‘The Crown’ Season 5 Episode 6 Recap: “Ipatiev House”

The premise of the season’s sixth episode, “Ipatiev House,” begins with the execution of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas and his family and it’s probably the most blood-soaked episode of The Crown we’ve ever gotten. It also makes a case for a Crown prequel focused on Elizabeth’s 20th century predecessors, because I would watch five seasons of King George if it means his shoulder parrot got equal screen time. But I digress.

The episode opens in 1917 in the middle of the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas had recently been deposed, and in an effort to ensure the safety of him and his family amid the turnmoil of the revolution, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George sought the approval of King George V (Elizabeth’s grandfather) to send a ship to Russia to retrieve the Russian royals. That request included the transport of Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, their five children, and several of their servants, who had been forced to live under house arrest, being shuttled from one place to another amid the political upheaval that put Vladimir Lenin into power.

George mulls over the request and defers to his wife Mary, who is the first cousin of Tsarina Alexandra, while the future King Edward VIII, looks on, awaiting her verdict. Meanwhile, we cut away to Ipatiev House, the place where the Tsar and his family were imprisoned. Though the show depicts it as a modest but still well-apportioned home, in reality, while the family was held there under high security with boarded up windows, fed meager rations, forbidden to speak to outsiders, and locked in the home for 23 hours a day. The family had been imprisoned in various locations since 1917, but in 1918, after having made their plea for help to the king, they’re awoken in the middle of the night and given a moment of hope as they’re told they’re being moved to a safer location, mistakenly thinking George finally came through with a ship to save them. Moments later, the family is brought into a basement under the pretense that they’re about to be photographed, and they’re slaughtered when Russian soldiers gruesomely open fire on them and later, bayonet any survivors. Their remains are loaded into a truck and unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave and doused in acid before their bodies are buried.

In the present day, 1994, the queen is visited by John Major who has just returned from a state visit to Russia where he spent several days in the company of a very drunk Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, an Anglophile, has asked Major to pass on a message to the queen that he’d like to meet her. As we all know, since this season’s primary theme is the queen being a relic of a different time, she is excited at the prospect of reuniting Russia and England as allies. The relationship between the two countries had been a strong one up until the Cold War, and now that Yeltsin has become the first democratically elected president of the country, she feels it’s time to reunite.

Their meeting is cordial at first, but when Yeltsin extends an invitation to the queen to visit Russia, she brings up the sore subject that back in the 1970s, Yeltsin himself gave an order for Ipatiev House to be demolished, an act of great disrespect the the queen’s family, owing to her lineage connecting her to the Tsar. Yeltsin grovels but agrees that he’ll make an effort to provide a proper resting place to honor the legacy of the Tsar’s family. (Though later, during a photo opp he’ll put the queen on blast, muttering in Russian, “She has no business lecturing me like that. We know the truth. It was in this house that the Romanov deaths were sealed.” And then he goes full Jackie O, saying “They call this a palace? We have shithouses in St. Petersburg that are bigger.”)

Soon after Yeltsin’s visit though, he makes good on his promise to provide a proper burial to the Russian royals, and a team of forensic scientists begins to excavate the mass gravesite and perform DNA analysis on the bones to identify them. The queen tells Prince Philip about this newfangled DNA stuff and he’s like, “Pff, it’s as if you don’t read Double Helix Monthly, you old cow.” Philip is an angry man these days, and he’s not afraid to show his disdain for his wife in any way he can. (It’s very Charles-like of him – the jilted, disappointed apple doesn’t fall far from the grumpy-ass tree.)

Philip feels like his wife wouldn’t be so surprised by stuff like DNA if she was well-read and more curious (like his new friend Penny is). Prince Philip’s dour unhappiness and dissatisfaction is an irritation this season, so when the queen tells Philip that his DNA can help identify some of the bodies, on account of his own lineage, rather than just say “Okay!” he asks what kind of sample they’ll need from him. “Can you be more specific? Hair? Blood? Saliva? Did you ask?” Jesus, YOU ASK if you’re so interested, Philip.

You know who would’ve asked what kind of sample was needed? PENNY. When he regales her with riveting talk of his DNA ladder, she is literally kneeling at his feet, rapt, telling him that he has singlehandedly provided the key to learn about the Romanovs that were buried. Penny even goes so far as to say that by studying DNA, perhaps the science behind it can help us understand whether every aspect of our lives is predetermined. Now Philip is the one who’s rapt, he adores this intellectual, stimulating conversation.

Once the remains are identified and a proper burial for the Romanovs can be considered, the queen makes good on her promise to Yeltsin and she and Philip travel to Russia for what she hopes is a trip that will allow her to reconnect with her spouse. It does the opposite. After taking in the sights, attending Russian Orthodox church services, and connecting more deeply to his ancestors, he explains that he had to give up a large part of his identity when he married her. (Specifically, his faith, he was born into the Orthodox religion and converted to marry her.) But wait, aren’t these sacrifices the same things they keep telling Charles and Diana to just get over and make peace with?

And then Philip tells Elizabeth that he’s sought out companionship with his new friend Penny. He’s basically like, she is the anti-you, and if you want to make this not a scandal, you should be seen with Penny in public to co-sign her. And the queen is like, you sonofabitch, just because I relax by playing with my dogs and not by reading science textbooks doesn’t mean you can cheat on me with a 40 year old.

“You’re asking me to legitimize your…”

“My friendship,” he says.

Then he insinuates that by hanging out with Penny, the queen might learn the real truth behind what happened to the Romanovs. Because you see, Penny has read at least six books about the subject, and she has some theories. She meets with Elizabeth at Windsor Castle and explains that her theory is that Queen Mary refused to let the Tsar and his family into the country because Mary was jealous of Alexandra’s beauty and there was a long-standing rivalry between the two women. Elizabeth will not tolerate that kind of pettiness, queensplaining that actually, Mary just didn’t want Alexandra or Nicholas in England because the Tsarina was pro-German, and England was at war with Germany at the time. “The truth is, Queen Mary was devastated when she heard that they’d been killed,” Elizabeth tells Penny.

“But how commendable of you… to do all that reading!” This queen is shadier than an Iron Curtain and I love it. But, despite Elizabeth’s feelings toward Penny – jealousy, sadness, etc. – she invited her to join the family at church for Christmas, for that public display of friendship that Philip had requested. Because the queen knows that scandal will follow if the media decides to call Philip a cheater, and Elizabeth has worked too hard to have her image tarnished by his late-life crisis.

As with every episode of The Crown, the parallels between Queen Mary, who had a difficult choice to make about how to preserve the monarchy in 1917, and Elizabeth, who is struggling to preserve the image of the monarchy in 1994, are obvious. Both women’s husbands have put them in situations that depend on their diplomatic skills to save public face. A little frustrating too, in that this responsibility (a.k.a. blame) falls to the women, and they’re the ones who will ultimately be judged by their husbands’ actions (or inactions).

This episode was a fascinating history lesson while somehow also being one of the driest episodes of The Crown in recent memory. As the episode concludes, the queen explains that after everything that has happened with Russia in the recent months, “One forgets that our two nations, thanks in part to family ties, are more successful as allies than enemies.” Her marriage, like the relationship between England and Russia, is fraught with political implications and simmering tension, but if they can just learn to live with each other, things will be just like they were once upon a time… in the good tsarist times.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.