‘The Crown’s’ Final Episodes Give Us Too Much Will and Kate

An unexpected thing happens in the series finale of The Crown, which Netflix released today: Queen Elizabeth is the main character.

This would seem to be the most predictable thing in the world, right? The Crown began with Elizabeth’s unexpected ascension to the British throne at the age of 25, and it concludes a little over 50 years later. First Claire Foy, then Olivia Colman, and most recently Imelda Staunton have been playing the protagonist, haven’t they?

In theory, yes. But The Crown creator Peter Morgan has always had an ambivalent relationship with his fictionalized version of the late monarch. He understands Elizabeth’s importance to both history and the show’s narrative, but he only occasionally has seemed interested in understanding her as a person. More often, it seems, he gravitates toward other royals: Matt Smith’s petulant Philip in the Foy years, Josh O’Connor’s Charles and Emma Corrin’s Diana in the Colman era, and Dominic West, Elizabeth Debicki, and Ed McVey as, respectively, the older versions of Charles, Diana, and William. 

The Foy years also spent a lot of time on Princess Margaret (played then by Vanessa Kirby) complaining that she should have become queen, because she had all the personality that her older sister lacked. While Morgan has grown increasingly pro-monarchy over the run of the show, he’s also long seemed to be on Margaret’s side of the argument. The Crown largely viewed Elizabeth from a distance, occasionally restating the idea that she had to surrender whatever her real personality was in order to properly perform her duties, but otherwise treating her as an enigma who struggled to stay above the fray of what the more exciting characters were doing.

The finale finally returns its focus to Elizabeth in the mid-aughts, as she contemplates her past and her future as she approaches her 80th birthday while Charles gets deeper into his 50s, still unable to assume the job he’s been waiting his whole life for. But even that only comes after the final season’s first four episodes focused on Diana’s death and its immediate aftermath, followed by a stretch in this final batch about William getting to know Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) while they’re classmates at St. Andrews. There’s a spotlight on the older Margaret (Lesley Manville) that also looks back at the two of them as teenagers on V-E Day(*), again providing a glimpse of the woman Elizabeth could have been if her uncle hadn’t abdicated, or if her father had lived longer. But by the time the spotlight fully returns to her in the last episode, it feels almost obligatory, as if Morgan is admitting, “OK, fine! We should end a show called The Crown with a story about the woman wearing the crown when the story ends.”(**) 

(*) This is also the plot of the 2015 film A Royal Night Out.

(**) In case you missed all the discussion of this over recent years, the show gets nowhere near the period when Harry meets Meghan Markle, Elizabeth dies, Charles finally becomes king, etc. 

And Staunton is excellent throughout that finale, even if most of it is simply her and other characters restating Morgan’s thesis about Elizabeth, again and again and again. He has one thing to say about her, and he just does that. But that approach worked much better in the Foy years, when Elizabeth was so young, and the job so new, that she was still coming to grips with all she would have to sacrifice in order to live up to the kingdom’s expectations of her. By the time Colman and, especially, Staunton took over the role, Elizabeth had long since made peace with that sacrifice. There simply wasn’t enough of a dramatic center to the series anymore. The later seasons were still capable of periodic greatness, but The Crown wasn’t as consistently excellent as in that very first year.

The main problem with these post-Diana episodes is how focused they are on William. As written by Morgan and played by Ed McVey, he’s… fine? He’s a nice young man who is grieving the loss of his mother, but who is also better at compartmentalizing, and at understanding the complex demands of being a royal, better than anyone other than his grandmother. The thing that Elizabeth spent her 20s and 30s struggling with has been baked into his DNA, which takes away any real character arc. And beyond that, he’s presented as a fairly normal kid whose flirtation with Kate would play out roughly the same if they were two characters on a teen drama without any connections to royalty whatsoever(*). It does, though, lead to an amusing scene where William tells Elizabeth that he’s been having trouble with dating, and she replies, “I don’t know that word, because we didn’t do that in my day. We met someone, then married, then got on with it.” 

(*) Bellamy is good, as is Eve Best as Kate’s mother Carole, and there’s decent tension about whether Carole has steered her daughter toward the handsome prince by any means necessary. But even the beats of that feel not dissimilar to many stories about girls from the wrong side of the tracks who wind up dating wealthy boys from “good” families. Minor variations on a very old theme, performed decently enough.    

The more interesting story is lurking on the periphery: Prince Harry (now played by Luther Ford). Like Margaret, Harry has to go through life understanding there is no chance he will wear the crown. But his struggle with it plays out very differently. He doesn’t want to sit on the throne himself, but also feels like he can never be great at anything, lest he eclipse Will and cast doubt on the whole idea of the line of succession. He suggests that his purpose in life is to be “a screw-up to make you look good.” The finale devotes a surprising amount of time to the incident where Harry wound up in the tabloids for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, but more to other people responding to it than to Harry himself. 

This should shock no one who has witnessed the series’ evolution from feeling agnostic at best about the royals to being fully converted to the concept. Eventually, we got to a point where Charles was somehow presented as the sympathetic one in the end of his marriage to Diana, while Mohamed Al-Fayed became the cartoonish villain of this season’s first half, which implied that Diana would still be alive if not for this foreigner daring to try to associate himself with the British aristocracy. So of course, Harry — who has so publicly split from, and feuded with, the royal institution itself — could not be given the same level of narrative prominence, nor empathy, as the father who recently ascended to the throne and the brother who will do that after King Charles is gone.

Elizabeth spends much of the finale planning her funeral, a necessary bit of business to ensure an orderly transition upon her passing. No one knows that she will live nearly 20 years past this, and she is understandably jolted by seeing a scale model of her funeral procession, complete with a tiny casket. Later, she sits with Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) and seems to enjoy watching the prime minister squirm as they discuss what a mess the Iraq War has become — and, implicitly, how Blair’s support of the Bush administration throughout this has destroyed his reputation only a few years after British citizens seemed to prefer him to her. As he talks about an exit strategy from Iraq, she notes that exit strategies have been on a lot of people’s minds of late. That must extend to Peter Morgan himself, who had to decide the right moment, both in time and in the arc of the life of Elizabeth Windsor, to exit this family’s story. Short of continuing things to Elizabeth’s death last year, Morgan picks as good a moment as any. But the journey to that exit has been very bumpy of late.

An unexpected thing happens in the series finale of The Crown, which Netflix released today: Queen Elizabeth is the main character.

This would seem to be the most predictable thing in the world, right? The Crown began with Elizabeth’s unexpected ascension to the British throne at the age of 25, and it concludes a little over 50 years later. First Claire Foy, then Olivia Colman, and most recently Imelda Staunton have been playing the protagonist, haven’t they?

In theory, yes. But The Crown creator Peter Morgan has always had an ambivalent relationship with his fictionalized version of the late monarch. He understands Elizabeth’s importance to both history and the show’s narrative, but he only occasionally has seemed interested in understanding her as a person. More often, it seems, he gravitates toward other royals: Matt Smith’s petulant Philip in the Foy years, Josh O’Connor’s Charles and Emma Corrin’s Diana in the Colman era, and Dominic West, Elizabeth Debicki, and Ed McVey as, respectively, the older versions of Charles, Diana, and William. 

The Foy years also spent a lot of time on Princess Margaret (played then by Vanessa Kirby) complaining that she should have become queen, because she had all the personality that her older sister lacked. While Morgan has grown increasingly pro-monarchy over the run of the show, he’s also long seemed to be on Margaret’s side of the argument. The Crown largely viewed Elizabeth from a distance, occasionally restating the idea that she had to surrender whatever her real personality was in order to properly perform her duties, but otherwise treating her as an enigma who struggled to stay above the fray of what the more exciting characters were doing.

The finale finally returns its focus to Elizabeth in the mid-aughts, as she contemplates her past and her future as she approaches her 80th birthday while Charles gets deeper into his 50s, still unable to assume the job he’s been waiting his whole life for. But even that only comes after the final season’s first four episodes focused on Diana’s death and its immediate aftermath, followed by a stretch in this final batch about William getting to know Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) while they’re classmates at St. Andrews. There’s a spotlight on the older Margaret (Lesley Manville) that also looks back at the two of them as teenagers on V-E Day(*), again providing a glimpse of the woman Elizabeth could have been if her uncle hadn’t abdicated, or if her father had lived longer. But by the time the spotlight fully returns to her in the last episode, it feels almost obligatory, as if Morgan is admitting, “OK, fine! We should end a show called The Crown with a story about the woman wearing the crown when the story ends.”(**) 

(*) This is also the plot of the 2015 film A Royal Night Out.

(**) In case you missed all the discussion of this over recent years, the show gets nowhere near the period when Harry meets Meghan Markle, Elizabeth dies, Charles finally becomes king, etc. 

And Staunton is excellent throughout that finale, even if most of it is simply her and other characters restating Morgan’s thesis about Elizabeth, again and again and again. He has one thing to say about her, and he just does that. But that approach worked much better in the Foy years, when Elizabeth was so young, and the job so new, that she was still coming to grips with all she would have to sacrifice in order to live up to the kingdom’s expectations of her. By the time Colman and, especially, Staunton took over the role, Elizabeth had long since made peace with that sacrifice. There simply wasn’t enough of a dramatic center to the series anymore. The later seasons were still capable of periodic greatness, but The Crown wasn’t as consistently excellent as in that very first year.

The main problem with these post-Diana episodes is how focused they are on William. As written by Morgan and played by Ed McVey, he’s… fine? He’s a nice young man who is grieving the loss of his mother, but who is also better at compartmentalizing, and at understanding the complex demands of being a royal, better than anyone other than his grandmother. The thing that Elizabeth spent her 20s and 30s struggling with has been baked into his DNA, which takes away any real character arc. And beyond that, he’s presented as a fairly normal kid whose flirtation with Kate would play out roughly the same if they were two characters on a teen drama without any connections to royalty whatsoever(*). It does, though, lead to an amusing scene where William tells Elizabeth that he’s been having trouble with dating, and she replies, “I don’t know that word, because we didn’t do that in my day. We met someone, then married, then got on with it.” 

(*) Bellamy is good, as is Eve Best as Kate’s mother Carole, and there’s decent tension about whether Carole has steered her daughter toward the handsome prince by any means necessary. But even the beats of that feel not dissimilar to many stories about girls from the wrong side of the tracks who wind up dating wealthy boys from “good” families. Minor variations on a very old theme, performed decently enough.    

The more interesting story is lurking on the periphery: Prince Harry (now played by Luther Ford). Like Margaret, Harry has to go through life understanding there is no chance he will wear the crown. But his struggle with it plays out very differently. He doesn’t want to sit on the throne himself, but also feels like he can never be great at anything, lest he eclipse Will and cast doubt on the whole idea of the line of succession. He suggests that his purpose in life is to be “a screw-up to make you look good.” The finale devotes a surprising amount of time to the incident where Harry wound up in the tabloids for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, but more to other people responding to it than to Harry himself. 

This should shock no one who has witnessed the series’ evolution from feeling agnostic at best about the royals to being fully converted to the concept. Eventually, we got to a point where Charles was somehow presented as the sympathetic one in the end of his marriage to Diana, while Mohamed Al-Fayed became the cartoonish villain of this season’s first half, which implied that Diana would still be alive if not for this foreigner daring to try to associate himself with the British aristocracy. So of course, Harry — who has so publicly split from, and feuded with, the royal institution itself — could not be given the same level of narrative prominence, nor empathy, as the father who recently ascended to the throne and the brother who will do that after King Charles is gone.

Elizabeth spends much of the finale planning her funeral, a necessary bit of business to ensure an orderly transition upon her passing. No one knows that she will live nearly 20 years past this, and she is understandably jolted by seeing a scale model of her funeral procession, complete with a tiny casket. Later, she sits with Tony Blair (Bertie Carvel) and seems to enjoy watching the prime minister squirm as they discuss what a mess the Iraq War has become — and, implicitly, how Blair’s support of the Bush administration throughout this has destroyed his reputation only a few years after British citizens seemed to prefer him to her. As he talks about an exit strategy from Iraq, she notes that exit strategies have been on a lot of people’s minds of late. That must extend to Peter Morgan himself, who had to decide the right moment, both in time and in the arc of the life of Elizabeth Windsor, to exit this family’s story. Short of continuing things to Elizabeth’s death last year, Morgan picks as good a moment as any. But the journey to that exit has been very bumpy of late.