‘The Crown’ Recap, Episode 8: “Pride & Joy”

Buckle in, dears, because in The Crown, Episode 8, “Pride & Joy,” it’s time for the monarchy to go walkabout.

The eye-watering expense of the 23 week Commonwealth tour (and The Crown itself, which really let it all hang out with these crowd scenes) is even more extraordinary when we consider that the nation, in 1953, was barely out of the intense economic strictures of British wartime, and only just beginning to see the gains in prosperity that would mark the 1950s and 1960s. (If you’d like to read more on this topic, I simply cannot recommend David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 highly enough.) A hundred dresses for a symbolic monarch to swan around Bermuda in is some Sun King shit!

Those dresses find their analog in Prince Philip’s particularly brocade-festooned military uniform, except that while Elizabeth recognizes that her clothes are part of the trappings of her office and wears them uncomplainingly, Philip has to be a big girl’s blouse about it. “It’s a costuuuuuuuuume.” Yes, Philip, just like a Naval uniform is a costume.

The whining just keeps on coming with Philip, unsurprisingly. The poor man has to go on a free six month world tour where someone physically helps him get dressed and pours him drinks and ensures he gets a full English breakfast even in the middle of Bermuda. He has the sack to complain that he’s expected to wake up in time to get the car to the airport.

Honestly, the only thing getting me through Philip’s bitchiness right now is the idea that there’s some small chance IRL Philip is watching a screener right now and getting his knickers in a twist about it.

Elizabeth LITERALLY has to get injections in her jaw to overcome a case of Resting Queen Face, and he’s still complaining. “I wish I was dead, like your father.”

It may have been a SLIGHT overreaction to throw some glasses and chairs at him, but thankfully the press is still in thrall to the monarchy for a few more years.

Now, to the Head of State…which is somehow Margaret, wearing the biggest tiara she could jimmy out of Elizabeth’s safe (I guess technically it’s still the Queen Mum, who is on her rumspringa in Scotland, but if you’re the one knighting people, you’re basically the Head of State, in my book). Margaret wants to shine! Margaret has been gloomy. Nothing is fair (stamps food). I knew everything was on very shaky footing as soon as she received her pre-written speech and requested a pencil.

Poor Martin’s FACE when she started going all in on the green hills of Africa. Martin’s face when she said “ladies, he’s single!” in reference to a dignitary! The crowd loved it, because their expectations for being entertained at state dinners are probably pretty low, but I guess it was nice to Margaret light up a bit. My brief relief wanes when they let Margaret go down a mine briefly, which she needs to point out is Terribly Dark and Hot. She’s also dressed in white, which wasn’t the best choice, perhaps. Literal jaw-drop as she says to an impertinent reporter that she misses Townsend more than her sister. No one can tell this bitch anything. Except for Churchill, it seems, who lays the smackdown and calls the Queen Mum back from Scotland.

It’s she who gets her real turn in the sun in “Pride & Joy,” which I had been waiting for. Victoria Hamilton (she’ll always be Mrs Forster in the 1995 P&P miniseries to me) has played her ably, but there’s a real flatness to the character as we’ve seen her unfold so far. Partly, this episode helped me realize that the lack of resemblance between The Crown’s Queen Mum and the sassy, upbeat, gin-sodden Queen Mum who insisted on living to the age of 101 is partly that the show wanted to portray the boredom and ennui of grief and uselessness. She does come alive a bit in Scotland, and it’s nice to see her with her friends; one realizes with a start that we haven’t seen the Windsors have a true moment of social interaction with anyone who isn’t in their immediate family or a spot on the payroll. “We Four” is the phrase young Lilibet and her parents and Margaret famously used to describe their tight little familial unity, and we appreciate that the loss of that unit hit the Queen Mum harder than we thought, as we watch her her struggle to explain it to her friends.

The brief idyll she spends talking castles with a fictional gent who can’t quite place her is cut short by Margaret’s idiocy, and it broke my heart just a little to see her pulled back into the strictures of her life and schedule.

What those strictures mean to the people of the Commonwealth was already starting to change, and the rah-rah note the show hits as Elizabeth insists on visiting Gibraltar, safety be damned, before steaming back triumphantly into London Harbor rings a bit false. It’s a coat of paint on a crumbling house, after all.

To a 2016 audience, the sudden sharp realization that Elizabeth and Philip just left their kids behind for six months hasn’t quite faded out by the time she thoroughly chews her sister out for having been disastrously “individual.” Margaret is quite brilliant in her bravado and vulnerability here, and Elizabeth in her exhaustion.

We fade out on the Queen Mum, who doesn’t look quite as droopy as she did before.

[Watch The Crown, Episode 8, “Pride & Joy” on Netflix]

Nicole Cliffe used to run The Toast, a niche site for queer archivists which Hillary Clinton at least pretended to like, but is now mostly just dicking around on Twitter.