‘The Crown’ goes out with class and sass, giving us a dignified goodbye to the Queen while going all-in on William v. Harry, reimagining Charles, Camilla, and a young Kate Middleton, lacing it all with the perfect amount of camp.
Harry, pardon the pun, is spared no indignity here.
He is depicted as an angry, bitter, hopeless, recalcitrant loser whose simmering resentment of William would only ever lead to ruin.
Worse, he’s given a Three Stooges-like bowl cut with teeny tiny bangs. It’s the look and effect of a dunce. He is twice staged on or near a toilet, drinking copiously, and lamenting his ginger-hood.
‘I’m just jealous’, he says to William in the first episode of series 6 part 2, called Willsmania. ‘In the history of humankind, no one’s ever screamed for someone with red hair’.
That dialogue is the first of many cuts. Harry exists here as a mere foil to William, an also-ran, the much-pitied Number Two whose energy is only ever dark and disturbing.
‘The Crown’ goes out with class and sass, giving us a dignified goodbye to the Queen while going all-in on William v. Harry, reimagining Charles, Camilla, and a young Kate Middleton , lacing it all with the perfect amount of camp.
Harry, pardon the pun, is spared no indignity here. He is depicted as an angry, bitter, hopeless, recalcitrant loser whose simmering resentment of William would only ever lead to ruin. He is twice staged on or near a toilet, drinking copiously, and lamenting his ginger-hood.
‘I’m just jealous’, he says to William. ‘In the history of humankind, no one’s ever screamed for someone with red hair’. That dialogue is the first of many cuts. Harry exists here as a mere foil to William, an also-ran, the much-pitied Number Two whose energy is only ever dark and disturbing.
William tells the Queen (Imelda Staunton) that harry is developing a problem with marijuana, while Harry gripes that Charles is threatening to force a daylong visit to a rehab facility — Harry agitated not by the implications but by the optics and a media he calls ‘f**kers, every one of them, scum of the earth’.
Subtle!
Harry’s bitter words to William: ‘I know my job is to be the f**k-up in this family… I know my purpose in life: the screw-up to make you look good. There’s no need for a Number Two in this family except as entertainment. So it’s Willie gold star, Harry black sheep. Willie saint, Harry sinner. Willie solid, Harry lost. F**king up — oh, that’s Harry Wales’s job’.
One imagines the rage-fueled calls and texts emanating forthwith from House Sussex to Netflix. But the streamer has exacted its pound of flesh, and viewers will be thankful for it.
And how satisfying that this coincides with a week in which The Hollywood Reporter named Harry and Meghan two of the year’s ‘biggest losers’ and their charity, Archewell, recorded an $11million slump in donations.
‘Be kind to [Harry]’, the Queen tells William. ‘In many ways it’s harder being Number Two than Number One… Number Two tends to —’
‘Go mad’? William parries.
‘I was going to say, need extra care and attention’.
Ha!
Such delicious exchanges aside, of these final six episodes, be warned that numbers two and four are filler.
Flashbacks to the hours after World War II and the reemergence of Mohamed Al-Fayed are agony. An entire episode devoted to Princess Margaret, no matter the pathos, feels irrelevant.
William tells the Queen (Imelda Staunton) that harry is developing a problem with marijuana, while Harry gripes that Charles is threatening to force a daylong visit to a rehab facility – Harry agitated not by the implications but by the optics and a media he calls ‘f**kers, every one of them, scum of the earth’. Subtle!
One wonders why these well-trod eras and characters are revived yet again while more recent-day dramas — for example, Camilla’s nerve-wracking first meeting with William, after which she famously said, ‘I really need a gin and tonic’ — were presumably left on the writers’ room floor.
Of course, as is his wont, showrunner Peter Morgan has rewritten history considerably: Charles (Dominic West) is given a hero edit. Camilla (Olivia Williams) is self-sacrificing and supportive, thinking only and ever of ‘the boys’ and their welfare, kneecapped here with a ratty wig. Her big moment with Charles, his long-awaited proposal on bended knee, sees Camilla gardening with a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth. It’s glorious.
Carole Middleton — the actress, as with the actor playing William, a physical döppelganger — is depicted as a mildly pushy, well-meaning stage mom, less Kris Jenner than upper-middle-class striver.
Dishy alleged details, however, of Carole’s machinations to put her daughter in William’s path — timing Kate’s gap year to William’s, having her joining the same South American expedition program, enrolling her in St. Andrews after William announced his plans to attend university there — are glossed over.
The most we get is Kate telling her mother that she’s ‘worse than [Jane Austen’s] Mrs. Bennet’.
As for Kate: Well, Waity Katie is no more.
This Kate Middleton is diffident and unimpressed by William, who pines for her from the beginning.
After the infamous fashion show in which Kate modeled a semi-sheer dress — the moment when William was said to have first seen his friend as a potential love interest — the future king is depicted as a stalker.
‘I’ve always been interested, bordering on obsessed’, he tells Kate. ‘To the point where I thought if I couldn’t have you, I’d sooner not be here at all’.
Please. We all know Kate suffered during that lengthy courtship. But such revisionist history is a small price to pay for Morgan’s exacting take on the brothers Windsor and the show’s clear fealty to monarchy, service and crown.
As for Kate: Well, Waity Katie is no more. This Kate Middleton is diffident and unimpressed by William, who pines for her from the beginning.
After the infamous fashion show in which Kate modeled a semi-sheer dress – the moment when William was said to have first seen his friend as a potential love interest – the future king is depicted as a stalker.
We see the Queen take William and Harry for a private chat, in which she asks their feelings about a Charles-Camilla marriage. Harry raises an instant objection; the Queen swats it away.
‘William’?
‘I suppose this is the reality’, he says. ‘And she does seem to make him happy’.
Harry’s opinion matters not. After, he confronts William, spewing bile.
‘You’re such a f**king company man’, he says. It’s savage dialogue straight out of Scobie and ‘Spare’.
‘I’m just trying to be an adult’, William shoots back. ‘I don’t expect you to understand what that feels like’.
Cut to Harry dressing as a Nazi (with Kate gently advising against, contrary to Harry’s blame-shifting in ‘Spare’) and the ensuing media storm.
Here’s hapless Harold, naked on his toilet except for boxers, freaking out and screaming ‘F**k’!
His self-imposed failings are contrasted with William’s rising seriousness, Charles’s happy ending, and the Queen’s reckoning with her own mortality and a strange temptation to abdicate (a total fabrication).
Claire Foy and Olivia Colman, who played Queen Elizabeth in previous seasons, return to counsel Staunton’s QEII.
Foy delivers the thesis statement, which doubles as a sharp rebuke to the two miseries dwelling in Montecito: ‘Monarchy is something you are, not what you do… If you step down, you will be symbolizing instability and impermanence. You’ll also be indicating the luxury of choice, which is the one thing we cannot have if we claim the crown is also our birthright.’
Boom!
Harry’s self-imposed failings are contrasted with William’s rising seriousness, Charles’s happy ending, and the Queen’s reckoning with her own mortality and a strange temptation to abdicate (a total fabrication).
In one of our last moments with William and Harry, the younger brother offers a dire foreshadowing. As they sit alone outside, at night, Harry tells his brother the story of King William the II — details changed and invented by Morgan for dramatic effect.
‘He was assassinated by his own brother’, Harry says.
William: ‘Was he’?
Harry: ‘Who, would you believe, was also named Prince Henry. He had William killed in a shooting accident, then galloped off… to claim the throne for himself. Don’t worry mate — I wouldn’t do that to you’.
It’s a poetic, perfect parting shot at Harry: ‘The Crown’ may be over, but the world knows exactly who’s come out on top in this fratricidal war of words.
Spare, indeed.