Another poll. Another boat trip. Another clandestine meeting between Charles and a prime minister. Haven’t we been here before? I’m getting serious déjà vu.
There are some differences this time around. After a splashy televised debate — and despite Diana’s gleeful opposing votes — polls find the majority’s still pro-monarchy but no longer keen on Charles being in charge. (The real poll named Richard Branson as a preferable option.)
The boat’s passengers have changed, too. Charles travels back from the Hong Kong handover ceremony — an event that marked the end of the British Empire — via the Britannia. It’s her final voyage. Elizabeth has decided to decommission the yacht (an event that would lead her to publicly shed a tear) upon hearing newly elected PM Tony Blair’s suggestions for financing and branding. The news comes as a surprise, particularly to Charles, who somehow only now realizes why the queen was holding on so tight: “Her distress or her grief, it was not for the royal yacht, nor her precious memories. It was for herself and the institution she represents.” Wait for it … Wait for it … “Like she felt she was being decommissioned.” Glad you caught up, Charles. We’ve been here for TEN EPISODES.
Having the season’s overarching theme tied so tightly to Britannia feels like a bit of a misstep; sure, it’s a straightforward metaphor about obsolescence, but I don’t think the yacht has the emotional resonance Peter Morgan intends, especially when the queen keeps insisting other people pay for its upkeep. And while her decision came from a noble desire to preserve Britannia’s honor — and seeing her teary-eyed at the episode’s end is certainly a moment — it’s hard to feel that bad for a queen who refuses to lease a luxury yacht out of pride. (A global housing crisis is looming — read the room!) The Crown is most engaging when it highlights the royals’ humanity and relatability. Owning a private, five-story-tall yacht? Not so relatable.
Charles arranges to secretly chat with Blair aboard Britannia, and he’s eager to meet the new PM, considering their similarities in age and shared passion for change. The main difference? While Blair has the freedom to self-actualize, Charles must wait in the wings. Still, the prince is hopeful to find an ally in Blair, who’s likable enough but seems a touch smarmier in The Crown than how Peter Morgan wrote him in 2006’s The Queen. (Could this be due to a low-key plagiarism accusation?)
Compared to his season-opener meeting with Major, Charles feels less shady and more humbled with Blair (which makes sense — he’s no longer coasting off of positive poll results). And while he talks about the need for the monarchy to modernize, it comes across more as a plea for him to be able to remarry rather than to assume power. But when the queen confronts her son about his undisclosed tête-à-tête, she lets him know where she stands on the issue of his remarrying: It ain’t happening. (This episode sees both Dodi and Charles wanting parental approval to wed their partners, but neither gets it.) When Charles says that they must let go of their antiquated Victorian values or else the world might leave them in the dust, his mother says nothing. The woman’s willing to go down with the ship.
Is it just me, or has this season been pretty light on the queen, especially for a series meant to center her? It almost feels like the show has also decided she’s losing relevance (a meta-metaphor!). Imelda Staunton’s done what she can with what she’s given — her scenes involving William were standouts for me — but I do hope she gets more to work with next season.
Speaking of being sidelined, this episode finds Diana alone in a box at the Royal Albert Hall, watching a performance of Swan Lake. (This event marked her last official public appearance, occurring just three months before her death.) It’s a simple scene that stayed with me for a few reasons. (1) Diana dreamed of pursuing ballet as a young girl. While Charles watches Blair enviously, imagining what he himself might have become in another life, I wondered if perhaps here so too does Diana. (2) The visual composition is striking, with Diana in the dark, engulfed by the hall’s red-and-crimson interiors and sandwiched between two vases of roses; it’s a rare image of the Glamazonian princess looking physically small, and her loneliness amid all that beauty is palpable. And (3) while rooted in fact, it’s incredibly fitting to have Swan Lake as the featured ballet: a story about a prince who was told he couldn’t marry for love; a tragedy about a prince who failed to keep his vow of love; and a tale about the loss of a crown that protected a young woman from harm. Now these are parallels I can get behind! No more boats, please.
I spoke too soon: While Charles chirped at her desire to go shopping in Italy at the top of the season, Mohamed readily offers Diana some retail therapy, security, and sunshine if she joins him in Saint-Tropez on his big, new yacht. The final time we see Diana this season, she’s packing her and her sons’ clothes for the trip, a smile playing on her lips as she looks into the mirror. It’d be a sweet, tentative moment of hope and happiness for the audience to enjoy if we didn’t know the domino effect this vacation will have. In two months, Diana will be dead.
That these particular Diana scenes are the highlights speaks, in a way, to the episode’s weakness. “Decommissioned” feels less like a finale and more like the official prologue for The Crown’s final season. In fact, most of the fifth season has felt like it’s been building up to something we won’t experience for another year or so. This isn’t entirely surprising; in January 2020, Peter Morgan announced the series would be ending in its fifth season, but then later backtracked, saying six seasons will be necessary “to do justice to the richness and complexity of the story.”
Keeping this in mind, it starts to make sense why certain choices were made this season. It’s why Dodi — someone Diana dated for less than two months — gets far more emphasis than Hasnat, whom Diana dated for two years (and reportedly wanted to marry). It’s why Charles keeps harping on the need to modernize the monarchy without getting anywhere. I suspect it’s the reason why Diana’s paranoia and isolation was such a fixture this season, with little attention paid to her humanitarian work. (By this time in her life, she had famously walked through a live minefield in Angola — something that appears to be pushed into next season.) It’s also likely why we see Charles pressing for the ability to marry Camilla and hiring a spin doctor without seeing any fruits of that labor; we know his efforts will pay off in time.
The issue with this approach is the season feels incomplete on its own — the Britannia-based bookends can’t save it. There are ways to remain episodically compelling while setting up a later, larger story (this season’s “Mou Mou” was a wonderful example), but “Decommissioned” falters on this front. And so, even though The Crown has always been a staid, slow-moving show, we’re left with a finale that feels particularly anticlimactic, despite being cloaked in a general sense of unease.
It’s hard to speculate where exactly the series will conclude in the royal timeline. Obviously, Diana’s death will be covered, but how will the show approach such a delicate subject? (The scenes in this episode with Diana in Mohamed’s car, speeding away from paparazzi, were chilling enough.) And will Morgan divert from the narrative he established in The Queen? We do know that Kate Middleton has been cast, as well as two versions of William, suggesting we’ll venture as far as his college years. It also sounds like Charles and Camilla’s 2005 wedding will be featured, which makes the death of Princess Margaret in 2002 another obvious event to cover.
Morgan has confirmed that, despite his decision to extend the series for a sixth and final chapter, the show’s mysterious end point remains the same: “To be clear, season six will not bring us any closer to present day.” These last ten episodes were so much about setting the stage for a final act, but there’s a difference between leaving an audience wanting more (good!) versus expecting more (not so good). And so, while I enjoyed this season, I’m not sure where The Crown lands in that respect — or maybe it did both! Whatever Morgan’s plan is moving forward, fingers crossed the final season delivers.
Royal Diary
• It’s nice that Edward finds time to pop up every so often, but it always takes me a second to place him. (Sorry to this man, etc.)
• On that note, where the hell did Penny go?
• I thought Camilla’s wink at Bolland when discussing the first-class fiasco was cute and well-placed, while also establishing how a business-class seat is not the end of the world. She’s good at defusing an unwanted situation, which Charles constantly seems to find himself in.
• As icky as it is to acknowledge, The Crown sure does benefit visually from the wide-spanning nature of colonialism, especially in terms of providing picturesque backdrops for the show. The shots of Hong Kong, especially that spectacular skyline at night, were gorgeous and offered a nice change of environment and tone (even if they might have been technically captured elsewhere). At the same time, season five had so little to do with politics that the transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty doesn’t have the narrative impact it deserved.
• It’s a bit sad to know that Dodi will be ditching Kelly soon, despite his proposal to her. Farewell to our future Blue Kentucky Girl.
• The Crown always gets me crushing on the most unexpected of characters, and this season it was … John Major?! I know Diana gave Andrew Morton the nickname of Clark Kent, but it’s way more fitting of Major here. Thank you for your service, Jonny Lee Miller.
• While it was indeed a treasured gift of the queen’s, the Big Mouth Billy Bass came out in 2000, a few years after this episode takes place. But the show gets accuracy points for highlighting that Charles is an avid watercolorist.
• When it comes to awards-season predictions, I see Elizabeth Debicki and the woefully underused Lesley Manville especially strong contenders.
