SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from all of Season 5 of “The Crown,” now streaming on Netflix.
As handsome as the sharp-jawed British actors bringing it to life, “The Crown” has been nothing short of dazzling, luring curious viewers like me into Peter Morgan’s reimagining of the impossibly tangled web that is the British monarchy. Five seasons in, the Netflix drama’s ability to shock and awe with its immense budget, top- tier acting, and nigh impeccable production design is a well-worn fact — and also a lifesaver, given how blunt it’s now become.
In the six years and 21 Emmy wins since its debut, the show’s managed to distract millions from the fact that each season has been less subtle than the last. Season 5, which dropped on Nov. 9, is far from the first “Crown” installment to lean too heavily on metaphors to sell its themes. (Remember Season 1’s “Act of God,” in which a deadly fog represented Winston Churchill’s indecision paralysis, or something?) This new season is, however, an especially egregious offender, with Morgan’s scripts hammering their most obvious themes home with clattering thuds, pushing allegory after allegory with vanishingly little nuance.
Season 5, hinging on Queen Elizabeth (now Imelda Staunton) feeling more like an outdated relic and the contentious divorce between Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Prince Charles (Dominic West, doing his best despite being wildly miscast), features shaggy scripts that never met a metaphor they didn’t want to catapult straight into viewers’ faces. As typically good as actors like Debicki, Lesley Manville (Princess Margaret) and Olivia Williams (Camilla Parker-Bowles) are at adjusting to their inherited roles, it’s almost as if Morgan doesn’t quite trust them (and/or the audience) to understand exactly what’s going on at all times. In telling the stories of some of the most repressed, private people on the planet, “The Crown” constantly makes them spell everything out. Subtext is dead; long live tortured metaphors.
Need convincing? Here are the new season’s five most jarring metaphors and allegories, ranked from least to most ridiculous.
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Queen Elizabeth as The Britannia
Image Credit: Keith Bernstein / Netflix Tying Elizabeth’s arc from young queen to veteran sovereign alongside that of the royal yacht, which launched almost the same exact day she took the throne, is a gimme. So bookending Season 5 (which might as well be called “The One Where Elizabeth Feels Obsolete”) with the unavoidable decline of the Britannia makes as much sense as anything else — especially given that it was, as the finale depicts, officially decommissioned in 1997, the same year Diana died.
However: I tried to keep track of all the times the season identifies this extremely obvious parallel, and I failed. Throughout several episodes and countless scenes, there are simply too many “Elizabeth IS The Britannia” moments to count. By the time Charles mournfully says in the finale that his mother seems melancholy, as if “she’s being decommissioned,” the point has already been well and truly made.
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Princess Margaret as Proto-Princess Anne
Image Credit: Netflix This one may seem unfair at first glance, since Elizabeth’s younger, wilder sister Margaret and her steadfast, duty-bound daughter Anne are absolutely nothing alike. But as Margaret drunkenly insists in “Annus Horribilis,” the one (1) episode in which she gets to shine (an enormous shame given how good Manville is in the role), their relationship paths do end up winding in similar ways, albeit to very different destinations. It’s an interesting enough comparison to draw between two distinct women, but Morgan isn’t content to let the suggestion speak for itself. Instead, Manville has to deliver the following repetitive explanation, which does neither her performance nor the theme at hand any favors:
“Anne is a royal princess with no prospect of acceding to the throne, as was I. [dramatic pause] Commander Lawrence is a palace equerry marrying scandalously above his station; Peter was a palace equerry hoping to marry scandalously above his. [dramatic pause] Anne and Commander Lawrence are in love; Peter and I were in love. [dramatic pause] In both cases, one party is a divorcee. The situation is identical in every way except for the outcome. [somehow even more dramatic pause] She is being allowed to marry him. I wasn’t. [And finally, just when you think it’s over, a dramatic pause that ends with:] Her story ends happily. Mine did not.”
We [dramatic pause] get it! Once again, the point is made about halfway through this historical outline masquerading as monologue; once again, the point gets stated outright, as if we might be too dumb to understand otherwise.
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Queen Elizabeth as the Burnt Husk of Windsor Castle
Image Credit: Keith Bernstein / Netflix Combining both the previous offenders’ sensibilities is the show’s tendency to equate Elizabeth in her elder years with Windsor Castle after a devastating fire. As with the Britannia, the parallels are obvious and generally fair enough. There are even a couple moving scenes in which a shrinking Elizabeth walks around the ruins, with Staunton’s face conveying her heartbreak without her saying a single word. And yet character after character comes forward in scene after scene to remind us that Elizabeth Is The Castle, until finally someone outright describes the catastrophe as “the great metaphor — I mean, fire.” The moment of self-awareness is a welcome one, but it’s ultimately far too little, far too late.
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Princess Di and/or Martin Bashir as Guy Fawkes
Image Credit: Netflix If there’s a point of no return in Season 5, it’s the moment Diana agrees to an interview with Martin Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah), the hungry BBC reporter who manipulates her into acquiescence by forging documents that suggest her entire inner circle is out to get her. Bringing this cataclysmic scene to life would be a juicy prospect for any writer, and the fact that the interview took place in secret on Nov. 5, aka Guy Fawkes Day, aka the day the UK remembers when a plot to bomb Parliament fizzled into failure. As my co-critic Dan D’Addario points out in his review of the season, Morgan can’t help writing the episode as a history lesson — literally, it cuts between the interview and Prince William’s Eton classroom where a teacher is emphatically describing the attempted coup by underlining the treason of it all.
From there, the episode (titled “Gunpowder”) takes every single opportunity it can to emphasize the parallels, using words like “dynamite” and “explosive” with abandon. As with so many metaphors on this list, I don’t fault Morgan for giving in to the delicious irony of the princess giving an earthshattering interview on Guy Fawkes Day. The comparison just loses its power with every mention — and when you mention it about 12,000 times, there’s soon no (gun)pow(d)er left in it at all.
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The Queen as a Broken Television
Image Credit: Netflix If I had any patience left by the time the Queen’s aging television gave out in “Gunpowder,” her sighing that “even the televisions are metaphors in this place” killed it for good. “The Crown” isn’t “Community.” It doesn’t need to acknowledge every metaphor it’s making, nor does doing so make it any more poignant. The line may have been trying to garner some sympathy for Elizabeth, but the only sympathy I felt in that moment was for Staunton, stuck in an increasingly doddering role.
Then, as with every example on this list, the script doubles down. As William gamely tries to teach his grandmother how to use a fancy new satellite TV remote, the Queen Mother (Marcia Warren) heaves a knowing sigh. “It’s so sad to see her struggle to understand a medium with which she’s inextricably linked,” she says of her daughter, a woman 26 years her junior. From there, she proceeds to give yet another history lesson about the ascendance of Elizabeth to the throne alongside the birth of TV news, making sure that both William and the viewers (apparently also children) understand the scene’s extremely plain meaning. To hear dialogue so clearly ripped from outlines is to get jogged out of the show’s reality entirely.
In its best moments, “The Crown” has humanized people who have pathologically kept themselves unknowable for decades. More and more, though, it’s defaulted to this exhausting tendency to just make them read their own Wikipedia pages at us, keeping any true insight out of reach.