‘The Crown,’ Diana, and the morbid satisfaction of seeing just what you want to see

The Crown has two endings. But it’s not what you think. Netflix has divided the final season into two parts — the first was released on Thursday, November 16, but viewers will have to wait until December 14 for the second. What makes that decision meaningful is that it gives the series the endings that it deserves and that the public want. Because one is the long-awaited ending, which everyone has been wondering about since November 4, 2016, when the platform premiered the series. From that first episode set in 1947, the series covered 50 years of the trials and tribulations of the House of Windsor, and all the while the public wondered: will Diana die? At first, it looked like she would, then it looked like she wouldn’t, and then finally it was back to the original plan: the series would continue until recent times, Diana included. The four episodes of the first installment finally put that mystery to bed.

The second ending is of the series itself, which will be wrapped up over six more episodes in December. That ending is a little more open. Previews show that it looks to the future. As in reality, William is the protagonist. And that is both the problem and the success of The Crown; it has become so attached to our lives and to what we know that it is very difficult to remember that it is fiction.

The narrative of all these years, the incessant repetition of the Greek tragedy of Princess Diana, resonates in our heads sequence by sequence, shot by shot. And that means that the morbid curiosity is satisfied, with all the elegance of a detailed and very refined British blockbuster. And this means that we sometimes watch the series as a documentary and at other times as a TV movie. But in general, we are eager to see what we know is coming. This is the last time Diana will see her children, we think, as if we were peering into a crystal ball. This is her last dinner. This is her last car ride. We already know the characters’ fortune, or rather their misfortune. As always, the details are what make the series. We do not know if some of them are real, or if they are part of a fiction that has become a new reality. They have become one more version of events: Diana wearing a cap from the Canary Islands, eating vanilla ice cream; gift-wrapping a console for her son Henry, who would turn 13 two weeks later; rejecting Dodi Al Fayed’s (Khalid Abdalla) marriage proposal, and Mohamed Al Fayed, the young man’s father, never knowing the outcome for the couple.

Diana, Diana, Diana. The royal family is secondary, Andrew and Edward, the youngest of Elizabeth II’s children, do not even appear, and Camilla appears in only a couple of scenes. With Her Majesty’s permission, Diana is the true queen of this part of the season. In these episodes, Elizabeth II is shown at her coldest and most unfriendly, until she redeems herself at the last minute. It is a redemption that, of course, we know. It’s in the history books — and on the BBC. The Duke of Edinburgh doesn’t make much sense either. The young princes William and Harry, like sullen teenagers, are reflected in the joyful summer they had with their mother before her death, which serves even more as a counterweight to seeing them in mourning. “They’re not crying for her, they’re crying for you,” Prince Philip, the princes’ grandfather, whispers to William as they follow his mother’s coffin on foot through a London overcome with grief.

The profile of the Al Fayeds is similar to what they had in 1997. We see a lot of them in the summer in which Dodi and Diana went out together and scarcely after her death in Paris, where the princess grabbed all the headlines. The most striking character is the father, the tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed (Salim Daw), who was the owner of the Harrods department store and the Ritz hotel in Paris. He is presented as the strategist of the love match, with Dodi as a puppet by his side taking orders. That’s the beauty of The Crown: we will never know what reality was like, or how twisted it is. No one is completely good or bad; there are infinite shades of gray in the people in stories. There are even more as time passes and the voices become quieter. Mohamed Al Fayed died on August 30, 2023, one day short of 27 years after his son.

The wedding of Charles and Diana was recreated (off-screen) in the fourth season. In the fifth came their divorce and a growing role for the princess. The sixth season was intended to focus more and more on Princess Diana, but in these four episodes she is the absolute star — so much so that she even appears dead. It is true that the Australian Elizabeth Debicki is fascinating in her role. She is so similar to the Princess of Wales that it’s disturbing to see her sitting in a blue swimsuit on the bow of a yacht, with her Dior bags and her Versace glasses, and wearing protective gear as she walks among landmines. Once again, reality and fiction blur and further stoke our morbid fascination with knowing how the princess meets her end.

The viewer suffers from the constant paparazzi attention alongside her. The car chases are as draining, disturbing, and suffocating as they were for Diana in real life. The idea of escape, of a possible departure to California, is ever present in the series. It strikes a chord with the departure, 25 years later, of Prince Harry, Diana’s youngest son, to a dreamland free from the same media harassment that his mother suffered. As what the queen says in the first episode also resonates, with Diana outside the royal family and Tony Blair trying to make use of her image: with the Windsors you either are or you are not, there are no half measures. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will also be familiar with that story.

Subtle tribute

When the fifth season premiered last fall, Elizabeth II had just died. In fact, the sixth season was being shot at the time, and filming was halted for a few days as a sign of respect. There is a small tribute to the sovereign that comes subtly but obviously when, at the beginning of the second episode, a photographer close to Queen Elizabeth praises her as the glue that united a British society that, like so many others, went through times of deep division: “I think we will miss her very much when she is gone.”

What can The Crown give us that we don’t already know? It has a plot that while it is perhaps not different, is full of details, and, as always within its narrative, these details play on a higher plane between fiction and reality. We will not know if this or that happened, if this or that private conversation took place, or if it was similar. We will not know if that person cried or if that hug was given. We would like to know and believe it. But we can’t. The people involved are no longer there, and the series plays with the advantage that those who remain will never comment on the matter. The truth, the morbid curiosity, the ulterior motives, everything is mixed. But The Crown remains.

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