The Crown Season 6: What Is True and What Is Fiction in The Final Episodes of The Series
The Crown Season 6 finale is now available to stream on the Netflix platform. If the series by Peter Morgan had been characterized by presenting a view that mixed fascination and cynicism concerning the monarchy – beings that are all too human who inhabited the unstable zone located between their personal passions and social parasitism, The Crown Season 6 Part 2 continues the hagiographic tone of the first four episodes, to complete a story that lost its critical force until reaching an ending that feels aseptic and obsequential, in which Morgan defines the legacy of Queen Elizabeth II with one word, sacrifice, a simplistic reduction for a series that constantly sought greatness.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 5: The Duel of Carlos and His Children?
The first of the new episodes (5-10) focuses on the fragile and tense relationship between Prince Charles (Dominic West) and their son William (Ed McVey) as they grieve following Diana’s death. If throughout its seasons The Crown showed a Carlos always conflicted but affectionate and dedicated to his children, Harry (Luther Ford) refers to the feeling of abandonment and heartbreak that the brothers felt by a cold and distant father at the time they needed him most. When Charles talks to his sister, they agree that it is good that William has close friends at Eton because he “had no friends” at school. In real life, the prince always felt isolated at Gordonstoun, and his former classmate Johnny Stonborough wrote in the Telegraph that it was “impossible” to become friends with him without becoming the object of harassment for being “one of the king’s friends”.
As part of Carlos’ drive to bond with his children, he takes them on an official trip to British Columbia and skiing in Whistler. The trip is a disaster, with journalists and large crowds harassing them at all times. That happened in real life. William defines Carlos as someone jealous of his popularity and spits out the words: “It’s hard for you to be eclipsed.” It’s impossible to know if the conversation ever occurred, but the most important point is true: the fictional William has Diana’s interview with Martin Bashir in mind, in which the princess makes the same claim (in the present, with Charles now king, William’s popularity still surpasses her own).
In his memoirs, Harry says that “William did everything Carlos wanted, and many times he didn’t want him to do too much, because he and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate received publicity.” Harry added that before the public engagement, Charles’ staff insisted that Kate not be photographed holding a tennis racket. “Without a doubt, that type of photo would have taken Dad and Camila off of all the covers. And that cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.”
The Crown Season 6 Episode 6: Elizabeth II’s Obsession with Tony Blair
The Crown Season 6 Episode 6 begins with the queen having a nightmare in which Tony Blair) obsessed and jealous of the Prime Minister’s popularity ratings. There is no evidence to suggest these facts, nor that the queen ever uttered in a casual conversation with Blair the phrase “the spell we cast is our immutability.” Imelda Staunton) has been named king. The episode shows Isabel (Bertie Carvel). But did the queen seek the prime minister’s advice on modernizing the monarchy? Who knows? After all, hearings are private, not public. But it is Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) who is portrayed with some accuracy as averse to the prospects of change. In real life, he said that he was in favor of modernization, but “not for the sake of doing things the Blairian [sic] way.”
It is feasible that focus groups were used to assess attitudes towards the monarchy as shown in episode 6 of The Crown, but these scenes also appear to be a reference to Prince Charles’s ill-fated Way Ahead group, formed by senior royals in the 1990s to exchange ideas on modernization plans (the group is mentioned in the season 5). Tony Blair did receive loud disapproval from members of the British Women’s Institute when he spoke at its national conference in July 2000, in stark contrast to the enthusiastic reception given to the queen.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 7: William goes to university and his Meeting with Kate
Episode 7 of the final season of The Crown begins with the fictional meeting between Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy) and her mother Carole (Eve Best) with William and Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) at Christmas 1996, who are raising funds for charity. The episode focuses on how Carole believes her daughter is “special” and destined to marry William. The matriarch makes Kate postpone her entry to university for a year, travel to Chile as a volunteer to do social work, take an art course in Florence, and change educational institutions – from the University of Edinburgh to St Andrew’s in Scotland. to study with William. This happened.
Kate has laughed off suggestions that she had pictures of William taped to her bedroom wall as a teenager. The Crown shows a teenage Kate fanatical about the prince. William’s first serial girlfriend at St Andrew’s, Lola Airdale-Cavendish Kincaid, “from a family so posh they had to name her three times”, is fictitious, but he had many girlfriends before Kate. That the heir to the throne dated a rich girl but without a lordly title was considered subversive [sic] in many royal circles.
Harry and William’s relationship is presented as more antagonistic than those who knew them as teenagers tend to remember. Although Peter Morgan told Variety that he had not read the book Spare of Harry, these scenes seem taken straight from its pages, as does William’s participation the night Harry dresses up in a Nazi uniform for a party (episode 10). Annie Sulzberger, the lead investigator for The Crown, recently said that The Crown “helped us think, ‘Okay, this is an insider’s look and I feel like we’re on the right path” Spare.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 8: The Celebration at the Ritz and Margaret’s Illness
Episode 8 of the final season of The Crown is a fictional account of Victory in Europe Day in 1945, featuring a young Princess Margaret (Beau Gadsdon) and the future queen (Viola Prettejohn) sneaking out of the palace – with Lord “Porchey” Porchester (later the queen’s racing director and best friend) and Peter Townsend (the king’s equerry with whom Margaret would later fall in love) – to attend the party at the Ritz Hotel, where they dance jittabug with black soldiers in the basement. The episode is based on reality: the princesses were part of a group of 16 who left the Palace that night (including Townsend and Porchey). They went to the Ritz, but not to the seedy jazz club in the basement: “For some reason, we decided to walk in through the front door and play the conga”. Margaret Rhodes recalled the queen’s cousin, from her trip to the historic hotel. They tried to remain incognito and failed, so they had to return to the palace at midnight, not at dawn.
The episode also deals with the relationship between Margaret and Isabel, especially at the end of Margaret’s life (sure enough, she burned her feet in a bathroom accident in Mustique). Overall, the performance is beautifully done, and the Victory Day celebration sequence illustrates her bond to underline how the queen gave up a normal, carefree life to be a monarch. Like the character Bunbury in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, Margaret had an imaginary friend called “Cousin Halifax,” whom she blamed for her transgressions.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 9: Kate’s parade, Mohamed Al-Fayed’s allegations, and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee
Episode 9 of season 6 of The Crown presents the well-known story of the underwear show in which Kate modeled to attract William’s attention. What is fiction is the moment when the bodyguard interrupts them in the middle of the first kiss to inform him that the queen’s mother has died. William was on a skiing holiday with his brother and her father in Klosters, Switzerland, when she died. The highlight of the series is that pleasure always clashes with the duty of being part of royalty. A similar narrative impetus seems to be behind a fictional sequence in which William leaves lunch at Kate’s parent’s house to be at the queen’s side at the Golden Jubilee speech. Of course, in real life, it was always meant to be there.
The complaints of Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Daw) were real. The Egyptian businessman long insisted that the accident was intentional. He hired investigators and appealed several times the conclusions of the official French investigation into the issue. Mou Mou suggested that the British royal family may have been involved in some way because they wanted to cover up the fact that Diana was pregnant with her child and were planning to get married. People close to Diana have consistently denied that she was pregnant or that she planned to marry Dodi (Khalid Abdalla). Brown writes that sources close to Diana told him that the princess “had no intention of marrying Dodi Fayed, but that she was flirting with him simply to annoy Charles and the Royal Family”. Still, in November 2008, Fayed read written testimony before the Royal Courts of Justice. “She told me she knew Prince Philip and Prince Charles were trying to get rid of her. They cleaned the decks. “They murdered her”.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 10: The Queen’s Funeral, Charles’s Wedding and cameos by Olivia Colman and Claire Foy
The tenth and final episode of The Crown moves towards the Queen’s funeral but is mainly about Charles and his marriage to Camilla. As the series shows, William and Harry were not happy with the idea. Harry wrote in his memoirs that they “begged” his father not to marry. The episode completes the redemption arc of the queen, who slowly accepts that her son’s love is true. In reality, Isabel gave a speech at Charles’s wedding reception congratulating him for being “home and dry, an English idiom meaning to come to fruition] with the woman he loves”. The part about the queen contemplating the possibility of abdicating is invented, but it helps Morgan for a final meeting between the actresses who played Elizabeth: Imelda Staunton. Claire Foy and Olivia Colman.
