We’ve long known that The Crown season six would end up in the same historical territory as Peter Morgan’s other major Windsor drama, 2006’s The Queen. In that film, Helen Mirren’s icy Elizabeth II (an Oscar-winning performance) finds herself at odds, for the first time, with the British public in the wake of Diana’s tragic death. It picks up moments up the crash: a fresh-faced Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) is sprung with the first major crisis of his premiership, and Mirren’s Queen, supported by James Cromwell’s Philip, elects to do nothing publicly. Until the frost thaws at Balmoral and she realises that such hardiness isn’t good for national morale. Or, y’know, royal PR.
The first couple of episodes of The Crown season six cover the weeks before Diana’s death, zooming in on her mythologised situationship with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla). It feels soapier, but there are merits to Morgan’s new approach: for one, he uses the opportunity of returning to Diana’s death to cast fresh light on the public outpouring of grief for Dodi in the Middle East, reminding us that more than one person perished on that fateful night. Historically Dodi has been an afterthought in dramatisations of the crash, if thought about at all; in The Crown, his death is afforded an equal split of the episode, as is the grief of his father (Mohamed Al-Fayed, portrayed by Salim Daw) and the Middle Eastern world. It’s at least a meaningful corrective.
The aftermath, however, as predominantly seen in episode four, is more-or-less covered in the same manner as Morgan had 17 years earlier in The Queen. The terrible news reaches the sleeping royal estate; Prince Charles (Dominic West) dutifully heads to Paris to recover Diana’s body; the Queen (Imelda Staunton) and Philip (Jonathan Pryce) remain staid and stubborn, ignoring the public outcry for sympathy and focusing instead on their obligations to Princes Harry and Will as grandparents. Mixing it up a bit, Diana’s (Elizabeth Debicki) ghost appears for a midair chinwag with Charles, and later to console a stubborn Queen, but it’s such an oddly tone-deaf move that you can only be led to wonder the point of all the retreading.
Nevertheless, with an hour and 40 minutes of running time, the film has more room to navigate the complex conflict the family faces after the fact, and the greater political stakes of ignoring Diana’s death publicly — that the attendant backlash was existential for the royal household, conflict The Queen wields to great dramatic effect. We’re offered insights into Number 10, buoyed by a tremendous performance by Blair-actor-in-chief Michael Sheen. There’s a bolder sense of the public mood. Even as episodic TV, The Crown only gives the Diana aftermath 50 minutes, and has no such room to breathe.
The overarching sense in The Crown‘s version of events is that Morgan, as fingers hit keyboard, was looking over his shoulder. This period of The Crown‘s chronology, after all, offered a unique challenge: he’d already done it before, and to great success. He even opts to nick a bit of symbolism from himself. In both works, a majestic stag is shot on the estate. In The Queen, it’s the same regal, beautiful creature that the Queen had interacted with earlier in the film: a reminder of the beauty in the world amid the chaos of the post-Diana moment and, after it’s killed, a relieving cue to personally grieve.
In The Crown, Prince William is taken to shoot it the day before his mother dies in Paris. It’s a tradition for all members of the royal household, we’re told, to bag their first stag in their teens, and to be subsequently “blooded” — to have your face painted with the stag’s blood, still warm. Perhaps it’s to signify William’s alignment with royal tradition, Diana being its symbolic antithesis. Whatever the case, it mostly reminds you of how good The Queen is.
