‘The Crown’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “Bubbikins”

Remember how last season included that exquisite episode about Philip’s miserable childhood and his wish to make his son as strong as his miserable childhood made him, but they were just intensely different people and also Philip’s strength can be deeply toxic as well? You remember all that?

Good. Because the minute the title card said ATHENS, 1967, my heart sunk because I knew that his actual tortured saint of a mother would be coming to live with them and I was deeply unsure how Philip would handle that. He spent so many years forcibly emotionally separated from her, and–this may shock you–Philip isn’t good at emotions.

Or, as it turns out, not making an ass of yourself on Meet the Press.

As Philip embarks on his eternal film shoot to ensure the British people realize how much drudgery the Royals must endure for their 2.5 million million pounds a year, Menzies does a marvelous job of making you believe that he believes they truly are underpaid and ill-treated. He has loads of buffoonish moments in this episode, but also some deeply poignant ones. We see Princess Anne, inarguably his favourite child, now a teen, and the ease with which he can speak to her is something we haven’t seen him accomplish ever before.

The warmth of his relationship with Anne, of course, throws his chilly reaction to his 82-year-old mother into rather sharp relief. Princess Alice, as portrayed here, is a delight: sharp as a whip, a good sense of humor, a chainsmoker, and a woman who has endured so much that her son’s insistence on putting off visiting her in his own home barely registers on her scale of hurt. The fact she’s there at all is quite remarkable: Elizabeth, who is allowing the film, despite loathing every second of the process, in order to support her husband, flatly overrules him on the question of his mother coming to live with them. It’s hard to imagine that even someone as tightly-wound and emotionally-damaged as Philip would suggest his elderly mother should stay in Greece during an active coup because her presence might interfere with his movie, but, that’s Philip for you. Elizabeth’s style of argumentation with her husband is classic Elizabeth (one which real life courtiers have mentioned): she never says no to him, she just smiles and then does precisely what he said “no” too. And in this case, it could not be better timed.

We are prepared to come down very hard on Philip for this, obviously, but the show immediately gives us more devastating flashbacks to Philip’s admittedly wretched childhood: reaching for his mother as she’s being packed off to an institution, etc. The simple fact that he’s “Bubbikins” to her is more than a sweet pet name, it represents how little access they had to each other after his early childhood. Philip, the king of pushing away bad memories, now has the–as it were–mother of all bad memories sleeping in the room next to his daughter’s, and he is shaken by it. Her own patience as she waits for him to visit, is both heartbreakingly sad and deeply maternal. Desperate to see him, knowing full well he’s putting her off deliberately, but willing to wait forever.

Now, how is Philip’s marvelous film going?

Ah. How delightful.

Watching Princess Anne enjoy her grandmother is a great gift, especially on the heels of Philip throwing an absolute shit fit because his mother answered a few questions (perfectly normally!) from the BBC crew. It’s here, though, that I realized the connection between Philip’s mother and his determination to make this film perfect: the Queen has never really had to seriously consider being ousted from her position, with public approval of the monarchy nearly unblemished during her lifetime. Philip, however, was indeed whisked out of Corfu in an orange crate as a child, had multiple relatives killed by the Nazis, and has always felt how tenuous the ground beneath any monarchy is, and the importance of maintaining a Good Relationship with the common man (despite being deeply contemptuous of the common man.)

It is…almost impossible to watch the finished product. Everyone looks like they are in a high school production of The King and I, Elizabeth smiles exactly once, when a horse comes on-screen, reminding us all, of course, of:

Philip is shitting himself with excitement, confident that this masterpiece will restore balance to the Force, utterly unaware that each moment is worse than the one before. (I also appreciate the cutaways to Wilson, sneakily smoking cigars in his office, shuddering at each new disaster.)

In an utterly delightful turn of events, Philip’s attempt to get Princess Anne to meet with the Mean Journalist from The Guardian (as the least ridiculous royal they have to offer) results in Anne instead shoving Philip’s mother in with said journalist, where she, of course, utterly shines and creates the true sympathy that a full-length film commercial for the monarchy could never achieve.

It’s this, of course, that finally brings her Bubbikins to see her. I like to think that it had nothing to do with the unexpected rave from The Guardian, but rather that until reading the true and quite horrific story of his mother’s life, Philip truly felt abandoned by her, and now knows the reality of what kept them apart.

I SOBBED during their entire conversation, mostly, but you should watch it for yourself. As Paul Simon once told us, the mother and son reunion is only a motion away.

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 and, more importantly, writing a twice-weekly parenting advice column for Slate.

Stream The Crown Episode 304 ("Bubbikins") on Netflix