‘The Crown’ Season 4 Sets the Stage for Prince Andrew’s Damning Downfall

Netflix’s The Crown is maybe the most flattering portrait of the British Royal Family imaginable. It’s not that the drama shies away from the more embarrassing scandals of decades gone past. Rather, The Crown helps you see the people past the salacious headlines. It depicts Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman), Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor), and Princess Diana (Emma Corrin) as complex people struggling to balance the weight of duty with the existential torture of being alive. No one is the villain the tabloids may make them out to be. Until now.

The scandal-mired and alleged sex offender, the Duke of York, Prince Andrew (Tom Byrne) is not just finally introduced in The Crown. He’s dragged through the muck. Giving Andrew perhaps the most unflattering portrayal of a royal in the series’ history, The Crown all but explicitly says Andrew’s an evil egg destined for evil things. That it’s able to do so with such wit and restraint makes it all the more appalling (and leaves the audience all the more certain that Andrew was not at that Pizza Express in Woking).

Prince Andrew finally arrives in a Crown episode aptly titled, “Favourites.” From the start, Elizabeth is shocked to discover her Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) has a favorite child. An amused Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) has to tell an incredulous Elizabeth that everyone knows who her favorite is, even if she lacks that self-awareness. Horrified, Elizabeth decides to check in with each of her children to see how they are and where her relationship is with them.

Of course, we all know Elizabeth’s favorite is Prince Andrew. The third born child, second son, and first baby it seems Elizabeth and Philip conceived perhaps out of some passion beyond duty. Andrew was the caddish “fun one” in the ‘80s. Now that party boy rep has soured past the point of decay. The biggest scandal that the Royal Family has ever had to deal with is Andrew’s ties to sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein…and the implication that he, too, participating in underage rape. The Crown hints at this sordid future in just the space of a single scene between Byrne’s Andrew and Colman’s Elizabeth.

While Elizabeth’s meetings with her three other children are heartbreaking looks at the way the Queen’s devotion to duty has stymied her ability to mother, her lunch with Andrew is something out of a horror show. Edward (Angus Imrie) might be bullied, Anne (Erin Doherty) holding onto her marriage by a thread, and Charles desperate for approval, but they’re all essentially “okay” people. Sad, but not perniciously cruel. Andrew on the other hand seems downright sociopathic. He swaggers into Windsor Castle via a commandeered military helicopter and immediately goes into ass-kissing mode with Mummy dearest. But that’s not the worst of it…

The worst is a one-two punch that shows Andrew as immoral as he is crudely ambitious. The only thing Andrew wants to talk to his mother about is the title he’ll get upon marriage. Elizabeth pulls the Duke of York out of the air, since that’s traditionally given to second sons. Andrew is rapturous. Not because he’s lucky enough to be honored with such a title, but that historically, Dukes of York have indeed taken the throne. In the case of Richard III, he jokes, because the elder brother and heirs are dead.

If that’s not enough to unsettle his mother, his social life is. It’s not just that he’s dating a scandalously sexy American actress, Koo Stark, but that she’s best known for an erotic 1976 film called The Awakening of Emily. Andrew tries to nominally sell his mother on the film’s artistic merit, but it’s clear what really excites him is his girlfriend playing an underage sexual plaything for rich older men. The Queen is scandalized and Andrew says something to the effect of, “Who cares?”

The whole episode throws Elizabeth through a loop, but nothing is as worrisome to her as Andrew. She later confesses to Philip that she was shocked. “If he doesn’t change… What does that say about us as parents?” she says, proving her concern is more about how it reflects upon her versus the collateral damage that could be left in Andrew’s wake.

Later the show doubles down on Andrew’s lack of character, showing him as fixated on claiming the spotlight for himself on his big wedding day to Sarah Ferguson. But nothing is as poignantly damning as that single conversation with his mother. He is the very model of privilege calcified into a weapon of mass destruction.

The Crown argues that all the royals are real people, too. In the case of Prince Andrew, though, Peter Morgan is underlining that he’s a rotten on.

Watch The Crown on Netflix