Critic’s Notebook: Final Episodes Bring ‘The Crown’ to a Smooth but Savorless Finish

“The Crown doesn’t ask existential questions of itself,” Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) is told when she contemplates modernizing the British monarchy during a time of particularly frigid public opinion. “It suggests a loss of confidence. It’s putting blood in the water.” But if the Crown won’t pose those inquiries, Peter Morgan’s The Crown often has.

Since 2016, the Netflix drama has probed the British royal family from an array of angles, and in doing so asked us to consider what the monarchy is worth, what the monarchy is for, what the monarchy has cost the people at its center and the people around them and the nation they purport to serve — all conversations that feel, if anything, even more relevant in 2023. In its final six episodes, however, The Crown proves less interested in interrogating the status quo than admiring it. It surely makes for a sweeter finish. But it doesn’t make for a very satisfying one.

To be sure, The Crown was never going to go out in a blaze of burn-it-all-down glory. The series has generally been deeply empathetic to and respectful of the Windsors, not that that’s ever stopped the British tabloids from clutching their pearls over it. Still, its best runs were sharp, lively and, yes, sometimes unflattering enough to have the ring of truth: Philip could be a supportive partner but also a selfish one, Elizabeth could be in tune with her public in one episode and wildly out of step with it the next, and so on. But the final six episodes of the sixth and last season (following a four-part, Diana-centric arc in November) dispense with much of that nuance, and much of its formerly gripping narrative power along with it.

Whatever Morgan’s actual motivations, whatever the actual process of making these chapters, the end product has the smoothed-over texture of something scrupulously designed to avoid offending those in power. Take Charles, who in middle seasons was portrayed by Josh O’Connor as simultaneously a victim of his own royal circumstances and the villain of Diana’s. Following his closure from Ghost Diana(!!) in chapter four, Charles (Dominic West) is now a well-meaning father taken aback by the suggestion that he might be jealous of his son’s exploding popularity, as if he hadn’t been seething at his ex-wife’s just episodes earlier.

Meanwhile, as William (Ed McVey) moves into the spotlight he’s portrayed sympathetically as a sweet, slightly sad young man — but missing is the specificity and intimacy that The Crown has brought to his relatives in seasons past. Much of his screen time is spent pining after Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy), a talented beauty agreed upon by all of Will’s friends to be the most eligible bachelorette at St. Andrews. Yet once they meet, there’s none of the lively affection that marked Elizabeth and Philip’s early years, nor of the passionate drama that drove Margaret’s various romances. What drew them to each other remains a mystery, as do whatever quirks or challenges define their dynamic.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. As careful as The Crown is to keep to the Windsors’ good sides in its final stretch, it pointedly does not extend the kid-glove treatment to those outside their circle. So The Crown posits that the relationship was orchestrated by Kate’s mother Carole (Eve Best), a social climber who spent years scheming to throw her daughter in the prince’s path. But it also makes sure to include a scene of the future princess objecting to such machinations, so that we may still understand her love for Will as sincere.

Its portrayal of another would-be interloper, Mohamed Al Fayed (Salim Daw), is even less forgiving. In the wake of his son’s death, he reemerges as a vitriolic crank whose increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories are framed as attempts to deflect the blame that he rightly deserves. In the same breath that the incident is described as a “tragic accident,” a law enforcement official notes that the couple were “being driven in an Al Fayed car, by a member of Mr. Al Fayed’s staff, with bodyguards paid for by Mr. Al Fayed and acting on a last-minute change of plan instigated by Mr. Al Fayed’s son.”

(All of which, by the way, make it much easier to disregard Mohamed’s accusations that the family are racist — at precisely the same time we’re enduring yet another IRL news cycle about the “royal racist” who commented on the skin color of the future Prince Archie.)

That this series and its viewers would come to feel deeply for the family we’ve invested six seasons following is not surprising, and not necessarily a drawback. The single most moving hour of the entire season intercuts the last days of Margaret (Lesley Manville) with a long-ago evening in which she and her sister snuck out to celebrate V-E Day among the masses. Margaret cites the memory as evidence of the “true self” that Elizabeth repressed in favor of her royal duty. Showing us the younger Elizabeth (Viola Prettejohn, who looks freakishly like a young Claire Foy) dance the jitterbug and flirt with boys, The Crown drives home the sacrifice of self required by the institution as poignantly as it ever has.

But the drama’s way of ultimately resolving that tension is simply to posit that it doesn’t really exist anymore. In the series finale, the nearly 80-year-old Elizabeth wrestles with the decision of whether to cede her throne in favor of Charles. She ultimately decides not to under the advisement of her younger self (Claire Foy), who points out that whatever private, “real” Elizabeth may have existed once, she’s long since been subsumed into the queen she was required to be. “This system is a dreadful thing to inflict upon people. It’s not natural. It’s not fair. It’s not kind,” the 20something version acknowledges. “But you seem to thrive in it. And more importantly, it seems to thrive under you.”

What this admission means for an institution meant to outlive Elizabeth, The Crown does not dare to examine. In a final conversation with his wife, Philip (Jonathan Pryce) lightly reflects that whatever might happen to the monarchy after they’re gone, “it’s not our problem.” He is, technically speaking, correct. But it makes an odd concluding note for the story of a family who’ve shaped their entire existences around the idea that the system they were born into represents something bigger than any and all of them — something so worth preserving that nearly any cost to their private lives or personal freedoms might be worth it.

The series ends well before the close of Elizabeth II’s reign, leaving us watching at home to connect the dots between the ground it covers and everything that’s happened since. The onscreen Harry (Luther Ford) mentions his discomfort with his role as “spare” more than once, but the arc cannot go where we already know it’s headed, toward Sussexit and the publication of Spare. Elizabeth and Philip agree that “those that come after” are not as suited to the position as she naturally was; draw your own conclusions about whether Charles ultimately did grow into the role he inherited last year.

Elizabeth’s eventual death is alluded to as she plans her own funeral, and more poetically evoked in a closing shot that sees her exiting a church into an almost heavenly white light. But in the end, it’s not The Crown that has the final say on her legacy. It’s our own understanding of the world she’s left behind, and the hand she had in shaping it.