What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s a dramatization of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Olivia Colman played the Queen at some point. Gyles Brandreth provided some of his real-life jumpers to be worn by an actress whose character historically wore some of his real-life jumpers.
Recap
We open on birds chirping and a closeup on the face of a dog or wolf. A man is awake in bed. He turns to wake up his wife; captions identify the woman as Camilla.
In another room, the queen wakes up to the sound of a lone bagpiper walking across the grounds outside. I know that this is a thing she apparently loved.
It’s later. The queen’s personal dresser tells her her schedule for the day. There’s a Mysterious Meeting involving a number of dukes and lords and whatnot.
The actress does not look very much like the queen, in my opinion.
A radio broadcast identifies this as taking place circa 2005, two years after the war in Iraq began. The man we saw earlier, who I now assume is Prince Charles, asks Camilla to marry him, though he acknowledges he’ll need permission from his mother to make an official proposal.
Meanwhile, the queen enters the meeting. There are a dozen indistinguishable old guys there.
They’re here to plan her funeral, Operation London Bridge. They escort her to a room with tiny figures in a model procession, and as she looks over the figures, the dialogue fades out and is replaced by military music, and we go to opening credits.
The music in the opening credits gets a thumbs-up from me. And the queen is played by Imelda Staunton.
After the credits, we see Iraq war protestors surrounding the prime minister as he leaves what I think is Buckingham Palace. Prince Charles talks to his mother the Queen about Blair’s refusal to resign. “Once people get a taste of life at the top, they never want to leave,” he says, which is an out-of-character (though I should hope not in-character) jab at the fact that she’s not dead yet to make him king.
But his reason for seeing her is actually what we saw in the opening scene: he wants to marry Camilla. Elizabeth is not happy, reminding him how they cheated on their respective spouses with each other. But he demands that his mother thank Camilla for being loyal, staying quiet in the face of press intrusion, and making him happy. During the conversation they look out the window at “him”, which turns out to be the queen’s husband (Prince Philip, I think is his name?), who is also planning his funeral.
I can tell you in advance that without captions I am not going to be able to tell the difference between Prince Charles and any of the other suit-wearing characters.
There’s a follow-up meeting on the details of Operation London Bridge. They ask Elizabeth what she wants, and she asks for a quiet service in Scotland, out of sight, and over and done in 20 minutes. The others laugh. That will never happen.
Elsewhere, we see three teenagers, two of whom I assume are Prince William and Prince Harry, on the ramparts of a castle, shooting air guns at some poor guy in the distance. I wonder at first if it’s a gardener or a servant, but over the course of the conversation it sounds like it’s a friend of theirs (“friend” in the sense of “guy they pick on”). The scene establishes that the two are annoying and arrogant and have no sense of consequences.
Meanwhile, the queen is meeting the Bishops of the Anglican Church. She tells them of Charles’s intention to marry Camilla, and her inclination to allow it. The bishops are visibly unhappy with this. How can the future Head of the Anglican Church be allowed to marry in a fashion that effectively condones adultery? The queen has a good retort: if she dies without granting permission, won’t their living together without marriage be even worse?
So a compromise is offered: a civil ceremony.
The Church will hold a separate ceremony to bless the marriage after the civil ceremony, and the blessing will include a public expression of atonement.
After the bishops leave, Harry and William are brought in; the queen wants to talk to them about the same issue, this time outdoors. (They call her “Granny”, which is odd because I thought the family nickname for the queen was Gary.) Harry is very unhappy about his father remarrying, but William is more diplomatic: we don’t like it, but it’ll make him happy, and that might make him shut up about the Diana/Camilla situation. The queen pointedly ignores the fact that Harry did not say yes and considers William to be speaking for both of them.
The boys listen in from outside the room while Elizabeth calls Charles and grants her approval. Harry is not happy that William spoke for him, but William tells him to grow up. On the other end of the phone line, Charles runs to find Camilla and give her the news. He dramatically gets on his knees, but she laughs and pulls him up and hugs him.
That night, the queen is saying her prayers before bed when Prince Philip enters the room. They discuss the issues with the grandchildren: she wasn’t blind to the fact that Harry didn’t truly grant permission. Philip says the army will whip Harry into shape, then says goodnight and leaves. (Do they not sleep next to each other?)
The next morning. This time the queen is already eating breakfast – and feeding her dogs – when the bagpiper begins to play. (Maybe that’s why - Prince Philip doesn’t like being woken up by bagpipes.) She has an idea and calls the bagpiper in. She asks his opinion as to which bagpipe music to play at her funeral; he gives general answers but she insists on hearing which one he likes.
He suggests Sleep Dearie Sleep, and she insists he play it immediately, even though they’re indoors. The guards close doors so the music doesn’t disturb everyone in the palace, but it’s heard throughout anyway. A random woman in another room, working on organizing chairs for some kind of reception, begins singing along. Based on the camera work I assume she’s a known character?
Meanwhile, Harry and William are at a costume shop. Oh no, this is the famous incident when Harry wore a Nazi uniform for Halloween. They go to the costume party, which is a raucous, outdoor event. Their friend “Guy” is dressed as the queen, gets on the stage and sings “I want to break free”. Two other teenagers spot Harry’s Nazi costume and photograph him. I suspect that this might be intended as comeuppance – that one of the teenagers was the one Harry and William were shooting at earlier – but if it is I don’t recognize him.
It’s the next morning. William walks down the front hallway in the palace to the spread of daily newspapers, and sees Harry’s costume splashed on all the front pages. One by one we see each family member reacting to the news.
The queen meets with an advisor. He says Harry is popular, so it should be enough if he merely apologizes and demonstrates a period of contrition. She says, “Is that what you’ll be saying about Iraq?”, so I think the advisor might actually be Tony Blair. Blair says the elections will provide the beginning of an exit strategy, a phrase that she compares to her own funeral preparations.
Later, the queen is trying to load an old film projector and failing (my second review this month with an old film projector). She views a series of old films: One of herself at a very young age playing with her dogs and horses, labeled “Lilibet and Margaret Rose”, who I assume are her and her sister. One with unfamiliar boys kicking over sandcastles. One of a funeral, I presume her father’s. Or is it his coronation? I can’t tell. She falls asleep on the couch while watching.
The next day, she’s at the stables. Prince Philip meets her there and reports that Charles has Harry mucking out the pigsty as punishment. “[Harry] was bloody unlucky that a fellow guest should go to the newspapers like that”, Philip says. The way the line is delivered, it sounds like dramatic irony – which lends weight to my earlier assumption that the teenagers who took the photos did so because of Harry mistreating them. Philip says he also called the costume store to yell at them.
This is intended to make us viewers think he’s being an idiot, because how is this the store’s fault? But Philip was actually having a bit of fun, criticizing them about how the costume was historically inaccurate, and laughing after he hangs up the phone.
Philip tells Elizabeth the real problem is a lack of responsible parenting – which sets the queen thinking.
Later, inside the stables, a woman pours a bucket of water on the floor behind Elizabeth. “You coward,” says the woman. For a moment I think it’s the queen’s dresser (what would she even be doing here?), but then I realize it’s an imaginary person. Is it the ghost of her sister Margaret, from the video? Ah, it’s Olivia Colman, so it’s her younger self. Olivia-beth recommends to Imelda-beth that she step down before she becomes infirm and incapable. The crown came at the expense of being a good mother. Stepping down would be the right thing to do, to help fix the mistakes made by the rest of her family.
I’m not sure this follows logically from Prince Philip’s criticism. Wouldn’t abdicating make Charles even less able to devote the necessary time and effort to instill responsibility in Harry?
Over dinner, Harry and William argue over dinner about the wisdom of the costume; Harry accuses William of being hypocritical, because he had no problem with the costume when they were selecting it in the shop. Charles calls Camilla to discuss this, and also the fact that the queen is planning to make a speech at the wedding reception whose contents are unknown. Is she planning to announce her abdication?
I mean, obviously she didn’t abdicate, so this is a bit of false tension. But Harry thinks that’s what the speech will say. William objects: Why would she do it on Charles’s big day? Harry: “It’s the wedding present he [Charles] most wants.” Harry then points out that the abdication would also make William the heir to the throne. Harry mentions William the Second, who was assassinated by his brother, also named Prince Harry, and says he wouldn’t do that to his brother.
It's the wedding day. They’re following the Archbishops’ plan of doing a civil ceremony followed by a Church of England blessing. And it turns out the queen is writing an abdication letter after all. But this time she is visited by the ghost of her even younger self, telling her she swore to serve the crown through her entire life until death. Young-izabeth presents good arguments: “You’re in your prime still.” “The crown is a symbol of permanence and stability; if you step down you will be symbolizing impermanence and instability.” “You can’t claim to have the crown by birthright and also claim to have a choice.” “There’s a difference between you and the rest of the family – it comes naturally to you, while they make a mess of it.”
This is by far the best scene of the episode.
“What about the woman I put aside? The life I put aside?” Imelda-beth asks. That’s a curious question for an eighty-year-old to ask about a path she embarked on in her twenties. How can she possibly return to that path? Which is the point the ghost makes in response: “There’s only been one Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, for years. Elizabeth Windsor is long gone.”
So Elizabeth crosses out the parts of the speech where she was going to abdicate.
It’s the wedding day. We don’t see the civil ceremony, only the religious one – which opens with a heavy-handed confession of sins and a request from God for mercy. Everyone glances at each other uncomfortably as they recite it, knowing this is about Charles and Camilla’s adultery.
Later, at the reception, the queen gives her speech. “For those of you who don’t know me, I am the mother of the groom.” Amusing, but everyone laughs like it’s the funniest line ever. “The police have asked that displays of expressive exuberance be kept to a minimum,” she says, looking at her grandsons. She compares the wedding to that of Edward the Black Prince, about whom I know nothing, but the moniker doesn’t bode well and Charles and Camilla are nervous about where she’s going to take the comparison. But she follows it up by saying that Edward had a long and happy and loving marriage. She visibly skips a card, which William and Harry notice.
After the wedding, William approaches his grandmother and asks if she perhaps forgot part of the speech. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. They both understand each other perfectly. She asks him to take extra good care of Harry, because the system is so focused on who’s first in line it tends to forget and abandon whoever’s #2.
Everybody is assembled into a family photograph. Prince Philip has no patience for the cameraman’s quoting Shakespeare, and Elizabeth looks at him lovingly.
After the wedding, the queen is alone in the cathedral. Prince Philip comes in and tells her that her inner turmoil was obvious to him, but she made the right decision. The other people in the family are not remotely ready to take over. And even if they’ll never be ready, by the time they do take over we’ll be dead and buried!
He leaves the cathedral, and the queen sees the bagpiper playing Sleep Dearie Sleep on the balcony. (Frankly if I lived in a country where the monarch were prone to these kinds of hallucinations I would be quite concerned.) She then sees her three younger selves in turn, who stand as a sort of funeral guard. The camera is left to linger as she walks down the long hall and out the door.
Unresolved questions
How did things turn out with that war in Iraq everyone was talking about? It sounds like it might have been a big deal.
Will the queen snubbing Harry’s feelings have any long-term effects? Will he start to feel a bit alienated from the family?
Will Prince Andrew, who appeared in essentially a non-speaking cameo role, ever become famous in his own right?
Okay, it’s hard writing these when you actually know what happens after the series ends. More seriously:
Who was the blue-suited woman that the camera kept focusing on during the wedding?
Was the woman who sang along with “Sleep Dearie Sleep” actually a known character or just an extra?
Ratings
Story: 3/10. One of the dangers of basing a story not just on real life but extremely recent and well-known real life is that you’re limited in what you can have happen. In this case, there’s not much more to the story than: The queen considers abdication and decides against it. I’m not familiar enough with the history to know whether this is true; I get the feeling the writers either played that up more than the reality or invented it out of whole cloth. But in that case couldn’t they have done a bit more to spruce up the other two plotlines? The incident with Harry had no salience of its own, only existing in service to the main plot (though this may be deliberate, as it’s the queen’s show), and there was no real doubt that Elizabeth would refuse Charles’s request to marry Camilla.
Writing: 4/10. The dialogue was decent. Nothing particularly special, except for the tour de force that was the queen’s second conversation with her younger self, in which she is convinced not to abdicate. But there were a few high-profile moments that fell flat. In particular the last scene, when her younger selves send her off as though to her death, is intended to be symbolic of viewers saying goodbye to the series and the character. But in-universe she’s got a good few years ahead of her yet, so the symbolism feels off. Other aspects, such as the queen always answering “Here I still am” or the dual use of the phrase “exit strategy”, were clever but not actually deep.
Finally, there was a fairly noticeable logical hole in the plot. Surely the UK didn’t wait until the queen was 80 before planning her funeral?
Production: 8/10. Imelda Staunton may not look very much like the queen, but her acting was top-notch. She and Prince Philip have excellent chemistry together. When Elizabeth gives Philip a loving look during his annoyed outburst in the photo session, you can see that far from being embarrassed this is part of why she loves him. The actresses playing younger Elizabeths also did excellent work.
There were a few noticeable but minor production and continuity errors. I have no way of knowing if the sets were accurate, but they looked great. The direction was good, and in particular I liked the way they used flashbacks in mid-conversation as a way of circumventing “show-don’t-tell”.
Characterization: 6/10. The Queen was of course the most fleshed-out character, and I got to like Prince Philip very quickly. All 6 points here come from them. Charles was as nondescript in personality as he was physically. William and Harry are young-adult troublemakers without a lot of depth to them. None of the other characters were important at all.
Clarity: 9/10. I was fairly quickly able to recognize the queen (of course) and Harry and William on sight. My vague familiarity with the British royal family was enough to ensure I’d eventually know which guy was Prince Philip, even if I didn’t initially remember his name. But I could only recognize Charles if he was next to Camilla or if dialogue identified him; otherwise he’s just another man wearing a suit. Since half the minor characters are nondescript white males above the age of 50 wearing suits, they could have had Tony Blair stand in for Charles at the wedding ceremony and I’d not have noticed the difference.
Still, the storyline was clear enough.
Closure: 8/10. The dilemma as to whether or not to abdicate, accompanied by the acknowledgement that the rest of the family are going to be nowhere near as responsible with the throne as Elizabeth was, makes for an effective closing chapter. But the sense of closure is marred by the knowledge that there are many important events still ahead: the death of Prince Philip, the pandemic, the abdication of Harry and Meghan.
But wait. Am I penalizing the show for this deviation from real life, a mere eight paragraphs after I criticized it for not deviating enough? Yes. The writers needed to decide what they wanted: biography or dramatization. In not making a clear decision one way or the other, they highlighted the ways the show failed to be either.