The Crown, season 6 episode 4, Aftermath, review: all done in staggeringly bad taste
Warning: this review contains spoilers
Peter Morgan has covered Diana’s death and its aftermath before. The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, was a critically acclaimed film which presented a sympathetic and dignified portrait of the monarch during the most difficult crisis of her reign.
Covering this same ground in The Crown, Morgan is all out of ideas. And the creative decisions he has made are staggeringly bad.
Netflix has been saying for months that the drama would not show the Mercedes crashing in the tunnel, for reasons of taste. But bad taste takes many forms. How about the camera following Charles into his sons’ bedrooms at Balmoral, waking them to say that their mother is dead? And that camera focusing on the face of Prince Harry – then a 12-year-old boy – as he hears the news? It is horribly intrusive.
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Morgan gives us a subplot in which William goes missing from Balmoral. Presumably, this story is an invention, designed to illustrate William’s grief and the pressure he felt after overhearing Charles say that he must walk behind Diana’s coffin and take on the mantle of a future king. “He’s never done anything like that before,” the Queen says of his disappearance. Well, he’s never lost his mother before, has he? It’s either a stupid line dashed off without thought, or designed to show that the Queen has the emotional intelligence of a trout.
Then there is the much-trailed “ghost” of Diana (and Dodi – the episode starts to fill up like the house in Rentaghost). She’s not drifting through walls, but she does appear from beyond the grave in imagined conversations with Charles and the Queen. The dialogue is fist-chewingly awful.
“Thank you for how you were at the hospital. So raw. Broken. And handsome. I’ll take that with me,” she tells Charles. Later she sidles up to the Queen on a Balmoral sofa. “I hope you’re happy now. You’ve finally succeeded in turning me and this house upside down,” says Imelda Staunton’s bitter little monarch. Diana delivers a motivational speech which boils down to: be more Diana. And, voila, the Queen performs a volte-face and comes to London to record an address to the nation.
Mohamed al-Fayed, a villain over these past few episodes, regains our sympathy as a heartbroken father. A letter he sent to the royals goes unanswered, a gift is returned without acknowledgement. The coldness of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh is repeatedly underlined. “Diana was part of this family,” Charles says. “Divorced from this family,” corrects the Queen. They row over whether she should have a public funeral (Charles has caught the public mood, as has Tony Blair).
The Queen, Charles tells Anne, is “unable to mother the country in precisely the way she was unable to mother us”. “Ugh, that is just not helpful right now,” replies Anne, ever the voice of good sense.
The Crown has previously given us CGI spectacle, but the funeral is not covered here save for a close-up of Charles, Philip, William and Harry walking behind the coffin (Earl Spencer gets so little screen time that the actor playing him must have been pleased to be paid the Equity minimum). It feels oddly cheap, like a reconstruction from a throwaway history documentary, and is interspersed with fuzzy news footage of the real thing.
One can only think that Morgan was on the gin and Dubonnet when he wrote the final scene, a screamingly mad moment in which the Queen kneels by her bed to pray and then looks fearfully over her shoulder as a horror-film soundtrack cranks up. Does she fear the ghost of Diana coming back with more self-help quotes? Or is Imelda Staunton worried that an even worse script is coming her way?
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