — the result of which is that watching William going away to college is no more interesting than witnessing any other college kid’s freshman year.

Episode eight is far better. The queen’s sister, Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville), collapses at a party in Barbados and has to be flown back to the U.K. for treatment. Sad scenes of her declining health, her refusal to take medical advice (“Exercise? I’d rather die than exercise!”), and her disinclination to quit cigarettes and booze for any length of time alternate with charming flashbacks to VE Day, when she and Elizabeth, the latter in military uniform, celebrated at the Ritz in London (not to be confused with the Ritz in Paris, from which Diana would head off half a century later to meet her maker). We see the young Elizabeth — played, as in the series’ first two seasons, by Claire Foy — dancing the jitterbug with a handsome black GI, who (shades of Roman Holiday) doesn’t know she’s a princess.

Eventually, after a life of hard partying, Margaret ends up dying at age 71, whereas Liz would hang on to 96. I must admit that the scenes between the two aging sisters — played by two terrific actresses — are touching. Because they’re not about being royal. They’re about being mortal — about approaching, and accepting, the end of life.

In fact the last few episodes of The Crown dwell, of necessity, on death. But there’s also rebirth. The cycle of life, as it were. So even as William is courting Kate Middleton at a college party, the queen mother (Marcia Warren) is expiring, at age 101, in a bed at Buckingham Palace. Shortly afterwards, Tony Blair, who’s unnecessarily worried that Elizabeth has lost her mojo, suggests to her, with boorish disrespect, that William, whom the proles love, be given a starring role at her Golden Jubilee. Later, while the queen and Prince Philip hold meetings at which they plan their funerals — which even have code names (hers is Operation London Bridge) — Charles gains his mum’s permission to wed Camilla, and William meets his future in-laws, whose habit of eating dinner in the kitchen astonishes his grandmother. (“They prefer to behave like staff?”)

In the previous cache of sixth-season episodes, the ghost of the recently deceased Princess Diana materialized, in separate scenes, in the presence of Charles and Elizabeth. Presumably she was supposed to be a figment of her ex-husband’s and former mother-in-law’s imaginations. Whatever. In any event, I didn’t see the purpose of this silly gimmick, other than to give Diana more screen time. But something similar happens in this final batch of episodes, and in this case I found it rather moving. While the queen is hanging with her horses, her middle-aged self (Olivia Colman, who played her in seasons three to four) appears to her and suggests that she abdicate in Charles’ favor. Later, her even younger self (Foy) confronts her in the palace, reminding her of her constitutional duty to stay on the throne until the end. For me, these voices from the past worked — made psychological sense — in a way that the Diana phantoms didn’t.

Why? Because the queen is getting old. It makes sense for her to be hearing the voices of her earlier selves. Increasingly, she’s all she’s got left. Everyone around her is preparing for a world without her. Her sister has died; her mother has died; her husband is nearing his curtain call. Meanwhile, Charles is waiting in the wings, itching to take over, and William is waiting behind him, a prospective bride at the ready. But the queen, who feels ancient and ready for a rest, can’t walk away from the throne, because — as Philip and Charles and William all declare, in their own different ways, in these last episodes — none of them have the same kind of dedication to the role of monarch, and the same kind of belief in the idea of monarchy (or, at least, in the idea of a certain kind of monarchy), that she does. Charles is too ready to share with the public his sometimes solid and sometimes silly opinions about everything from architecture to the environment; William, for his part, has grown up in an entirely different world from the queen, living among mere commoners and not really wanting to exist apart from them in a bubble of entitlement. Besides, he’s smart enough to know that trying to radiate the kind of mystery that the queen cultivated all her life just isn’t possible anymore.

And what does that say about the ability to keep the monarchy going?

At the end of the series — and I guess this counts as a spoiler — the queen stands by herself, small and fragile, in the empty chapel at Windsor, where her body will one day lie in state, and imagines her own coffin standing there. As she stares silently into — what? the abyss? the void? Heaven? — the two actresses who’ve played her younger selves flank her, also staring. And, yes, it’s affecting. Because when you come right down to it, it doesn’t matter that this is a world-famous monarch who’s the head of state of 15 countries and who’s spent her life being waited on by platoons of servants and cheered by massive crowds — it’s a frail grandmother who has a long life behind her and who, like any other elderly woman, is doomed to face her end alone.

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