‘The Crown’ Recap, Episode 10: “Gloriana”

After the emotional rollercoaster of the last few episodes, The Crown season finale, “Gloriana” fell a bit flat. In many ways, the final showdown between Margaret and Elizabeth over the question of her marriage to Peter Townsend was cut off at the knees by arguments already aired when Elizabeth packed him off to Brussels. After two years and a variety of skirmishes over the respective roles of duty and familial obligation, it just doesn’t seem as compelling for Margaret to be left shocked and desolate by this latest flashpoint in the Elizabeth Is The Monarch and Margaret Wants To Party wars. Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby, however, acted their whole butts off.

Elizabeth is correct, I think, to feel as though her courtiers pulled a real bait-and-switch on the question of the constitutional impossibility of Margaret’s marriage. She could certainly have read the relevant paragraphs, of course, since it’s her job, but you can tell by the look on Tommy Lascelles’ and Michael Adeane’s guilty-ass shifty faces that they had put all their eggs (reasonably!) in the “Margaret has never had a single desire that lasted two years in duration before now, we assumed she’d get over it months ago” basket.

Badly done, advisors! Badly done.

While Elizabeth is trying to find anything, anything she can do to make everyone happy, she gets to enjoy the company of her terrible husband, who is equally impossible to please. He doesn’t want to have any responsibilities, but he’s bored and cranky and is channeling his feelings of irritation by bullying Charles, which will one day turn him into a real weirdo. In order to get him out of their collective hair and give him a reason to get up and put on his fancy pants every morning, the palace decides to pack him off to Australia to help oversee the Olympics, a gig he refers to as “being shipped off to a penal colony,” a joke that will no doubt go over super well in Australia, a place that does not yet have a fun sense of humor about penal colony jokes (and good for them). He delivers this line while dancing in a kilt with the Queen Mum, and I have never seen a man attempt to sound superior and withering while wearing a kilt before. It really doesn’t suit him.

The show’s Egyptian subplot, in which an increasingly frazzled Anthony Eden manages to accidentally insult Nasser six or seven times, comes across as more of a retro Curb Your Enthusiasm episode than an introduction to the hugely relevant issues of populism and self-governance and the UK’s role abroad. It does, however, conclude with Eden injecting himself with some kind of substance and then nodding the fuck out on his desk while a newsreel plays!

Margaret’s claim that she could “live without the trimmings” of the monarchy is so extraordinarily obviously nonsense that it’s no wonder that we never hear the idea floated again. Elizabeth throws up a Hail Mary by calling the Duke of Windsor in exile, who, again, manages to astound me by curtailing his natural smug and self-pitying tendencies to tell her that her job is to protect the monarchy at all costs.

It is with that goal in mind that Elizabeth girds her loins to disappoint Margaret, who arrives at the palace for their interview, confident that the overwhelming tides of public opinion which support her and Peter have won the day for her cause. Margaret’s face, as Elizabeth tells her she cannot give her the answer she wants to hear, is breathtaking in its frozen sorrow.

Margaret, for all her frivolity, musters a degree of self-awareness I had not believed her capable of, and haltingly explains that Peter is the stabilizing influence in a life otherwise marked entirely by fragility and histrionics and self-absorption, and without him, she believes she will never again be the person she has the capacity to be.

It’s heartbreaking, and I say this as someone with very little sympathy for Margaret.

We end the season spilling out in different directions, all of them haunted by loneliness. Philip to Australia, Margaret to a sea of shallow, brittle parties, Peter Townsend to obscurity and disgrace, and Elizabeth to be photographed, mask-like in her grief and guilt, as Gloriana, the goddess.

[Watch The Crown, Episode 10, “Gloriana” 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.