Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E9 Avalanche

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

My apologies for the delay on the blog posts about the last two episodes of Season 4 of The Crown. I’ve been taking some time off to re-evaluate things.

I have determined that if I’m going to keep blogging, I need to cut back on the level of detail and research I put into each post or I’ll just implode from stress. I mean, my last blog post on 48:1 clocked in at over 8,000 words. That’s just not sustainable. So I’m going to put CONSIDERABLE effort into really cutting down these blog posts to 3,000 words or less in the future. This is still long enough for me to get into the nitty gritty details y’all love, but will make my life, and probably your life as readers, considerably easier.

On to Avalanche!

Top: Emma Corrin as Princess Diana in The Crown and Jay Webb as Wayne Sleep.
Bottom Left: Princess Diana (Credit: Reg Wilson / Shutterstock).
Bottom Middle: Princess Diana and Wayne Sleep.
Bottom Right: Princess Diana and Wayne Sleep (Credit: Helen Wilson / Shutterstock).

• The episode starts off with an incident in which Diana surprises Charles with a choreographed dance to Uptown Girl with Royal Ballet dancer Wayne Sleep. This really did happen on Dec. 23, 1985 at a private “Friends of Covent Garden” charity event. This charity event regularly featured surprise celebrity appearances, and Charles and Diana had appeared in a skit together the previous year as Romeo and Juliet. (Source: Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles)

  • We unfortunately only have photos of it, and no video. Probably the closest we have to an actual video of it is this 2017 CNN film in which Sleep talks and walks through both his and Diana’s parts. I’m not a dancer at all, but from what I can tell, it seems like The Crown really tried to recreate Sleep’s description of the dance very closely.

    • As I’ve discussed before, Diana really did love to dance, and she had actually asked Sleep if he would give her lessons in the 1980s. He didn’t have time to teach her, but later, did agree to help her with her surprise dance. They apparently struck up quite a lovely friendship and afterward, Diana would occasionally pop in to come hang out with him in his dressing room after his performances to just chat. (Source: A 2017 interview with Wayne Sleep published in The Guardian).

      • This entire incident took place a month after another high profile dance of Princess Diana’s, namely, when she danced with John Travolta at the White House. At that dinner, she actually specifically asked to be seated next to Russian ballet master Mikhail Baryshnikov, and wanted to dance with him, but alas, Baryshnikov had an injured ankle at the time. (Source: Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles)

Princess Diana with Wayne Sleep.
(Credit: Mirrorpix / Getty)

• Charles’ Reaction: We can’t know whether the couple argued about it in a car afterward, but there are reports that Charles was rather cool and distant towards Diana at a reception after the event. (Source: Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles)

  • Diana’s dress in the episode looks to be an almost perfect copy of the real dress Diana wore, and Emma Corrin’s hair is styled out voluminously like Diana’s was in real life. I feel like they don’t quite capture the height of Diana’s hair though.

  • I’m really happy they included the detail of the height difference between Diana and her partner in the crown. In real life, Diana was at least 8 inches taller than Wayne Sleep without heels; at 5’2”, Sleep is the shortest male dancer ever admitted into the Royal Ballet School. On The Crown, Emma Corrin is only 4 inches taller than Jay Webb, the actor who played Sleep (again without heels), but I think the contrast and effect still comes across very well.

    • Fun fact: Wayne Sleep originated the role of Mr. Mistoffelees in the initial West End run of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats! (Source: Marie Claire)

    • Additional fun fact: Jay Webb, who played Wayne Sleep in this episode, has acted in a fictional retelling of Princess Diana’s life before! As a child, he apparently played Prince Harry in the 1996 TV movie Princess in Love, a fictional retelling of Diana’s relationship with James Hewitt. (Source: Jay Webb’s CV ). I could barely find any photos from this film online, and it has, uhm, poor ratings. I may have to go watch this and see how terrible it is. For research purposes, of course. :D

• The scene in which the Queen and Philip discuss the dance after reading about it in the newspaper didn’t actually happen back in 1985. Even though there were 2,500 people in the crowd, the dance didn’t actually make the news at the time (source: Town and Country). It was 1985 and people didn’t just have cameras in their pockets like we do now. The only photos of the dance were taken by a Royal Opera House photographer, and those weren’t actually published until 1995. Sleep said in his interview with The Guardian that their publication made Diana suspicious of him and they drifted apart after that. Note: This was really hard for me to believe, but I actually searched through a couple newspaper databases for any mention to Princess Diana and Uptown Girl in 1985/1986 and couldn’t find anything.

  • The back and forth between the Queen and Philip of "Why did you never dance for me?” “Because if memory serves you had your own ballerinas for that.” is a callback to the Season 2 premiere episode Misadventure, when the Queen found a photo of a ballet dancer in Philip’s bag when he was about to leave on tour.

• The avalanche that occurred in the show was a real life event, although it happened several years after the Uptown Girl dance. In March 1988, Diana and Charles were at Klosters with friends when an avalanche killed their long time friend Major Hugh Lindsay and seriously injured Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. Diana was back at the chalet with Fergie at the time, and said later that they waited for news for several hours in utter fear.

  • When the COVID-19 pandemic locked down things in the UK, The Crown only had six days of shooting left. The show had actually planned on shooting the avalanche scene during this time, and had to change course very quickly to adjust to the situation. The director of the episode said that when all their plans had to be changed, she looked at what she really needed from that scene in the story to affect the journey of Charles and Diana, and ultimately decided to show the avalanche from Charles’s perspective. The result was a completely created avalanche visual that ends up enveloping the camera’s view entirely. (Source: “The Crown Cast Tell the Story of Filming Season 4” on Youtube, around 9 minutes).

  • Remember the character named Sarah who we saw in the press office in the 48:1 episode immediately previous to Avalanche? That’s Major Hugh Lindsay’s wife. I thought it was an interesting choice to have us see her work so much in the margins of one episode and then see her grief take center stage in the next.

    • The Ethics of Dramatizing Real Life Tragedies: Sarah Horsley, Hugh Lindsay’s widow, said that she was horrified by The Crown’s inclusion of the disaster in the show and that she specifically wrote and asked them not to include it. It makes me incredibly uneasy that they didn’t listen to her on this. Yes, yes, creative freedom and all that, but …this is a real person’s life. I guess at least he wasn’t portrayed by an actor in the show (at least as far as I can tell) and the actual incident wasn’t shown beyond some very brief avalanche footage with no people present. However, this appears to be more the result of COVID-19 shutting down production and changing their plans than any attempt to portray the incident sensitively.
      As the show moves closer and closer to present day, the criticism of its representation of events that are still affecting the lives of people today grows. I’m sure this will only become more of an issue in future seasons. I myself have a few questions about the ethical issues surrounding shows that come this close to present day (and my mother has some OPINIONS on this, y’all). Peter Morgan has said that he plans to maintain a “20 year rule” with the series to avoid becoming too journalistic and in order to have a bit of perspective on the events portrayed. So sorry, we’re not going to get to see Prince William or Prince Harry’s weddings in Seasons 5 or 6, nor are we going to meet Duchess Meghan. (Source: The Standard).
      We /might/ get up to seeing Prince Charles’s wedding to Camilla, which occurred in 2005, but I really don’t anticipate seeing anything beyond that. Production on the fifth season starts up in June 2021, season 5 won’t premiere until probably November 2022, and season 6 won’t come out until probably November 2023 (if we’re basing predictions off the past release schedules). Including Charles and Camilla’s wedding would have to bend/break Peter Morgan’s 20-year rule slightly, but I think it would be a rather brilliant way to end the series, personally.

Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown.

• The show depicts the Queen and Philip waiting for news about the avalanche anxiously, knowing that someone has died but not knowing if it is their son or not. I’m not sure if we have any stories about their reaction to this, but this does seem to echo Diana’s accounts of the event. She and Fergie were back at the chalet and apparently heard that /someone/ had died over an hour before they actually knew who it was.

  • Tobias Menzies has had very little to do this season frankly, but I thought his acting in this scene was incredible. His worry for his son was just written all over his face.

  • The royal household does in fact have contingency plans to deal with the deaths of all royal family members. This came up in Season 1’s Act of God, when Queen Mary (Queen Elizabeth’s grandmother) mentioned that there were rehearsals for her funeral going on outside her bedroom window. These plans are given bridge-based code names, just as the Queen mentions in the episode.

  • Those are:

    Queen Elizabeth II - Operation London Bridge
    Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother - Operation Tay Bridge (these plans were rehearsed for 22 years before her deaht, apparently)
    Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh - Operation Forth Bridge
    Charles, Prince of Wales - Operation Menai Bridge

• In the show, both Charles and Diana view the avalanche as a turning point in their marriage. Charles sees it as a potential life ending event and realizes that he needs to be with Camilla. Diana sees the incident as a wake up call that she should change her ways and recommit to her marriage. I haven’t seen any evidence that either party reacted to this tragedy in these ways.

  • Diana said later that the tragedy taught her that she could cope with a horrible situation and take control of a situation even when Charles opposed her decision. Once they found out that Hugh had died, Diana quickly went up to pack Hugh’s suitcase and gave Fergie Hugh’s passport to give to Charles’s bodyguard. (Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words)

  • People have been criticizing the show a lot for making Charles look bad, but honestly, they kind of did him a favor in this story line. I’ve read in several places that Charles wanted to stay and keep skiing after Hugh Lindsay’s death but that Diana insisted that they had to fly back to the UK with Lindsay’s remains at once. (Source: The Diana Chronicles, Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words). This reaction was likely just shock though, as later, staff at Highgrove reported that Charles was completely overcome with horror and guilt and wasn’t able to eat. (The Diana Chronicles)

• The Queen calls out Diana for breaking her vows, which seems pretty hypocritical since everyone knew Charles had been in love with another woman for the entirety of his marriage.

  1. Charles is silenced yet again in the conversation with his parents and Diana and doesn’t get to speak his piece. This continues a theme with Charles’s interactions with his parents going back to Season 3 Tywysog Cymru, and continuing in Season 4’s The Balmoral Test. The Queen and Philip just want Charles to shut up and do his duty.

• When the Queen talks to Anne about Charles and Diana, Anne mentions that Diana has had affairs with her bodyguard and her riding instructor. This refers to bodyguard Barry Mannakee and riding instructor James Hewitt.

  • Her relationship with Mannakee isn’t covered in the Crown in any depth, but Diana said in private tapes recorded by her voice coach (which were released after her death), Diana described her relationship with an unnamed bodyguard as the “greatest love” she’d ever had. Although Manakee is not mentioned by name in the tapes, the details she gives about when she met him and how he died align with his life. (Source: Oprah Daily). Manakee was also married at the time, and eventually lost his position as her bodyguard after they were caught in a “compromising position” in 1986. (Source: The Diana Chronicles). We don’t know nearly as much about Diana’s relationship with Manakee as we do about her relationship with Hewitt.

  • James Hewitt was Diana’s horse-riding instructor. He spoke to newspapers in the early 90s and later wrote a 1999 book called “Love and War” about his affair with Diana; she confirmed their relationship in interviews. The affair started in 1986 and ended in 1989 when he was posted to Germany.
    Because Hewitt has red hair, there have been rumors for years that he’s actually Prince Harry’s dad. However, Harry was born a full two years before the affair began, so there’s really no actual grounds to believe this story. Diana always attributed Harry’s red hair to her side of the family, the Spencers. (Source: Harper’s Bazaar). The scenes in this episode about Diana sneaking Hewitt into Kensington Palace into the trunk (boot) of her car apparently are realistic. (Source: Harper’s Bazaar, Anna Pasternak’s Princess in Love)

  • Diana’s affair with Hewitt was pretty well known among their staff and the people around them, so it seems that Anne really may have known about all of these things. In addition, while they may not have addressed their affairs with their staff quite so openly as depicted in the show, it does appear that Charles’s relationship with Camilla and Diana’s relationships were common knowledge.

  • As I mentioned earlier, there isn’t any sign that the avalanche actually caused Diana to change anything about her relationships, so the scenes where she kicks Hewitt out and bans him from the Palace are made up. The BBC reported that Diana stopped taking Hewitt’s calls in 1992.\\

Diana with the cast of The Phantom of the Opera in The West End. I /think/ that’s baby Andrew Lloyd Webber there too.
(Credit: UPPA / Starstock)

Princess Diana with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• The second Diana performance of the episode, in which Diana gave Charles a video of her performing a song from Phantom of the Opera, may not have happened quite the way it was depicted. The video has never been released and no one has officially ever talked about it, but back in 1988, The Washington Post reported that Diana did record something on the set of Phantom of the Opera and gave the video to Charles as a seven year anniversary gift. Wash Post also reports though that Andrew Lloyd Webber was there at the time, which he denied to The Telegraph. It’s unclear whether she actually sang in the video or not, but she definitely at least danced.

  • Diana really did love Phantom of the Opera and saw it numerous times. Andrew Lloyd Webber confirmed this via tweet, along with a picture of him with her.

• Prince Charles has confirmed previously that his affair with Camilla began in 1986, after, in his view, his marriage had irretrievably broken down. Reports indicate that both Diana and Camilla’s husband Andrew knew about it. (Source: Insider). Of course, Andrew had already been having affairs for years and Diana also had her own relationships outside her marriage.

  • It’s hard to know how much Diana actually confronted Charles about the affair, but Diana did confront Camilla herself at a party in 1989. According to tapes Diana made for Andrew Morton for his book Diana: Her True Story (which were made years later and are from her own viewpoint, so there’s likely bias in this recollection), the interaction went something like this.
    Diana: “I know what's going on between you and Charles and I just want you to know that.”
    Camilla: “You've got everything you ever wanted. You've got all the men in the world fall in love with you and you've got two beautiful children, what more do you want?”
    Diana: “I want my husband. I'm sorry I'm in the way...and it must be hell for both of you. But I do know what's going on. Don't treat me like an idiot."

Josh O’Connor as Prince Charles and Erin Doherty as Princess Anne in The Crown.

Prince Edward, Prince Charles, and Princess Anne (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

• When Charles complains to Anne about the situation, she points out to him that Camilla and Andrew’s marriage is actually happy in its own way, stating “You’re not Romeo and Juliet.” It’s a little unclear how true this is, but reports do indicate that Andrew was aware of Camilla’s relationship with Charles, didn’t have any problems with it, and the couple remained friendly after their divorce, so it’s quite possible that this is a correct characterization.

• In the show, Diana repeatedly calls Charles, but he repeatedly ignores her. I pointed out in my earlier post that the colors blue and yellow seem pretty important to their relationship. Diana seems to be wearing blue more when she’s in love with Charles and they’re connecting, but seems to wear more yellow when they’re at odds. This isn’t super consistent, but that color juxtaposition shows up a LOT in the montage of Diana calling Charles and him ignoring her; at one point, he’s in blue and completely surrounded by yellow walls, which seems to indicate the huge emotional distance between them.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown.
Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown.
Right: Diana as a young teenager.

• The Crown depicts Charles as having spies that watch Diana, who inform him when her affair with Hewitt resumes. It appears that Charles did have courtiers around Diana who reported back to him, at least. On a very weird note, in 1998, the UNITED STATES National Security Agency admitted that they actually had “1,056 pages of classified information about the late Princess Diana.” (Source: Washington Post, 1998). This is…bizarre to say the least, and the NSA never explained exactly why this happened, but did say that references to Diana in the intercepted conversations were incidental and that she wasn’t a formal target of the NSA eavesdropping infrastructure.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E8 48:1

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1”
Season 1 Tiaras and Crowns of “The Crown”; The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown
Visual Cinderella References in The Crown S4E3 Fairytale

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 8 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

Content Warning: Some discussion of human rights violations, political violence, coup d’etats, murders, mass death. I’ll give a CW right before those portions of the post as well.

• The episode starts off with a flashback to April 21, 1947, with a cameo by Claire Foy as Princess Elizabeth before she rose to the throne. It’s her 21st birthday, and from Capetown, South Africa, Elizabeth speaks to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak.”
  Toward the end, she famously says, “I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” This speech is, I believe, a word for word rendition of her actual 21st birthday speech, which can be read in full here.
  As she continues to speak, we pan away to people from all over the commonwealth listening to her voice on the radio while going about their day. It’s a short but very affecting montage. I really wish that they told us which towns/cities/countries we were seeing though.

  • Fun fact: This is actually the earliest chronological appearance of the Queen (apart from some childhood flashbacks), as the first episode in The Crown started with her wedding on November 20, 1947. Claire Foy’s reappearance was much remarked upon when she was spotted filming these scene back in November 2019.

  • This speech was supposedly given from the garden of Government House in Cape Town. I guess they moved it to the porch in the show for dramatic purposes. At the time, Elizabeth was touring South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her parents and younger sister.
    However, IT LOOKS LIKE there’s actually evidence that the 21st birthday speech was not delivered live or recorded in Cape Town at all, but may have been pre-recorded a week earlier at a hotel in Rhodesia.

    • The Telegraph noted in 2018:

      A new book, Queen of the World by biographer Robert Hardman, has suggested it was impossible for the speech to have been delivered at 7pm in Cape Town on the birthday, cross-referencing the sun-dappled photographs of the Princess reading it with the timings of April sunsets, and unpublished diary accounts.

      One such diary, kept by the King’s press secretary Captain Lewis Ritchie and now locked in the Royal Archives, states that, on Sunday, April 13, 1947, at Victoria Falls Hotel in what was then Rhodesia: ‘At 6 pm, Princess Elizabeth recorded her speech for the BBC. It was afterwards played off for Her Royal Highness to hear and was a great triumph.’

      It was later broadcast from Cape Town as if live.”

  • The scenes we see, which all include radios of some sort, from what I can tell (but most of these are like 4 second pans so it’s hard to tell): (No, I’m not even going to try to guess too much which of these places is which, I am not familiar enough with the culture and racial makeup of all the people in these places to even try. Plus, I’ve already done a lot of research on who was in the Commonwealth in 1985 and I don’t want to have to do it for 1947 too, lol. The time of day, plants, animals, and landscape in each scene are definite clues, so if anyone wants to take a crack at guessing which is which, go for it).

    • Men listening from a barbershop set up outside (appears to be night)

    • Men and a boy walking through a rural pond with goats in the background (daytime)

    • Various people putting up their equipment after fishing on a beach (looks like dusk)

    • Women wringing out and hanging out clothes (daytime)

    • Men with rifles sitting outside of tents with camels in the background and surrounded by desert plants (daytime)

    • A man lying on a bed and two women sitting by him (sun coming through the window)

    • Various people sitting and standing outside a house in the rain, one woman sorting some sort of green crop. Chiles also feature in a basket out front.

    • Men inside and outside of a pickup truck filled with sheep (daytime)

    • Women, maids, and ranchers gathered around a radio listening (daytime - looks like morning light to me), distinctive orange flowers in a vase in the back.

    • A group of women playing games and talking in a common room at Oxford - Margaret Roberts shushes those that are talking and then walks out under the Hertford Bridge in Oxford, England (a city landmark).

Top: The Crown; Bottom: The real life Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday (Credit: Topical Press Agency / Getty).

Left: Margaret Thatcher back when she was Margaret Roberts in college; Right: Margaret Roberts in The Crown.

• The Commonwealth of Nations (usually just called the Commonwealth) is now a voluntary political association of 54 member states. Although the commonwealth members are not legally obligated to each other, the states basically work together to promote specific values. These core principles were outlined in the 1971 Singapore Declaration and the Lusaka Declaration of 1979 as: support for the United Nations and world peace, egalitarianism and individual liberty, the eradication of poverty, ignorance, disease, and economic inequality, opposition to racism and gender discrimination, free trade, institutional cooperation, multilateralism, and the rejection of international coercion.

  • The Head of the Commonwealth is Queen Elizabeth II; although the position is not technically hereditary, Prince Charles was appointed her successor to this role in 2018. This is a largely symbolic role with no involvement in the day to day governance of any of the commonwealth member states.
    As depicted in this episode, decisions involving the Commonwealth are generally made at the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). The Commonwealth Secretariat is the Commonwealth’s central agency and institution and is in charge of basically all the administrative aspects of the Commonwealth: setting up meetings, helping countries implement policies and decisions of the Commonwealth, and assisting with the development of various policies. The secretariat is run by an elected Commonwealth Secretary-General.
    Nearly all of the member countries of the commonwealth are former territories of the British Empire. (Source: The Commonwealth and the very helpful Wikipedia charts specifying the system of government of each state)
    I should note that in 1985-1986, when the majority of this episode is set, South Africa was not part of the Commonwealth, as it was basically kicked out after it became a republic in 1961 due to its racial apartheid policies. It was readmitted in 1994 after its first multi-racial elections were held.

  • The Commonwealth in 1985 (the list of commonwealth countries at the bottom of this 1985 document from The South African Institute of International Affairs reviewing the events at CHOGM in Nassau in 1985 was very helpful in compiling this last. This document also provides valuable contemporaneous background information from a supposedly neutral research source based in South Africa; I’ve skimmed this over and haven’t found anything terribly objectionable in it, but if I’ve missed something, please let me know.)

    • 16 of the member states were also Commonwealth realms and had the Queen as their head of state. Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis (sometimes Saint Christopher and Nevis), Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, *Tuvalu, and United Kingdom
      *(Tuvalu was a special member and didn’t have a representative at CHOGM but appears to have been counted for the 48:1 episode and line purposes)

    • 28 of the member states were republics of various types: Bangladesh, Botswana, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji , The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Malawi, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, *Nauru, Nigeria, Western Samoa (now known as Samoa), Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
      Since 1985, 6 other republics have joined - Cameroon, Mozambique, Namibia, Pakistan, Rwanda, and South Africa.
      *[Nauru was a special member and didn’t have a representative at CHOGM but appears to have been counted for the 48:1 episode and line purposes]

    • 5 of the member states are monarchies that do not have Queen Elizabeth at the head: Brunei, Swaziland (known known as Eswatini), Lesotho, Malaysia, Tonga

• The Commonwealth montage, still backed by the audio of Elizabeth’s speech, ends with baby Margaret Thatcher (Margaret Roberts at this point in her life) at Oxford, listening to the radio, walking joyfully across campus in full Oxford academic dress (which is still worn for examinations and on numerous other occasions), and then pursuing office in the conservative association at Oxford. Once again, Margaret is shown primarily in blue and is the only woman seen in the association pictures. She stands out quite emphatically from the others. This seems to call back to how she stood out among all the men in her cabinet photos in S4E1 The Balmoral Test.

  • We also get a shot of her working in a chemistry lab, which does reflect Margaret Thatcher’s real career as a research chemist after college.

  • Then we get a quick shot of her graduation from Oxford, with her parents at her side, posing for photographs.

Left: Press Secretary Michael Shea on The Crown; Right: the Real life Michael Shea (Credit: PA).

Top: Sir Shridath Surendranath Ramphal on The Crown; Bottom: Sir Shridath Surendranath Ramphal with the Queen in real life.

(Note: I have lightened the top image a bit just so the details can be seen. I have to do this with screenshots from The Crown pretty regularly, alas.)

• Next we’re introduced to Michael Shea’s rather purple prose in his novel “Ixion's Wheel: A Threnody,” which is presented on the screen as its typed, to suit its….hilarious pretentiousness. After he finishes it on his typewriter, he submits it to his editor. She describes it as his “War and Peace,” and he jokingly asks that it be thought of as Ulysses instead. She dramatically jokes, “I shall set aside a year of my life,” and later says, “You deserve congratulations for being able to carry it up the stairs.”

  • War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, is famously long and clocks in at over 500,000 words in most English translations. Although there’s more than one famous literature piece known as Ulysses, Shea is likely referring to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses here, which is around 265,000 words long. For reference, most novels these days are between 60,000-100,000 words long.

  • Text on the screen tells us that his editor’s office is in Bloomsbury, London. Bloomsbury is a very artsy and culturally important area in the city which features numerous museums and colleges and is also home to Bloomsbury publishing. Bloomsbury’s artsy-fartsy reputation actually began back in the early 1900s, when a group of English, writers, artists and intellectuals (including Virginia Woolf) lived in and around that neighborhood and became known as the Bloomsbury set.

    • The actual text on the screen:
      ”It was the volte-face of Eurydice except I was Aristaeus, driving her on towards the serpent. 'Malachi, Maalichi...' Twice she called me by my name, twice she beckoned me with her outstretched dactyl. I stood in darkness and she in light, and yet here i was the diurnal, and she was the crepuscular, if such a nugatory distinction pertain. The aurora was breaking, the island, sea-girt, was fast stirring. I looked at her again, her dermis pellucid in the lambent sunshine seemed as if a fish skin pulled taut. She gave me one last glancing look, and then stepped off, and plunged down into the waxing viridescence of the Ionian Waters below. Morus tua, vita mea. The End.”

      • I am not going to bother trying to interpret this all but here are a few bits:

        • Eurydice, Aristaeus, serpant: In Greek Mythology, Eurydice was a nymph married to the legendary musician/poet Orpheus in Greek mythology. Aristaeus, a minor god, tried to pursue her one day and while escaping, she stepped on a snake. She was bitten and died.
          After her death, the musician persuaded Hades to let her leave the underworld and come back with him. Hades agreed, on the condition that Orpheus that he had to walk in front of her and could not turn and look back at her until they were both completely in the daylight. Toward the end of the journey, after Orpheus had reached the light but Eurydice was still slightly behind, Orpheus turned to look at her. She was immediately whisked back to the underworld.

        • Malachi traditionally is said to have written the book of Malachi in the Hebrew Bible. Very little is known about him, and he may not have actually existed.

        • “Ionian waters” - refers to the Ionian Sea, which is a bay of the Mediterranean Sea that stretches from Southern Italy to Western Greece.

        • Morus tua, vita mea - Latin for “your death, my life.”

        • Ixion's Wheel: A Threnody - In Greek mythology, Ixion was the king of the Lapiths. He had a habit of getting into trouble, to say the least. He eventually was thrown out of Olympus and bound to an “ever-spinning fiery wheel for eternity” by Hermes.
          A Threnody is a song or poem to mourn the dead.

• Michael arrives at work at Buckingham Palace and happily greets everyone he walks by. His colleague Sarah tells him that a newspaper is asking for confirmation of “an apparently open secret in Commonwealth government circles that the Queen is deeply frustrated by Thatcher’s refusal to back sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa.” Shea scoffs at the question and says, “You should know better than to come to me with nonsense like that, Sarah. In the 33 years she’s been on the throne, the Queen has never once expressed a point of view about her prime ministers, positive or negative, and never will. Political impartiality and support of her prime minister is an article of faith to her.” This simple conversation basically previews all the plot points of this episode, in order.

  • We’ll see the press office throughout the episode and get to know its staff decently well. Pay attention to Sarah. She’ll be important in the next episode.

  • A TV in the background shows video footage of police in South Africa beating black protestors. A reporter notes that the brutality against protestors is causing increased international outrage.

• Next, we see the Queen meeting with a man she refers to as “Sonny” to discuss the atrocities in South Africa and the need for economic sanctions from the Commonwealth. The episode never quite tells us this, but Sonny is, in fact Sir Shridath Surendranath Ramphal, also known as Sir Sonny Ramphal, who served as Commonwealth Secretary-General from 1975-1990. Sonny notes that 48 of the commonwealth countries are now committed to sanctions, but that there must be “total unanimity” to implement them. Thatcher remains opposed.
  Note: The Crown can be pretty bad about telling us who specific people are sometimes, but this one seems pretty egregious. I genuinely had no idea who Sonny was and thought he was just an advisor for the queen. It’s not realistic to expect your viewers to come in with in-depth knowledge of who ran the Commonwealth in the 1980s or even to be able to intuit that he’s working /for/ the Commonwealth when we really only see Sonny in his interactions with the Queen and Margaret Thatcher throughout this episode. It would have taken five seconds to mention that he was the secretary-general; why was this step not taken?

  • The Queen is wearing a green and orange plaid dress. This color combination is unusual enough that I feel like it probably symbolizes something? I can’t put an exact finger on it, but it may refer to the flag of QwaQwa, one of South Africa’s bantustans. Bantustans were territories that the ruling party pushed black South Africans into with the intention of segregating out the population; the Government stripped black citizens of their citizenship and most of their political and civil rights and declared them citizens of the bantustans instead.

    • Content Warning: Human rights violations, racism, political violence, coup d’etats, murders, mass death. [italicized text]
      
      Apartheid was terrifically complicated and horrible and lasted for decades. I attempted to research it (because I was never actually taught about it in any class I ever took) and was quickly overwhelmed by the huge scope and destruction of it all. There’s no way I can encompass it all. Very briefly though, apartheid refers to the South African’s republic deliberate, systemic, society wide physical and economic discrimination against the majority population of the country, namely, black South Africans. It was the systemic and deliberate segregation. degradation, and abuse of millions of people. They were forced to live in specific areas, did not have freedom to move about their country, and were given inferior education systems and job opportunities. Many protestors against apartheid policy were beaten and killed. Tens of thousands of people were abducted and/or detained without trial for years. 21,000 people were killed in political violence during apartheid (including 14,000 deaths during the transition process from 1990-1994).(Source: Crime Against Humanity, Analyzing the Repression of the Apartheid State)
      
      End Content Warning.

• Margaret rants to her ministers, saying “Why do we allow our queen to fraternize with countries like Uganda, Malaysia, Nigeria, Swazi land?” She states that these countries have unelected dictators and despots with appalling human rights records. I find it really unintentionally funny that she says “I’ll give her a frank conversation about not wasting my time” while actually making dinner for her ministers (I mean, you’re the prime minister, you can probably hire someone to cook for you so you can spend your valuable time on like, running the country).

  • Thatcher can be difficult to relate to sometimes, but she actually makes some very good points in this episode. I’m /not/ an expert on any of the countries she’s mentioned, and am heavily heavily oversimplifying here, but I’ve researched them a bit and here’s just a small portion of what I discovered (I’m leaving out a LOT in every single case).
    
    Content Warning: Human rights violations, political violence, coup d’etats, murders, mass death. [italicized text]
    

    • Uganda: Only a few months before this episode takes place, President Milton Obote, who had led a government noted for huge human rights abuses throughout the Ugandan Bush War, had been overthrown in a coup d’etat. Amnesty International estimated at the time that Obote’s regime was responsible for more than 300,000 civilian deaths across Uganda.

    • Malaysia: In 1984, a diplomatic situation arose between Britain and Malaysia when several British newspapers reported on Sultan Iskandar of Johor’s coronation with headlines such as “Killer becomes King” (the Sultan had killed a man a few years earlier and been quickly pardoned by his father); the Malaysian government demanded an apology from the British government, which refused to do so. In addition, numerous Malaysian laws of the time (and even now) posed serious human rights concerns; media content and news was heavily controlled and the government often arbitrarily arrested those that threatened “social order” (such as political activists, labour activists, academics, and religious groups) and detained them for long periods without trial, sometimes for years.

    • Nigeria: Between Nigeria’s independence in 1960 and the events of this episode, six separate coup d’etats had taken place. Several of these regimes silenced their critics by jailing and threatening journalists, closing down newspapers, and banning organizations (there are still serious human rights issues regarding freedom of expression there still today). The government that had just come to power a few months before the events of this episode was notoriously and openly corrupt.

    • Swaziland: Political activities and trade unions were banned in Swaziland (now known as Eswatini) in 1973 when King Sobhuza II repealed the constitution, dissolved parliament, and assumed all powers of government. Parliament would not be allowed to meet again until 1979. The press was highly constrained and the king can waive an individual’s freedom of speech or press at will. Criticism of the king may result in prosecution for sedition or treason.
      
      End Content Warning.
      

  • Thatcher specifically makes her cabinet ministers kedgeree, which includes fish, rice, and eggs. It’s an Indian dish that was likely brought to the UK when India was a British colony, where it became a fashionable breakfast dish. This simple dish draws yet another line back to the UK’s former days as an empire and its connection to the Commonwealth.

Credit: Royal Collection Trust

Credit: WPA Pool / Getty

Credit: Royal Collection Trust

• Next we get the Queen trying on outfits for CHOGM, particularly a “sunshine chiffon” outfit which her advisor notes will pick up the yellow in the Commonwealth flag. Her wardrobe advisor (who is not named) specifically shows him her porcupine brooch, which refers to the Queen’s real life porcupine brooch, given to her by King Otumfuo Opoku Ware of the Ashanti Tribe in Ghana in 1972 (Ghana is, of course, part of the Commonwealth). Her advisor also mentions a diamond necklace that had been given to the Queen on her 21st birthday by South Africa.

  • Prince Andrew comes in to talk to his mother and tells her that he’s going to ask his younger brother Edward to be his best man, and not his older brother Charles. He relates this gleefully, in a “I’ll show Charles” way, and calls his brother an insecure, jealous fool. The Queen comments that this decision will “raise some eyebrows.” We also get a super brief glimpse of Sarah Ferguson (who was a friend of Princess Diana’s). Andrew and Sarah did not actually get engaged until after CHOGM 1985, as he did not propose to her until Feb. 19, 1986 (his 26th birthday). They married on July 23, 1986. Edward was indeed Andrew’s best man, although Charles gave a reading.

  • Andrew also refers to Charles’s vision of a “slimmed down” role for the monarchy. In real life, Charles has been advocating for this for years. Under his plan, the monarchy would become more cost effective, with only royals at the top of the line of succession actually supported by the Sovereign Grant. This dream is now closer to reality then ever before, as Prince Andrew himself is no longer participating in royal duties due to the backlash over his association with Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle have left their official roles as working royals, and COVID-19 has tightened purse strings and dialed back everyone’s appearances and roles.

  • Prince Andrew also says “like other second sons I could mention, I’d be so obviously be better [at being the heir] than him. Here, he’s referring to the Queen’s own father, a second son who became king only after his older brother abdicated from the throne.

  • In this conversation, the Queen also refers to her two families - her direct blood relatives and the commonwealth of nation. This tying together of the Commonwealth with her family and the immediate reference to her father helps illustrate again why the Commonwealth is so important to the Queen.

  • As Andrew walks away to greet Fergie, the Queen’s advisor notes that a specific dress will go well with the diamond necklace the people of South Africa gave the queen on her 21st birthday (when she gave that speech at the top of the episode). This necklace was indeed given to her on that occasion; , she has shortened it since and used the remaining diamonds to create a bracelet as well. (Source: The Order of Sartorial Splendor). She still pulls out this diamond necklace and bracelet for diplomatic visits, including her most recent visit to South Africa. I can’t figure out whether she actually wore it at CHOGM in 1985, but it seems possible, given the topic at hand.

• At the CHOGM meeting in the Bahamas, the Queen (wearing blue and red, picking up the blue in the Commonwealth flag but also representing the UK flag) addresses the meeting and says that the Commonwealth of Nations is her second family. Next, she fulfills her pledge to talk to Margaret Thatcher about sanctions against South Africa. The conversation doesn’t leave either woman vey happy.

  • Thatcher states that sanctions against apartheid won’t help and will just hurt and devastate both South Africa and the UK. She notes that the United Kingdom has three billion pounds of trade in South Africa. To put this in context, in 1985, the UK did about 105.9 billion in export trade and 101.4 billion in import trade. (Source: UK Trade, 1948-2019: Statistics)

• Although this character of Margaret Thatcher definitely has some points to make about the commonwealth, her views are also clearly influenced by an intense feeling of superiority and racism. Margaret is clearly just annoyed by the commonwealth’s existence– “There are ways of Britain being great again. And that is through a revitalized economy, not through association with unreliable tribal leaders in eccentric costumes.”

  • Margaret’s phrasing about making Britain great again was a common theme throughout her political career, dating back to a 1950 speech. Yup, she beat out Trump to the slogan by over 60 years.

  • The Queen’s rejoinder is that in some ways, she is herself, a tribal leader in eccentric costume, which points out Thatcher’s rather racist point of view. “To me all these countries are great countries with great histories….To you, the commonwealth is a distraction, a waste of time. It was the pledge I made forty years ago, on the wireless.” Margaret acknowledges that she remembers the speech and listened to it at the time, but continues on to say, “We cannot let the values of the past distract us from the realities of the present.” The Queen, clearly not too happy with Thatcher, says crisply, “48 countries of the commonwealth are now preparing a statement condemning south Africa and recommending sanctions, I am recommending you sign it.”

Above: The Crown’s Britannia. Below: The real HMY Britannia. I believe the views are switched in the pictures (look for the big wooden doors as a reference point).

Left: PM Thatcher wears a blue dress in The Crown in her power color.
Top Right: I couldn’t find many pics of her wearing a blue dress like this (as she usually wore suits) but I did find this one picture from after her time as PM (Credit: Mario Testino).
Bottom Right: A reference photo of the Queen herself in a similar outfit (Credit: Joan Williams / Shutterstock).

• We get another fun appearance by Denis Thatcher (who I personally find endlessly entertaining). After Margaret refers to the HMY Britannia as a big boat, Denis Thatcher insists that the ship is called a yacht when the queen is on it.

  • A yacht is generally thought of as a medium sized pleasure boat, at least 33 feet in length. The large commercial yacht code of Great Britain defines a large yacht as one that is 79 feet long or more. Superyachts are defined as yachts longer than 130 feet. The Britannia however, was 412 feet long!

  • This isn’t the first time we’ve seen HMY Britannia on the series (HMY stands for “Her Majesty’s Yacht”). It also popped up in S2’s Lisbon scenes. The real royal yacht was retired from service in the 90s and now (in non covid times) serves as a floating ship museum. The Crown didn’t film on the boat, but staff of the show apparently toured the actual yacht, took lots of photos, and built their own version. You can see photos and the layout of the ship over on the ship museum’s website.

  • Margaret Thatcher ends her phone conversation with her husband by calling him a know it all and affectionately calling him “DT.” This really was PM Thatcher’s nickname for her husband, as was noted in numerous articles about the two and his own obituary in The Independent.

• In Margaret Thatcher’s own lodging in the Bahamas during CHOGM, we see her crossing out lots of statements with a red pen in a montage that shows a similar scene repeated over and over again. More and more people watch every time to see if Thatcher will approve of the statement. She rejects numerous words to refer to the actions against South Africa throughout the sequence: sanctions, proposals, measures, actions, and controls.
  The queen ultimately states that they need a writer to solve the problem, not a “useless politician[],” and looks to Michael Shea. And then Michael Shea’s story from the beginning of the episode is brought full circle and he finally comes up with the word that will satisfy Thatcher - signals. Sonny later notes that among the signals she accepted were several actions that she would never have agreed to if they were actually called sanctions.
  At the end of it all, when the Queen was feeling quite triumphant, Thatcher challenged her and the other CHOGM' leader’s view by noting: “Did one person move to the 48 or did the 48 move to the one? Yes, I agreed to signals, but as you may now, with one simple turn, signals can point to an entirely different direction.”

  • A 1985 article in The Times said “there were many differing interpretations on the extent to which Mrs Margaret Thatcher had had to compromise to make agreement possible.” Thatcher herself claimed that she persuaded the other Commonwealth leaders that her approach was correct, stating “They joined me.” However, the Prime Minister of New Zealand disagreed, saying that she had made significant concessions and that Britain had “surrendered its position as to its literal interpretation of sanctions. ”

    • So it does appear that this level of nitpicking about words really did occur. The Times article described the final seven-page article as containing sanctions, threats, and inducement to encourage South Africa’s government to begin a dialogue with representative black leaders about replacing apartheid with a non-racial governmental system. Mrs. Thatcher said the document contained “psychological signals” to South Africa that the international community was losing patience with them. However, the word “signals” does not actually appear in the text at all.

  • The actual accord included the following items:

    • We, therefore, call on the authorities in Pretoria [the administrative capital of South Africa at the time] for the following steps to be taken in a genuine manner and as a matter of urgency:

      1. Declare that the system of apartheid will be dismantled and specific and meaningful action taken in fulfilment of that intent.

      2. Terminate the existing state of emergency.

      3. Release immediately and unconditionally Nelson Mandela and all others imprisoned and detained for their opposition to apartheid.

      4. Establish political freedom and specifically lift the existing ban on the African National Congress and other political parties.

      5. Initiate, in the context of a suspension of violence on all sides, a process of dialogue across lines of colour, politics and religion, with a view to establishing a non-racial and representative government.

    • The accord also discussed numerous other continuing measures and efforts, including an arms embargo, avoiding any sports contacts with South Africa, and numerous economic measures against the country. Those economic measures included:

      • a ban on all new government loans to the Government of South Africa and its agencies..

      • a readiness to take unilaterally what action may be possible to preclude the import of Krugerrands;

      • no Government funding for trade missions to South Africa or for participation in exhibitions and trade fairs in South Africa;

      • a ban on the sale and export of computer equipment capable of use by South African military forces, police or security forces;

      • a ban on new contracts for the sale and export of nuclear goods, materials and technology to South Africa;

      • a ban on the sale and export of oil to South Africa;

      • a strict and rigorously controlled embargo on imports of arms, ammunition, military vehicles and paramilitary equipment from South Africa.,

      • an embargo on all military co-operation with South Africa. and

      • discouragement of all cultural and scientific events except where these contribute towards the ending of apartheid or have no possible role in promoting it.

  • A History Extra article about this episode pointed out that according to recently released records from PM Thatcher’s time, she was actually much more active in fighting against apartheid than previously thought. “‘Mrs Thatcher was much more critical of South Africa in private than people thought,’ says historian Dominic Sandbrook. ‘She gave the country’s leaders quite a lot of grief behind the scenes, including telling them to release Nelson Mandela. She told the South Africans that Britain didn’t like the system and that it had to change. But because she refused to condemn it publicly, people assumed it must be because she secretly supported them.’”

Above: The Crown. Below: The real life CHOGM 1985 picture (Credit: John Shelly Collection / Getty).

I collected pics of PM Thatcher’s various power blue suits and had nowhere else to put it, please enjoy.
Credit:
Top L to R: Tim Graham / Getty; Shutterstock; John Stillwell
Middle L to R: Jean Guichard / Getty; Mondadori Portfolio / Getty
Bottom Middle: Keystone / Getty; Bottom Right: David Montgomery / Getty

• For the formal CHOGM picture, the Queen and Margaret Thatcher wear very similar outfits to what they wore in real life. However, Thatcher’s real dress in real life was blue, not red. The change in colors seems to really signify her opposition to the queen in this episode.

  • From close inspection of the pictures, I believe that Queen Elizabeth both in real life and in The Crown wore The Grand Duchess of Vladimir Tiara. This tiara was first given to Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a German princess who married a son of Emperor Alexander II, on the occasion of her wedding in 1874. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Maria hid her jewels, including this tiara, in a bedroom the palace. Her son and a friend eventually disguised themselves as workmen, got into the palace, and snuck out the jewels, which were taken to safety. Her daughter Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna sold several of her mother’s jewels, including this tiara, to Queen Mary of the United Kingdom in 1921. The piece can be worn with pearls and pendants or without (a tiara worn without its pendant stones is described as “widowed”). (Source: The Court Jeweller)
    The Queen is also wearing a diamond necklace and earrings, but I’m not as familiar with her non-tiara jewelry and am not sure of their identity. They aren’t the South African diamonds though, as those look very different than what is represented here.

• Michael talks to his agent friend. She suggests he write a political thriller about White Hall. However, Michael, shocked, says that he’s old fashioned and “would never betray those confidences or the people I am sworn to serve.”

  • White Hall was a residence of the English monarchs from 1530-1698 until it burned down. After, a street was built on the former location of the palace and named Whitehall. A number of government buildings sit on that street and thus, it’s common to hear “White Hall” used as a reference to the government overall.

• Discouraged, Michael goes to work at Buckingham Palace, where he is warned that the newspaper “Today” is planning to write a story about the tensions between Thatcher and the queen over the apartheid sanction discussions at CHOGM.

  • This is a big enough issue, that Michael Shea goes to the queen with her private secretary to report on the article to her. He says that the actual article will have little impact, but that it won’t be long before “bigger, more influential newspapers realize this warrants further scrutiny.” Shea advises that the Queen give some preemptive statement of support for the prime minister which would kill the gossip. Instead, the Queen asks, “What if on this occasion, I’d be happy to let the people know the displeasure is real?…You know how seriously I take my constitutional duty….to remain silent, but one has to draw a line in the sand.”

  • Here, they’re all talking about the sovereign’s traditional silence on all political issues in the UK’s constitutional monarchy. As CNN put it when reports of the queen’s views on Brexit became news in 2016, “Ever since her ancestor King Charles I lost his head in 1649 following the English Civil War with Parliament, British monarchs’ constitutional role has gradually distilled to this: representing the whole country – and steering clear of politics….The royal family’s position requires the support of parliamentarians – on either side of the political divide. To support one party – or cause – will only lead to trouble further down the line.”

  • There have been a few times where the Queen’s political views have slipped out, although she has never given a press interview and does not vote in elections. (Source: The Independent) Her views have emerged on the Scottish referendum, the delay in arresting a radical Islamist cleric, why the UK lost the American colonies, Turkey entering the EU, and of course, as shown in this episode, PM Thatcher’s approach to proposed sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. These views have pretty much all emerged due to leaks and people talking about their private conversations with her; she never speaks publicly on any political issues.

  When the queen suggests that she would be okay with confirming the rift between her and the PM to the press, Michael , looking aghast, advises strongly against it, saying that it “would risk doing serious and irreparable harm to the relationship between Buckingham Palace and Downing Street.” When the Queen insists on this course of action, Michael says that he would not go with the newspaper “Today,” but with a different one, with more heft and “a clear sense of the unprecedent nature of this, where they understood the rules of the game.” Shea insists on the private secretary (played here as Martin Charteris, although Charteris had retired years earlier) noting his objection, but then goes up to meet a few reporters from the Sunday Times at the pub.

  • Michael protests to the private secretary, saying the decision was reckless and irresponsible, and stated specifically that he wanted his objection noted. Eventually though, we see that he meets a few people at the pub, presumably reporters from the Sunday Times.

• Later, after the PM is tipped off about The Sunday Times piece, we get a fantastic scene in which the Buckingham Palace staff and the Downing Street staff both walk into Victoria station to get the newspapers fresh off the presses from opposite directions. There’s almost a West Side Story face-off feel about it all. The staff quickly distributes the paper and then we get a fun montage of shocked characters reading the paper: everyone in downing street, then Princess Margaret with her dog, Princess Anne with HER two dogs, Sonny reading it with several others, then we see Charles and Andrew reading it. Finally, we get to see Philip reading it to the queen, then to Denis, reading it to Margaret.

  • This framing of both powerful women being read the article by their husbands underlines their essential similarities, even as they’re facing off on such a polarizing issue. In addition, they’re both wearing grey prints at the time - the queen in a grey plaid and the PM in blue and grey print checks

  • The editor of the Sunday Times at the time actually wrote an article on the episode reminiscing about it all recently - you can read that over here.

• Later, right before their audience, we get another look at one of my favorite settings in the series - the Queen’s office in Buckingham Palace, which is bright yellow and COVERED in horse pictures.

  • This room is actually also briefly used in the recently released Bridgerton, as the Duke of Hastings’ office. This room is specifically the Large Smoking Room in Wilton House, which contains 55 gouache paintings of horses dating back to 1755. The yellow silk was only added to the walls in the last few years, so it’s possible that the room has appeared in other period dramas without my recognizing it (as it’s far more distinctive now with that yellow).
    The building, a former abbey, was actually originally granted to the forbears of its current owners by Henry VIII, although of course the house has gone through numerous renovations since then.
    Wilton House was a filming location for The Crown, Bridgerton, Pride and Prejudice (2004), Emma (2019), Sense and Sensibility (1995), Outlander (series 2), The Young Victoria (2007), and NUMEROUS other TV shows and films, so if you like period dramas, it may look familiar!

  • We get a very intense musical theme here which honestly reminds me so much of one of the Battlestar Galactica themes that it drives me NUTS. Like - similar chords and pounding beats and such.

•  Thatcher walks into her meeting to confront the queen with purpose. She notes that over the past 7 years, they’ve had 164 meetings. She states, “The editors told the Downing Street press secretary that the sources were unimpeachable, unprecedentedly close.”

  • A lot of this scene is just pure speculation and not based on facts that I can analyze, but it is an incredibly impressive one, in which Thatcher notes that of the two women, she is the one from a small street in a small town, not the Queen, thus implying that she is better able to judge the needs of the common man.

  • Their mutual Christian faiths are alluded to when Thatcher notes “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he only had good intentions. You see, he had money as well.” This line was plucked from a real life interview with Margaret Thatcher. I’m having trouble tracking down the exact source, but this specific quote is all over the place, so I believe it’s accurate. I’ll keep looking for a source and update this.

  • As they part, Margaret congratulates the queen on Andrew’s upcoming marriage, and points out that her son is getting married soon too. She then drops the bombshell that her son is now a busiessman, with significant interests in South Africa. This doesn’t exactly explain /everything/ she does throughout this episode, but it does illustrate how personal the issue actually is to her as well; she does not wish to ruin her son financially.

    • Mark Thatcher did indeed do business with South Africa and continued to be a shady ass dude and embarrassment to his family. He was a tax exile in Switzerland, then moved to the US, then had to move to South Africa to get away from tax evasion charges in the US, was investigated for loan sharking in South Africa, and then later was actually arrested for getting involved with a 2004 coup d’etat attempt in Equatorial Guinea. He is so shady, that it’s actually hilarious. The Guardian wrote an article about him at one point that said, “When Sir Bernard Ingham, Lady Thatcher's blunt-speaking press secretary at Downing Street, was asked by the troublesome son how he could best help his mum win the 1987 general election, he reputedly answered: ‘Leave the country.’”

Top: Screenshot from The Crown, Netflix
Bottom: PA Images / Getty

Credit: Tim Graham / Getty

• The scene of the royal siblings hanging out, drinking, and bitching about their mother together right before Andrew’s wedding has become a fan favorite of the season, and it’s clear to see why. It’s rather iconic, particularly as it ends with Charles’s devastating put down of Andrew (noting that he’s a fringe member of the royal family who will never be king, so why would the press care about his wedding anyway?) and Edward’s final “That was impressively cunty.”

  • Charles said that the queen did what she had told him never ever to do - speak. This seems to be a pretty clear callback to the events of Season 3’s “Tywysog Cymru.” 

  • Charles’s put down of Andrew circles back to Andrew’s earlier claims that he’d be a better heir then Charles and that Charles is just jealous of him and…squashes them very thoroughly. His pointing out that William is now in line to the throne also points out the flaw in Andrew’s “i’m the second son” reasoning; if anything happens to Charles, it’s certainly not going to be Andrew who’s next in line to the throne.

  • These events really did happen pretty closely together. The Sunday Times story “Queen dismayed by ‘uncaring’ Thatcher” came out on July 20, 1986 and Andrew and Sarah married on July 23, 1986. And stories of the time really did note that the controversy over the article was somewhat threatening the good news of Andrew’s wedding. The LA Times said on July 22, 1986, “The growing political controversy that enveloped the traditionally neutral Buckingham Palace threatened to add a sour note to Wednesday’s royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.”

• In The Crown, after the press kerfuffle over the story continues even after the palace denied the story, the palace ends up betraying Michael Shea (who never wanted to talk to the press about the queen’s views in the first place, remember), blames him for the leak, and fires him. This is really not accurate to real life.

• One unfortunate consequence of the denial of the story – editor of the Sunday times has gone out guns blazing. The Private Secretary tells the Queen that the palace will have to give the press something to put out the fire - a culprit to deflect blame from the queen. He ultimately asks s Michael Shea to step down and be the culprit, even though Michael had strenuously advised against the plan from the beginning and objected to it.

  • Shea did ultimately admit that he spoke to a Times reporter but denied the specifics of it and said his statements were misrepresented. A New York Times article from July 29, 1986 discussed this more in depth, (I had to access this article through a library database, so I can’t actually link it directly, alas - the original Heseltine Times letter is behind a paywall.):

    • “The letter [written by Queen’s private secretary Sir William Heseltine and sent to the Times of London] confirmed what had generally been suspected when it conceded that Michael Shea, the Queen's press secretary, was the so-called ‘palace mole’ who had a series of conversations with a Sunday Times reporter before the newspaper proclaimed to the world last week that the Queen found Mrs. Thatcher's policies 'uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive.’ But having conceded that much, Sir William went on to belittle Mr. Shea as a plausible source for the sort of disclosures The Sunday Times was purporting to make. It was the press secretary's job to speak to reporters and answer their questions, the letter said, but a press secretary ‘certainly does not'‘ know the Queen's views on political issues.
      With the palace press secretary finally revealed as the newspaper's main source, two related questions were left open to debate. One was whether The Sunday Times had broken or merely strained the ground rules for what was supposed to be a nonattributable background interview. The other was whether Mr. Shea had been using the conventions of a background interview, which would normally protect him from identification, to spread concern that Mrs. Thatcher's adamant stand in opposition to sanctions against South Africa was proving to be an embarrassment to the Queen in her role as Head of the Commonwealth.”

  • Shea actually stayed on as the Queen’s press secretary through June 1987 (so for almost a year after his role in the leak became public knowledge) and gave his notice in March of that year. (Source: AP, March 3 1987). At the time, when he was asked if he’d been fired, Shea said bluntly, “That’s ridiculous. I have held the post twice as long as any other press secretary, and I have had an offer that I cannot refuse.” He became head of public affairs for Hanson Trust afterward. He eventually wrote and published over 20 books, including a memoir which I have been desperately searching for and can’t find anywhere.

  • Shea had been the queen’s press secretary since 1978 and had actually managed several media crises that we’ve seen depicted throughout the show - including the eventual exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt (the royals’ art curator) as a former Soviet Spy (Seen in S3E1 Olding - in which his identity was revealed to the queen, but not exposed to the press at that time), the press frenzy around Charles and Diana’s wedding (S4E3 Fairytale), Michael Fagan’s break-in (S4E5 Fagan), and rumors of Charles and Diana’s rocky marriage (seen in S4E6 Terra Nullius).

• Queen watches as Shea takes his box out of the front gate, clearly very upset. The queen herself looks upset. Then she goes back and sits down, pulls out stuff from her red box, looks at a photo of her father. As the episode closes out, we get audio from the 21st birthday speech at the beginning of the episode, noting - “My whole life, whether it be long or short, will be devoted to your service, and the service of the whole imperial family to which we all belong.”

  • Julian Jarrold, who directed 48:1, said in The Crown’s official podcast that he really thought the Queen’s dedication to the Commonwealth and her work with CHOGM was in huge part a tribute to her late father. George VI was the first head of the commonwealth. I haven’t been able to find sources talking about his specific dedication to the Commonwealth, but since he was willing to let India and other republics enter the commonwealth (initially all commonwealth members were countries who recognized George VI as king) and took on the title of “head of the commonwealth” instead of king in the organization, it seems that he considered it important enough to compromise on his role within the organization.

• Eventually, in the Autumn of 1986, PM Thatcher did agree to join the rest of the European Community countries in imposing limited economic sanctions on South Africa. (Source: New York Times, Sept. 17, 1986) That August, after extreme pressure from other Commonwealth countries, Thatcher reluctantly said she’d agree to sanctions if all other 11 community members agreed to them. (Source: New York Times, Aug, 5, 1986) The countries agreed to ban imports of iron, steel, and gold coins from South Africa and also prohibited new investment there by European companies.

Visual Cinderella References in The Crown S4E3 Fairytale

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Benjamin Caron, who’s directed at least two episodes in every season of The Crown so far, posted a number of interesting photo comparisons on his Instagram a while back of scenes from S4E3 “Fairytale” and scenes from Disney’s 1950 animated Cinderella. He generally only posted these with something along the lines of “Fairytale,” so he has not actually specified whether these were deliberate shot recreations or not, but I’m guessing that they were. He DID specify in the comments that the famous mouse running across one scene was intentionally put in there as an homage to the mice in Cinderella.

Diana in her Cinderella blue in her kindergarten classroom, positioned in front of a children’s display of Cinderella’s carriage and horses.

I’ve taken all these scenes, put them side by side (on Instagram, you have to flip back and forth), and placed them in roughly chronological order within the episode, for your perusal and enjoyment. All credit goes to The Crown, Disney’ s Cinderella, and of course, director Benjamin Caron.

You may see a few stray instagram buttons and dots, as I took these screenshots directly from there.

This all seems to be inspired by the words of the actual archbishop on Charles and Diana’s wedding day, which were played over the end of the episode: “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made. A prince and princess on their wedding day. But fairytales usually end at this point with the simple phrase, ‘They lived happily ever after.' As husband and wife live out their vows, loving and cherishing one another, sharing life’s splendors and miseries, achievements and setbacks, they will be transformed in the process. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival, but the place where the adventure really begins.”

And that’s why you shouldn’t label a couple’s story, because you have no idea what’s going on in it. But that’s just my two cents, lol.

The outstretched hand of the stepsister is reflected in Princess Margaret’s outstretched hand for a manicure, as she (along with all the other royal women) wait to hear whether Charles proposed or not.
Although Margaret isn’t as unpleasant as the stepsisters, she ultimately loses the spotlight to the pretty and popular Cinderella/Diana, as is noted later in the season.

The mouse that launched a thousand tweets runs across the foreground as the Queen Mother waits for word on Charles’s proposal.

Benjamin Caron really did confirm in the comments of this post that the placement was intentional.

Then you have Jaq and Gus Gus from Cinderella.

The clock ticking as everyone waits on Charles’s news vs. the famous clock striking midnight in Cinderella.

“Balmoral Castle” in The Crown, which was actually portrayed by Ardverikie House vs. the King’s Castle in Cinderella.

Diana staring up at Prince Charles in the same way that Cinderella staring up at her prince. I previously noted in my post on Fairytale that Diana wears a ton of blue and yellow. Is that…a Cinderella reference? Although Cinderella’s dress is actually a light silver (yes, this is a hill I will die on), it’s always portrayed as blue in promotional material. And the Prince in Cinderella wears white and yellow.

The gates opening at Buckingham Palace vs. The gates at the King’s castle in Cinderella.

Diana goes up the staircase at Buckingham Palace to meet Prince Charles’s family for a formal dinner (notably wearing a dress that’s blue, white, and yellow plaid) vs. Cinderella begins her walk up the staircase to the ball at the castle.

The announcer in The Crown vs. The announcer in Cinderella.

A third party lens view of Charles and Diana vs. a third party lens view of the Prince and Cinderella.

The mail arriving in The Crown vs. The mail arriving in Cinderella.

Diana’s grandmother giving her princess lessons (which, as i mentioned in my previous blog on this episode, did NOT happen in real life) vs. the stepmother Lady Tremaine in Cinderella. It seems that Diana didn’t get along with this grandmother for quite some time (she testified against Diana’s mother getting custody in her parents’ divorce), so this reference seems pretty apt actually.

Also why does Lady Tremaine’s dress kind of resemble the pie crust collars Diana wears several times in this episode?

Diana looking out the window for her prince vs. Cinderella looking out the window for her prince.

Diana running down the spiral stairs in the palace vs. Cinderella going down the spiral-ish stairs from her bedroom to the main house.

The pumpkin carriage in Cinderella vs. the pumpkin (far right, sort of buried under the instagram button) in the kitchen scene in The Crown.

Since the pumpkin came from the household’s garden for its own use, it actually kind of works to have the pumpkin in the palace kitchen!

Diana staring in her mirror in despair vs. Cinderella looking in her mirror.

The fireworks around the palace in The Crown vs. the fireworks outside a digital recreation of Cinderella’s castle at Walt Disney World, as seen in the logo before each Disney film.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E7 The Hereditary Principle

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Princess Margaret in The Crown, on her way to see her new therapist.

• To be totally honest, I’ve been dreading blogging about this specific episode since before the season even dropped on Netflix. Early reviews called out the inflammatory plotline of this episode, which blames the Queen Mother for her mentally disabled nieces being put in a hospital and hidden from their family. This characterization does not conform with actual historical evidence, but ends the episode with pictures and birth and death dates of both of the actual women discussed here, implying that it IS the true story. Obviously the show is a drama, and people who watch it should realize that without being explicitly told that the series is not a documentary, but I personally think The Crown went too far in this episode.
  I have chosen not to include pictures of Nerissa or Katherine Bowles-Lyon here in this blog post, as it does not seem that they were capable of consenting to photographs. If you’d like to find photographs of them, you can easily Google them and find them elsewhere.

  The story according to the Crown: During her first therapy session, Princess Margaret finds out that she has two mentally disabled cousins - Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon. She checks the Burke’s peerage records with her sister, the Queen, and they find that both cousins were listed as deceased. Margaret drives her friend Dazzle to the psychiatric hospital where the sisters live, has him go in undercover to meet her cousins, and discovers that they (and several other more distant relatives - named Idonea, Etheldreda, and Rosemary) had been in the mental hospital back in the 1940s . When Margaret goes to speak to her mother about this, it is revealed that the Queen Mother was aware of situation and had kept it a secret from her daughters for their entire lives. She justified this action by claiming that it was done to preserve the integrity of the royal family’s bloodline after her husband became king. Margaret’s therapist reveals to her later that the gene responsible for the cousins’ disability did not run in the royal family line at all.

  The actual story: In April 1987, The Sun broke the news that the Queen had two mentally disabled first cousins, Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon, who had lived in a mental institution for almost 50 years, although their deaths had been recorded in the records of British aristocracy (Burke’s Peerage and Debrett’s handbook of British noble families) decades before (Source: Maclean’s - April 20, 1987). Nerissa had died in 1986 at the age of 66 and had been buried near the hospital in a grave with a plastic marker. The story also reported that three other cousins of the sisters (Idonea, Etheldreda, and Rosemary) had actually been placed in the same hospital on the same day as Nerissa and Katherine; Rosemary died in 1972 but Idonea and Etheldreda were still in the hospital with Katherine when the story broke. (Source: UPI). The Royal Family gave only a very brief statement on the issue, saying that the Queen was aware of the situation but that it was a private matter for the immediate Bowes-Lyon family.
  The therapist’s words about the genetic disorder not actually running in the royal line is completely correct, as I’ll discuss in more depth below.
  The entire frame story of Margaret discovering the sisters, getting Dazzle to go into the hospital undercover, and confronting her mother appears to be entirely invented. For the record, I don’t have any problem with a frame story like this being concocted to tell the story; my big issue is that The Crown lays blame at the feet of the Queen Mother and makes her sound like a friggin Nazi with lines about “the purity of the bloodline,” when in real life, she had nothing to do with it and didn’t even know that her nieces were in a psychiatric hospital until 1982.

• Here’s a quick break down of all that.

  • The genetic disorder - Nerissa and Katherine had a genetic disorder that passed down from their maternal grandfather, Baron Clinton (Charles Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis). Three of their maternal cousins, Idonea, Rosemary, and Ethelreda, also had the same disorder. I could not find any records that actually named what this genetic disorder was; in the 1930s-1940s, they were simply called “imbeciles.” Their defect left them unable to speak and with a mental age of about three.

    I could not find any family tree that showed all the people relevant to this discussion, so I made my own. This is obviously a very simplified and abbreviated version just to show the relationships of the royal family to the cousins discussed in this episode, but I hope it helps elucidate the situation. As the therapist says in the episode, the gene that resulted in Nerissa and Katherine’s condition came from their mother, who was not a blood relative of the Bowes-Lyons. Thus, the gene at issue had absolutely nothing to do with the royal family’s genetics.
    The show depicts them as knowing who the royal family is and knowing that they are their family. Although the 1987 article from Macleans states that Katherine “has no knowledge of her royal connections,” the 2011 documentary “The Queen’s Hidden Cousins” quoted a nurse who worked with the sisters as saying “If the Queen or Queen Mum were ever on television, they’d curtsey – very regal, very low. Obviously there was some sort of memory.” (Source: Daily Mail)

    • In The Crown Podcast episode on The Hereditary Principle, head of research Annie Salzberger gave a bit more detail about the sisters’ condition. (Source: Podcast episode transcript)
      “We don't have Katherine's files, but we have Nerissa’s, and Nerissa is diagnosed ‘imbecile’. That's the official term. Now that doesn't kind of equate to anything today. So then we had to try to read through records to understand how they described any symptoms of this illness or physical aspects to it, or it was just mental. So, so her record state that she quote ‘makes unintelligible noises all the time, is very affectionate, and can say a few babyish words’. And then staff also described Katherine as ‘alert’. ‘She understands what she's being told, but she only communicates pointing noises and smiles. She is severely mentally handicapped, but has no physical disabilities’ that, um, their family relative describes them as ‘lovely children’, ‘like frightened does’ and that we know that they recognize each other, but they don't recognize other family members, which really interested the doctors.”

  • Was it a cover up? It’s a bit unclear. Nerissa and Katherine were sent away to Royal Earlswood Hospital in 1941, when Nerissa was 22 and Katherine was 15. Although the show portrays the cousins’ commitment as resulting from George VI’s rise to the throne and the royal family’s need to keep them hidden away, in reality, they were placed in the hospital nearly five years after Edward VIII abdicated.
    Lady Elizabeth Anson, a niece of Nerissa and Katherine’s, spoke to The Sun at the time and said that the family had not actually attempted to conceal the sisters, but that her grandmother (the sisters’ mother) was often careless with filling out her forms for Burke’s and Debrett’s.
    It is possible that the Bowes-Lyon family may have been unusually wary of any allegations of mental illness, as 1800s gossip rumored that a Bowes-Lyon child born with significant physical disabilities was kept locked away in their ancestral seat at Glamis Castle (yes, the same Glamis from Shakespeare’s Macbeth). The Smithsonian Magazine wrote about “the monster of Glamis” in 2012 and looked at lots of historical accounts of various Victorians stumbling around trying to find the secrets of the castle, but it does not seem like there’s any hard proof to indicate that this was ever anything more than a story.

  • Did the Queen Mother know? The Sun also noted at the end of the article that the Queen Mother only learned about Nerissa and Katherine’s survival around 1982. When she found out about them, she sent them money with which to buy candy and toys.

  • Did the Royal Family neglect the sisters? The Daily Mail reported in 2011, at the time the documentary “The Queen’s Hiddens Cousins” aired, that Nerissa and Katherine’s last reported visitors were in the 1960s.
    A general manager for the East Surrey Health Authority said to the Associated Press in 1987, "Both sisters had regular visits from their families up until the early 1960s when one of their closest relatives died. Since then, they have had few visitors. My understanding is that Katherine had no regular visitors.” (Source: Vogue). Records indicate that the closest thing either sister had to a family visit in the 1980s was when a reporter from The Sun pretended to be a relative to get in and take pictures of Katherine for the article breaking the story. One former nurse also said they did not receive birthday cards or anything at Christmas (source: Express).
    However, Express also reported that the queen was upset about the documentary’s allegations that her cousins were neglected, saying that they were false. A statement from an anonymous source “close to Buckingham Palace” said: “The Queen is very, very upset at the thought that this programme is being made which is just not true. Both Katherine and Nerissa were visited very regularly by their family but neither could speak, and throughout their lives had the thinking age of four years old. They were unable to recognise visitors, often becoming hugely distressed as they struggled to work out who was with them. They also both regularly received presents, especially at Christmas, a fact disputed in this supposedly factual documentary. Neither sister knew who the presents were from but they enjoyed the moment of receiving a lovely gift. If Channel 4 had bothered to get the facts right and ask people who knew the true story, this would be a different matter. They just didn’t ask anybody and came up with this upsetting nonsense which brings nothing but hurt.”

• The Crown DID actually cast people with real disabilities as Nerissa, Katherine, their cousins, and the others living at the hospital. I haven’t found a ton of information on this, but it has been discussed briefly in The Crown podcast. (Source: The Crown podcast transcript). Episode director Jessica Hobbs was very adamant that Nerissa, Katherine, and all the other residents at the Royal Earlswood be represented by actors who had similar conditions. Casting director Kate Bone apparently went to lots of different groups, institutions, and hospitals to find people with mental disabilities who would be interested in acting in the show. The show specifically brought all these actors into the set the day before so they could get familiar with it and be comfortable with the location. Hobbs said in the podcast, “We just wanted to make sure that there weren't going to be triggers of distress or might be uncomfortable for them or frightening. So that was, you know, it was just a whole process of how we worked towards it. It was one of the two best days I've had onset in my life because at the end of it, you could just, the crew were in awe basically. These people were amazing and they loved it. And that was for me, the big thing.”

  • Hobbs also went on to discuss the fact that the institution itself was not necessarily a bad thing. She said: “I didn't want to make a moralistic judgment. I didn't want to say ‘it’s a Dickensian institution, it was appalling’. It was all, you know, my mother worked in mental health before I was born, but she was a nurse at an institution. So I’d heard the most wonderful stories about the way people were and what they did and who they thought they were on different days and how you could communicate. And I just wanted to make sure that there was also love and the way that people were portrayed on set and that there were, there was connection between carers. There are extraordinary carers that have worked over the years. It was just finding that balance. The story for me was that that the family shut them away because they were ashamed and worried about being tainted. And I think that that's just historically, what we've continued to do as a community. But I also think we haven't provided help and support for those families who need extra help. So these situations have come about because of the way we've approached it as a community.”

  • There has been a bit of discussion online about whether the episode is exploitative of people with disabilities. I won’t venture an opinion on this, but it does sound like The Crown crew really did attempt to portray all the residents of the hospital with dignity and care. And this is a super low bar, but just by casting people with actual disabilities in this role, they’re doing better than a lot of the entertainment industry, where it’s still very standard practice to cast non-disabled actors. Bustle did a great job exploring the scope of this issue in this article in 2019, but this issue still really exists today, as shown by the recent outcry over Sia casting a neurotypical actress as a nonverbal autistic character in her upcoming film Music.

• Sidenote: I’m pretty sure it would be fantastically unethical for a therapist to disclose the medical history and records of third parties to her patient, but I guess the story had to be kicked off in this episode somehow.

Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones with her dog Rolly (Credit: PA Images).

Now that the big controversy over this episode has been discussed, let’s move on to over-analyzing the episode from its start.

• At the beginning of the episode, Princess Margaret appears to be up to her old tricks, getting ready for a fun night to the sounds of “C’est Si Bon” by Dean Martin (a 1962 recording of a 1947 song). But as this episode will make clear, Margaret is now 54 (as will be confirmed by a newscast later in the episode), and her party hard lifestyle is starting to catch up to her. Throughout this opening scene, she’s smoking and coughing in a way that’s similar to how her father coughed before his death (which we saw in S1E2). A butler takes away her dog and a handsome younger man bikes up to her house and rings his bell to get her attention.

  • I couldn’t find much detail about any of Princess Margaret’s dogs, but we know that she did own several terriers and spaniels as an adult. A cavalier king charles spaniel Rolly was probably the most famous of these, as he took a few engagement pictures with Margaret and her fiance Anthony Armstrong-Jones in February 1960. (Source: Pets by Royal Appointment, By Brian Hoey)

  • There’s coverage of the royal variety show at the Palladium on the tv in the background. The Queen and Prince Philip are seen in full formal dress, with the queen sporting a tiara. This appears to be the November 1984 Royal Variety Show, given Margaret’s age and the timing of her surgery later in the episode. Fun fact: The Queen and Prince Philip actually didn’t attend the 1984 royal variety show; the senior royals at that event were, instead, the Queen Mother, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana (the only royal variety show she ever attended).

    • I would like to talk about all the tiaras in The Crown more in depth in the future, but for now, I’ll just note that the tiara the Queen is wearing at the Royal Variety Show scene appears to be her favorite, which is known as the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland Tiara. You can go read more about it at The Court Jeweller, who has in depth entries on almost every tiara and jewel worn by the Queen. As you can see in the photo comparison below though, it’s not….necessarily a very good replica. It looks far too metallic and dark, while the real tiara is very bright and glittering in photos. It also looks like it may be a tiny bit too tall? It sits very differently on Olivia Colman’s head than the real one does on Queen Elizabeth’s.

    • The fact that Margaret is not at this big event and is instead partying at home subtly begins the episode’s theme of Margaret increasingly moving to the margins of the royal family, rather than being at the center (this will come up again a few more times). In real life, the last time she had been at a royal variety show was 1968, a decade and a half before this episode is set. She’ll attend the variety show in 1990 as well.

Upper Left: The Crown. Upper Right: Queen Elizabeth in similar dress (Credit: Eric Vandeville / Getty).
Lower Left: Queen Elizabeth in similar dress (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty)
Lower Middle: Queen Elizabeth (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Left: Olivia Colman on The Crown; Right: Queen Elizabeth II wearing the real Girls of Great Britain and Ireland tiara.

• Somewhere else, we see the television on at a psychiatric hospital of some sort, full of adult patients milling around in a large room. As God Save the Queen plays on the television set, two women in particular stand up to attention and salute. They are seen taking their medicines, but don’t utter a word.

• Margaret dances to David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (1983) with her man friend while literally wearing dark red shoes (“put on your red shoes and dance”). Her friend is quickly revealed to be Derek “Dazzle” Jennings, who tells her that he’s greatly enjoyed spending time with her, but implies that their time together must end. Dazzle specifically calls her “ma’am,” indicating his relative youth and his respect for her status. In real life, we know that Margaret really did have all her friends call her “Ma’am” and was a stickler for etiquette.

  • Margaret has been dressed in similar dresses the entire season - structurally simple a-line dresses in bright colored prints and jewel tone colors. However, from what I can tell, the historical Margaret really only dressed like that when she was actually at her house on Mustique. I scoured through lots of photos of her fashion from the 70s and 80s, and in general, she dressed far more conservatively and more like her sister when she was going about in England and at formal events. The decision to dress her this way throughout most of Season 4 seems to indicate that she’s still living in the past and wishing for her days on Mustique with her young and sexy boyfriend Roddy Llewellyn

  • Derek “Dazzle” Jennings was a real friend of Margaret’s who was 16 years younger than her. He was very popular and had a wide circle of friends including various celebrities, but in 1984, took the orders and became a priest. He was “famously” gay, just as Queen Elizabeth says later in the show. Author Noel Botham claims in his book Margaret: The Last Real Princess, that Margaret was actually infatuated with Dazzle and “used any excuse to place herself near him,” but that she did know about his sexuality and was aware that nothing was likely to happen between them. Overall, their relationship was far more spiritual than romantic, as Dazzle did really try to convert Princess Margaret to Catholicism (as is shown later in the show), and they stayed friends until Dazzle’s death in 1994 (contrary to what The Crown shows).

Upper Left: The Crown; Upper Right: Princess Margaret (Credit: Bettmann / Getty).
Lower Left: Princess Margaret (Credit: Georges De Keerle / Getty).

Prince Edward’s 21st birthday party contrasted with a quieter party at the psychiatric hospital. Both scenes from The Crown.

• In the next scene, Margaret dresses more to match her sister (as she did in real life) for a lunch between the two- and bemoans her lack of luck with men. She specifically notes that Colin Tennant had said that she and Dazzle should be kept apart for public safety. We’ve seen Colin Tennant, Baron Glenconner a few times in the show; he married Margaret’s friend Lady Anne at the beginning of S2E4 Beryl and was also seen on Mustique in S3E10 Cri de Coeur, also with Lady Anne (who introduced Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn, both in the show and in real life). In real life, Colin bought Mustique and was the one who gave a plot of land on the island to Princess Margaret as a wedding gift.

  • I love that it’s Queen Elizabeth who had to specifically tell Margaret that Dazzle was “a friend of Dorothy.” This is slang for “gay” which dates back to at least World War II, and was used as a way for gay men to identify themselves without putting themselves in danger at a time when homosexuality was illegal. It’s unclear exactly where this term came from, but some think it was a reference to the Wizard of Oz books and films, whose themes and colorful characters resonated with the gay community at the time. Judy Garland herself, who played Dorothy in the most famous film version of the Wizard of Oz, was an undeniable gay icon.

  • Margaret initally can’t believe that Dazzle is gay, noting with surprise “He looked at me with great adoring eyes. “ Elizabeth calmly responds, “I think you’ll find that ti’s because you’re a royal princess and he’s a raging snob.” Their conversation is interrupted when Margaret begins to cough up blood, which must have terrified the two women, as this is how their father first found out about his illness in S1E1 of the series (although in real life, he was not diagnosed with lung cancer until 1951).

• Next is a very brief scene of Margaret undergoing exploratory surgery and news reports about her condition. In real life, this surgery removed an “innocent” portion of her lung, which has been interpreted to mean “non-malignant.” Margaret was never actually diagnosed with any form of cancer. We later see her recovering at the hospital, dressed fabulously in a very colorful blouse while using a nebulizer to breathe. Note that there’s a tea set laid out in the hospital room near her (which seems very on brand).
  The news reports that Princess Margaret smoked 60 cigarettes a day. This is accurate to life. She allegedly gave up smoking briefly after the operation, but within 3 months was back at it (although she’d reduced her consumption down to 30 cigarettes a day). The princess would not fully give up smoking or drinking until at least 8 years after her lung surgery in 1985. (Source: Daily Mail)

  • We get more shots at the hospital and the two unknown adult women watching the news about Margaret’s condition on TV. They look incredibly distressed by Margaret’s health.

• In the next scene, we see snippets of two birthday parties - Prince Edward’s 21st birthday with the royal family at the palace and Katherine’s birthday at the mental hospital. Even though we haven’t been introduced to the older women yet, this juxtaposition clearly connects them to the royal family, shot by shot. The fancy tiered cake at the palace juxtaposes with a tiny cake at the hospital, with a single candle on top.
  Philip gives a speech for his youngest son Edward’s birthday, noting that he didn’t actually want to have a 3rd and 4th child but his wife won them in a negotiation in an argument (on a yacht, in Lisbon, in a storm - specifically referring to scenes going back to S2E3’s Lisbon. He goes on to say that while the eldest two came out of duty, the younger two came out of joy (not pleasure, as he initially said). Charles and Anne, the eldest two, laughingly refer to their younger brothers as “the b team.” Philip also pretends to forget his son’s name right before the toast, which leaves Edward unamused.

  • At Edward’s party, Margaret is dressed in a solid color dark blue shirt which is a bit more toned down than most things she’s worn this season, perhaps indicating how unwell she is feeling. She sits with her sister and they reminisce over Edward’s christening, when the two of them held their babies in a photo; this refers to the very last scene of Season 2 and the final shot of the S1-S2 cast of the Crown.

  • In the background, Edward hysterically receives both a trombone and a scuba helmet and messes around with them, to the delight of the younger royals.

The final shot of Season 2 of The Crown at Prince Edward’s christening.

• Margaret asks the Queen to give her more responsibility as a royal, as she plans on giving up men, cigarettes, and perhaps even alcohol (as she waves another drink away). She specifically says, “Your sister needs to stay afloat with a sense of meaning.” This calls back to Margaret’s previous requests for more work in S1E8 Pride and Joy and S3E2 Margaretology, which has resulted in first, Winston Churchill taking away Margaret’s deputization to do the queen’s work while the queen is away on tour due to Margaret’s over the top ways, and later, the Queen and Prince Philip deciding that Margaret is too impulsive and unreliable to be given more responsibility.

• Unfortunately, in the next scene between the two sisters, Margaret’s request is quickly denied and she actually has her last remaining responsibilities as counsellor of state taken away. As Margaret said to Elizabeth, “it can’t be good news or you wouldn’t have brought Lurch.” (referring to the Queen’s private secretary as the Adams Family butler). As Charteris explains, by law, only 6 people can be deputized to act for the monarch at a time, and now that Prince Edward has come of age, he is replacing poor Margo in that role, as he is higher up in the line of succession.

  • The 1937 Regency Act allows the monarch to have a list of six senior royals, known as Counsellors of State, who can be called on to deputize for the sovereign in an official capacity. This is known and has been standard practice since that time, so I sincerely doubt Princess Margaret would have actually been taken surprise by this change. In recent years, the list has been trimmed down even more to only 4 people - both Princess Anne and Prince Edward have now been replaced as Counsellors of State at this point by Prince Charles’s own sons. (Source: Royal.uk)

  • Margaret’s argument about why she should remain counsellor of state - “I have the maturity, I have the wisdom; Edward’s a boy. He’s an immature useless boy.” - is very similar to her mother’s own lament back in S1E8 Pride and Joy, in which she says her experience as queen by her husband’s side was wasted after the king’s death and the crown passed to an immature girl (her own daughter Elizabeth).

  • Elizabeth, who’s trying but is honestly a bit oblivious to other people’s troubles, as usual, says that now Margaret will have more time to pursue her own interests. Margaret tells her bitterly, “I don’t want more time. Time it scares me. It fills me with dread. I want something to fill it with.” She says her friends worth knowing won’t have anything to do with her, and the charities don’t want her now that they have princess Diana (as she is “younger, nicer, prettier”). Her complaints about Diana getting so much attention echo Princess Anne’s previous statements in S4E4’s Favourites and Charles’s in S4E6’s Terra Nullius.

• We see a very quick order of the garter ceremony in which …presumably something important happens, but the show certainly doesn’t tell us. The queen is in her order of the garter robes, but Edward wasn’t inducted into the order of the garter until 2006. Is there a counsellor of state ceremony? I couldn’t figure this out, so if you know, please tell me.

• Margaret then flies off to her property on the private Caribbean island of Mustique, which is run by her friends Colin Tennant and his wife, Lady Anne Glenconner. She emerges from the plane slowly (refusing an offer of help from some sort of helper) while wearing a wild jewel-tone patterned dress. This contrasts with her arriving at Anne’s house already passed out in the car from drinking in the early, pre-Roddy moments of S3E10’s Cri de Coeur. Anne meets her in a white jumpsuit covered with brightly colored flowers, looking very concerned. She asks Margaret “Is everything alright,” and gets a brisk “no” in response.

  • I actually wish Anne had a bit more to do in this series than accompany Margaret and look concerned. She’s fascinating in her own right and published her memoir last year (Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown) to great acclaim.

• Margaret continues to hangs out on Mustique looking incredibly sad, not really listening to Colin as he drones on about the island’s board of directors, doing cross word puzzles that come in over the fax machine, and dreaming of seeing Roddy Llewellyn swimming in her pool. For the record, I will never forgive The Crown for only giving us one episode featuring the gorgeous Harry Treadaway as Roddy; the show portrayed their relationship as a very brief fling, but in reality, they dated for eight years! They had been together for about three years, actually, before the tabloids broke the story, and were together until 1980 sometime. Queen Elizabeth refused to invite him into her home. Fun fact, Llewellyn released a self-titled pop album in 1978. (Source: Vanity Fair). They only broke up when Roddy fell in love with someone else and got married. They still remained friends, and Margaret became friends with Roddy’s wife as well. How much fun would it have been to see all that portrayed in The Crown?

  • It is possible that Margaret missed Roddy as much as is portrayed in the show. Lady Anne said in a documentary that after Margaret’s funeral, the queen came up and thanked her for introducing Margaret to Roddy, as he made her very happy.

  • FUN FACT: Princess Margaret actually totally did crossword puzzles. I found a fantastic little article published in The Canberra Times in May 1954, noting that Princess Margaret won “a prize of three guineas worth of books for a correct entry in a weekly magazine crossword puzzle.” The editor in charge of the contest actually thought her entry was a joke at first, but confirmed its veracity with Buckingham Palace. Margaret was 23 years old at the time.

Top: Colin Tennant and his wife Lady Anne Glenconner on The Crown. Bottom Left: Colin, Margaret, and Anne (Credit: PA Images). Bottom Right: Colin and Anne (Credit: Slim Aarons / Getty).

Top: The Crown.
Bottom Left: Margaret with friend (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).
Bottom Right: Margaret with friends (Credit: Lichfield / Getty).

• Prince Charles comes in to visit Margaret and finds her in the pool. We get a great shot from Margaret’s point of view looking up through the water at Prince Charles and Anne. They walk about a bit and talk together. Charles’s gardening interests (previously discussed in Fairytale and Favourites) come up again as he points out all the gardens at Margaret’s estate (which, of course, were put in by Roddy). Charles also mentions that Diana is pregnant again, but that the couple continues to quarrel all the time.

  • Charles actually was pretty close to his Aunt Margot in real life. Prince Charles did and still wears double breasted suits very much like this. Margaret puts on a dark loose dress and hair turban to walk with her nephew, which resembles many things the real Margaret wore at Mustique.

  • Uh, apparently only Margaret’s nephew and niece care about her in CrownWorld, and her adult children give zero shits about her, as we’ve NEVER seen them, even though at this point in the story, her son David would be 23 and her daughter Sarah would be 20. The longer I think about this fact, the more it weirds me out that they apparently didn’t even make an appearance at Edward’s 21st birthday party, even though they would of course be close to their similarly aged cousin. David actually started lessons in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom with his cousin Prince Andrew at age 5 and Sarah was a bridesmaid at Charles and Diana’s wedding. So…they were definitely there, even if the show hasn’t even alluded to them since the moon landing (I’m fairly sure they attended the rocket launch party at Buckingham palace with their parents in S3’s Moondust as children, but they aren’t credited on the IMDB page for the episode. Will have to investigate).

  • I really enjoy the back and forth conversation of - “I’ve started to see someone.” “ Yes, we all know.” “No, not Camilla.” Charles doesn’t even pretend to be surprised that Margaret assumes he and Camilla are having an affair. Charles ends up suggesting that Margaret see a mental health professional as he himself is, or as Margaret calls them, “a head shrinker.” (Charles: “Aunt Margot, you can’t call them that”). Prince Charles really did go to therapy to help deal with his marriage problems for quite some time, reportedly 14 years.

    This apparently was all Princess Anne’s idea, by the way. Charles promised his sister that he would bring it up to Margaret, and mentioned that Anne actually found the professional he’s recommending to Margaret.

Top left: The Crown.
Bottom: Various pictures of Princess Margaret
Credit Left to Right: Keyston-France; Shutterstock; Slim Aarons / Getty

Left: The Crown. Right: The real life Prince Charles (Credit: David Cooper).

• Anne Tenant comes back to England with Margaret and drives her to the therapist’s place. Margaret is doing her best to stay incognito, wearing a head scarf, big sunglasses, and a purple coat. She acts very stand-offish at the very idea of therapy, says that she finds the whole idea pathetic, and states, “Self pity won’t get you very far. You just have to get on with it.” Margaret ultimately does admit that she’s been feeling a little low and hasn’t been able to get out of her slump. The purple in her outfit appears to emphasize her intrinsic royalness, which will come up again and again in this episode.

  • Princess Margaret did see a therapist during her marriage to Tony Armstrong-Jones, but I couldn’t find any indication that she’d seen a therapist later in life.

  • The therapist asked if any family members had mental illness, which introduces the sisters’ storyline. Margaret states that the Prince of Wales “has his ups and downs. But I wouldn’t say that’s a condition. That’s just marriage.” (continuing the season’s constant focus on Charles and Diana’s struggling marriage). She also notes that “the duke of Gloucester got low from time to time. This appears to refer to Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester - the third son and fourth child of King George V and Queen Mary (and thus, Margaret’s uncle). I have only briefly researched Prince Henry since he’s only mentioned in passing, but he apparently was a rather nervous child with poor health and sometimes had nervous fits of crying or giggling. However, after he was sent to school (becoming the first son of a British monarch to attend school), he thrived and apparently become much more healthy and happy. As an adult, he apparently drank whisky excessively, which may be what Margaret is referring to here. He suffered a few strokes in the later years of his life, eventually ending up in a wheelchair and unable to speak.

Left: The Crown. Middle and Right Photos: the real life Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

• Next, Margaret hangs out with her sister the Queen while an Easter egg hunt goes on in the background (the royals apparently do have a private family Easter egg hunt) and tells her all about what she’s learned about their cousins Katherine and Nerissa. The Queen says she knew about their issues, but that they were long dead. The two women end up consulting Burke’s Peerage to look up the Bowes-Lyon sisters and find that Nerissa’s death date was listed as 1940 and Katherine’s was listed as 1961. In this scene, both women wear paisley prints in wildly different colors, showing their close relationship but also their significant differences.

  • Fantastic Queen-ism as Margaret pushes her button to summon help: “What are you doing, that’s my button.”

  • Margaret continues her trend of stubbornly denying her own ill health by insisting on climbing up the ladder to get the books off the shelf herself, refusing her sister’s offer of help.

  • Burke’s Peerage has been published since 1826 and features the ancestry and heraldry of “the Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Landed Gentry of the United Kingdom [and] the historical families of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations.” These books are updated yearly. The firm also has published books covering “the Imperial, Royal and Mediatised families of Europe and Latin America, the Presidential and distinguished families of the United States, the ruling families of Africa and the Middle East and other prominent families worldwide.”

  • We get a few shots of various family members running around in the background, including an obviously pregnant Diana leading around a toddling blonde Prince William. Per usual, she’s dressed in an almost perfect homage to some of Diana’s actual pregnancy outfits.

  • Sidenote: How much time has passed in this episode? Prince Edward turned 21 on March 10, 1985 and Easter that year took place on April 7, 1985. Diana goes from looking not at all pregnant at Edwards’s birthday party to SUPER pregnant at Easter, in the space of a few weeks. That’s….impressive. In addition, Prince Harry was actually born in 1984, but that minor detail change doesn’t really change much in this story.

• Margaret is next seen at Buckingham Palace doing a crossword puzzle and refusing to pick up the phone when Dazzle calls. She initially says she doesn’t want to see him, but apparently changes her mind, as in the next scene, we see the two of them driving in a car. Dazzle is praying in Latin and asks Margaret when she had last driven, as she is ….somewhat bad at it (she almost runs over a bicyclist on the way). Dazzle, who is training to become a priest at this point, feels weird about lying about who he is to get into the hospital and check on Katherine and Nerissa, but Margaret bullies him into doing so anyway, saying “You can always confess later, now go.” Margaret hides out in the car (in the rain) until Dazzle comes back, confirming that he met Katherine and Nerissa (who are very much alive) and also telling her that there are several other relatives living there.

  • I didn’t actually find any info on whether Princess Margaret actually could drive or not, but I did find this somewhat hilarious article on the driving habits of the royals in the process (apparently Prince Philip still was driving around on private land in 2019, even though he was almost 98 at the time, and uh, Prince Edward’s 11-year-old son was also seen driving on private land).

  • I like that even when Margaret is going on a covert mission where she doesn’t want to be seen or recognized, she dresses fabulously in furs and big gold earrings.

  • Nerissa and Katherine have pictures of the Queen (Claire Foy) and Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) by their bedsides and clearly know that they are their royals and their family members. I read a LT of articles about Nerissa and Katherine while writing this blog post and didn’t find a single one that mentioned them having photos. However, they did indeed stand and salute when they saw the royals on the screen.

Upper Left: The Crown.
Upper Right: Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).
Lower Left: Princess Margaret (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty)
Lower Middle: Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Credit: AP)
Lower Right: Queen Elizabeth (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

• After this revelation, Margaret goes to her mother’s castle in Scotland. She pulls her mother away from her friends (including Lady Fermoy, Princess Diana’s grandmother) to confront her dramatically on a beach. Margaret is in the standard royal family Scotland uniform at this point (skirt, shirt, jacket, long coat, and headscarf). We haven’t seen Margaret dress like this much this season, but both she and her sister both commonly dressed like this in real life. The Queen Mother is in a blue and white dress with a cardigan and pearls that very much resembles the type of outfit the real Queen Mother wore her entire life.

  • Remember, we saw the Queen Mother tour and purchase her Scottish castle in S1’s Pride and Joy. This episode seems to constantly refer back to previous episodes. Everything in it points back to the mistakes of the past.

  • Margaret angrily shouts at her mother about five of their family members being “locked up and neglected.” The Queen Mother argues that Aunt Fenella (Katherine and Nerissa’s mother) was overwhelmed and that things were complicated around that time because of the abdication. Margaret then brilliantly yells, “Not everything that is wrong with this family can be explained away by the abdication!” which is totally true. As I previously mentioned, Katherine, Nerissa, and their three cousins were all placed in the hospital about five years after the abdication, so it’s unlikely that that actually played any role in their family’s decision to do so.

  • Margaret also yells that anyone in the family that doesn’t follow the rules and perfectly fit their role is rejected, underlining a constant theme throughout the show. We’ve seen Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Prince Charles, and Diana all really struggle with their roles as royals throughout the series.

• Later, Margaret sits in her mother’s castle looking positively ill, wearing the same outfit and using a plaid blanket to keep warm. Her mother, dressed formally for dinner, comes in and tells her all sorts of things about how the abdication changed things, and claims “Their professionally diagnosed idiocy and imbecility would make people question the integrity of the bloodline.” As I’ve discussed, this is bullshit, as the genetic disorder didn’t run in the royal line.

  • The Queen Mother notably refers to “the children of my brother” and “their first cousins,” while Margaret quite specifically names them all as individuals. When her mother refers to "their imbecility,” Margaret, shocked, says “don’t use their words.” This calls back to the earlier moment between Charles and Margaret when he told her she couldn’t call therapists head shrinkers. Each younger generation seems to be trying to teach their older generations to be better in this episode.

  • “The hereditary principle already hangs by such a precarious thread,” she says, giving the episode its title. This refers to the entire concept of hereditary monarchy, in which the throne passes from one member of a ruling family to another member of the same family.

  • Several examples of mental illness in the Windsor family are given: George III, Prince John, “your uncle” (presumably referring again to the duke of gloucester, who I discussed previously in this post).

    • George III was famously the “mad king,” whose recurrent mental illness ultimately led to the establishment of a regency, in which his eldest son ruled as Prince Regent for the last 9 years of his father’s life. During these episodes, he was often manic and deranged, sometimes talking until foam actually ran out of his mouth. There are several theories as to what was wrong with George, including porphyria and bipolar disorder. (Source: BBC). He was the subject of a popular play (The Madness of George III), a film, and also shows up in the new Netflix series Bridgerton.

    • Prince John was the youngest child of George V and Queen Mary and therefore was also Margaret’s uncle. He began to have seizures when he was four years old and was diagnosed with epilepsy. John was sent to live at Sandringham House with his nanny and governess. He died in 1919 at the age of 13. At the time, no one really understood epilepsy and patients with epilepsy were often treated as though they were insane. His condition was not revealed to the public until after his death, so there was lots of speculation that he was being mistreated. (Source: Libby-Jane Charleston on Medium)

• Margaret sits on the plane with a line of alcohol bottles conspicuously at her back. She may have tried to give up alcohol briefly, but is about to get right back to it. Back at her therapist’s, she ponders, “It’s all a family disease isn’t it? When they tell you you can’t marry, when they strip away your official role, when they side with your husband as your marriage falls apart, and now this. This final insult. That every diminishment, every rotten misfortune is written in my blood.” She then asks her therapist if she’s destined to be mad, at which point her therapist explains the actual origin of her cousins’ genetic disorder. Margaret ends up concluding that the girls never needed to be hidden away and what her family did to them was unforgivable.

  • This gorgeously delivered monologue (Helena Bonham Carter BETTER be nominated for a Tony for this episode) references her previous relationship with Peter Townsend (a big plotline in Season 1), the moment earlier in this episode when her role as Counsellor of State was given to Prince Edward, and the way that her family favored her husband Tony even when he was absent from her own birthday dinner and blatantly cheating on her (featured in S3E10 Cri de Coeur).

•  In the next scene, Margaret fiddles on the piano while talking to Dazzle. Her therapist has suggested psycho therapy, meds, and increased exercise to help her. Dazzle urges her to convert to Catholicism and tells her how joining the church gave him a faith and helped him; how “submitting oneself to something larger” lifted the gloom and emptiness in his life. She rejects this idea, and states that she has already committed herself to a larger power - the royal family - and converting would result in her being kicked out of the family.

  • Margaret is in serious denial about her life and her family. She states, “My title, my seniority, my proximity to the crown – it is my happiness. It’s who I am. I don’t expect you to understand.”  When Dazzle points out that her family does terrible things to its outer members to protect itself, and that they only protect the center. Margaret insists, “But I am in the center! I am in the very center. I am the Queen’s sister, daughter of a king-emperor, and I will always be in the center.”

    • The “center” metaphor is very apt at describing Margaret’s situation throughout her life. Before her sister Elizabeth got married and had children, Margaret was second in line to the throne. With successive children and children’s children, she’s been pushed further and further away from the throne. At this point in her life, she is…8th in line to the throne, behind Prince Charles and his son Prince William, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward, Princess Anne and her children Peter and Zara Phillips. At the time of her death, she was 11th to the throne. The nature of hereditary monarchy is that those who aren’t actually the firstborn direct descendants of the monarch are continually pushed further back in line as more royals marry and have children. It’s just inevitable.

    • Margaret’s use of “king-emperor” hearkens back to her mother’s use of the term earlier in the episode. Her mother was in denial about the situation with Katherine, Nerissa, and their three cousins, and Margaret is totally in denial about her position here.

    • At the end of the scene, Margaret says they shouldn’t see each other again but asks, if he has a moment, for him to pray for her. As I noted earlier, the real life Dazzle really did try to convert Margaret to Catholicism. However, the two remained friends until his death in 1994. She was actually one of the last people he saw before his death.

• Margaret, now feeling even more desolate and insignificant than ever, flies back to Mustique and gets a montage of party scenes. She’s seen in an acid yellow dress singing at a party, staring in her mirror, walking at a beach, and dancing by herself. She notably is back to smoking and drinking. She’s wearing brighter colors than ever in almost all these scenes, until the very end, when she’s sporting a much simpler and quieter printed dress. The episode ends with Margaret sitting alone at her pool (which of course, reminds her of Roddy and all that she’s lost), staring at her toes in the water and looking desperately sad and alone as the sun sets behind her.

  • The lyrics Margaret sings (from Fallin’ by Connie Francis) are on point as usual. “Yeah I was riding high, but then my ivory tower toppled and I tumbled from the sky. I got a feelin’ like I’m fallin’ and you’re the reason why.” The party music and noise is overtaken by the same sort of mystical music Diana has been getting all season (the instrumental arrangement is specifically “Voices”).

    • Her toes are specifically painted red, which calls back to the red finger nail polish she was wearing in S3E10 Cri de Coeur when she’s crying after her affair with Roddy was broken in the press and he tried to comfort her.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E6 Terra Nullius

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 6 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

Top: Bob Hawke on The Crown; Bottom: Bob Hawke in real life

• The episode opens with politician Bob Hawke (about to become Australia’s prime minister) speaking to a reporter on TV, who asks him about Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s forthcoming tour of Australia. Hawke notes that he doesn’t consider this a very important part of his job and expounds on his republican views and his desire to have an Australian head of state. He refers to the queen as a “pom,” which is an Australian slang word used to refer to Brits. It’s not entirely known where this term came from, but the most common theory I found spouted about the Internet is that it’s short for pomegranate and refers to the red cheeks that visiting Brits and new British immigrants to Australia get from the heat and sun there (source: Country Life).
  In the show, Hawke also refers to the royal family by saying “You wouldn't put a pig in charge of a herd of prime beef cattle — even if it did look good in a twin set and pearls.” In real life, Bob Hawke’s widow and others stated that he would never have said such a thing about the Queen. This uproar over this portrayal is discussed in this article from The Daily Mail, which also includes a video of the real Bob Hawke talking about Charles’s visit to Australia; what’s interesting, is the interview’s beginning is almost identical to how it’s shown in The Crown (where he says he’s met Charles and found him a nice young bloke), but where the show has Hawke going off and saying various rude things about the Queen, in real life, he was much milder and said, “I don’t think we’ll be talking about kings in Australia for ever more ... we would be better off as a republic. But I don’t think it’s a matter of great importance.” He then continues to talk about his larger concerns, namely, the welfare of people in Australia. (written quotes from that interview are included in this article from The Guardian)

  • Check out how closely the show captured the interview background of the 4 Corners news show just for this single one minute sequence!

  • Several articles also have reported that Bob Hawke was in fact a republican, but wasn’t nearly as keen on pushing the royals out of Australia as is shown in The Crown. The Australian stated, “The truth is that Hawke never saw the Charles-Diana visit as a chance to advocate a republic. Hawke always got on well with the Queen. He believed Australia should not become a republic until the Queen’s reign ends. This is a testament to the respect most Australians have for her.”

• Next, we see Martin Charteris apprising the Queen on the results of the Australia election. The Queen describes Hawke as “the rough, tough former trade union negotiator and the proud holder of the world record for beer drinking.” Charteris said he won it by drinking “a yard of ale in a sconce pot in 11 seconds,” and then notes that Hawke was now a teetotaller.
  I found a truly delightful article published in the Australian Times that looks into Hawke’s beer-drinking record in depth that you should totally go read if you have a chance. That article explains the story far better than I ever could: “Oxford University is an institution steeped in quaint tradition, and even more so in the 1950’s when Bob was a student. Students take their evening meal in the dining hall of their college, and are required to attend wearing a gown. Back in Bob’s day, if you turned up not wearing a gown, you were subject to a challenge against the ‘sconce master’ of the college. “Sconcing” is a tradition unique to Oxford University, which demands a person drink a tankard of alcohol, usually ale, as penance for a breach of etiquette — such as forgetting to wear one’s gown to dinner! The story goes that Bob had to drink the yard of ale from a sconce pot faster than the sconce master, or face buying a round for all present. Being unable to afford to buy the round, Bob had no choice but to beat the sconce master. And beat him he did, setting a world record and carving a place in Australian history at the same time.”
  The Independent reported in 1994 that Bob Hawke gave up alcohol in 1980 and remained a teetotaller as long as he was prime minister.

• FUN RIDICULOUSLY SMALL ROYAL REFERENCE: While talking to Charteris in her office, the Queen waters a flower in a pot. I’m not a gardener myself, but this flower looks to be a lily of the valley, which are in fact, the real life Queen’s favorite flower (source: House Beautiful). I could not find any evidence that the Queen actually keeps potted plants or waters them herself (please tell me if you do!), but she did take up gardening at 91 (Source: British Heritage).

• The Queen emphasizes the importance of Charles and Diana’s visit to Australia here, implying here and later that it’s their job to persuade Australia to keep in the Commonwealth. In real life, it wasn’t viewed that way at all. The Australian quoted Sir William Heseltine (the Queen’s ACTUAL private secretary from 1986-1990; as I’ve mentioned before, in real life, Martin Charteris retired in the late 70s), as saying “The visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales to Australia, which features large in the series, I can attest was certainly not conceived as a weapon to ward off any move to a republic. It was one in the regular series of visits by Her Majesty herself and members of her family undertaken as one of the ways in which the family showed their devotion to the overseas monarchies.”

Scenes from The Crown.

Diana in real life wearing a wide necked loose green dress similar to one on the show.

• Content Warning: Eating Disorders. [italicized]
  
  We get a quick flashback to a lunch with the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne. All of them are wearing similar colors and prints, clearly emphasizing their familial connection, but in their own particular colors and styles. In this scene, it’s implied that Margaret tells the others about Diana’s bulimia (this isn’t explicitly shown, but we do see a quick montage of Diana binging and purging in the middle of the conversation and the royal ladies looking very shocked afterward); she would know best, as Margaret, Diana, and Charles, all lived in Kensington Palace at the time (although Charles spent quite a bit of time out at his home in the country, Highgrove). Margaret lived in apartment 1A and the Waleses lived in Apartments 8 and 9. You shouldn’t expect “apartment” to refer to anything small, by the way; Diana and Charles’s rooms covered three floors (Source: Marie Claire).
  To the royal ladies’ credit, they are completely shocked by the news of Diana’s bulimia.

  • These bulimia scenes are incredibly heartbreaking, of course. Diana spoke about her struggles with her eating disorder quite openly later in life. In one interview with BBC, she said, “I had bulimia for a number of years. And that's like a secret disease. You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don't think you're worthy or valuable. You fill your stomach up four or five times a day - some do it more - and it gives you a feeling of comfort. It's like having a pair of arms around you, but it's temporarily, temporary. Then you're disgusted at the bloatedness of your stomach, and then you bring it all up again. And it's a repetitive pattern which is very destructive to yourself.” She attributed the bulimia to the struggles in her marriage, saying “The cause was the situation where my husband and I had to keep everything together because we didn't want to disappoint the public, and yet obviously there was a lot of anxiety going on within our four walls.”

  • Princess Margaret, who in the show, was the only one who spoke out openly against the marriage before it happened, saying that clearly neither Diana nor Charles wanted to marry each other, continues her trend as being the most observant member of the family by stating, “People do the strangest things when they’re unhappy”
    
    Content Warning end.

• At the royal ladies’ lunch, it’s stated that it was Diana who wanted to take baby William on the Tour of Australia. This is not actually the case. According to her biography by Andrew Morton, she was ready to leave William behind during the tour until the then-prime minister of Australia Malcolm Fraser suggested bringing him along. Apparently it was portrayed as Diana’s idea in the press at the time though.

• In the next scene, after a few very quick dialogue-less shots of Charles arriving to play polo with Camilla and her husband Andrew, we see Charles and Camilla laughing, drinking, and telling a bawdy joke together at a gathering of friends. Andrew Parker Bowles is in the crowd, with his arm leaned up on a sofa behind another woman (likely alluding to his own affairs). I think this is mostly to show how happy these two truly are together. Diana is conspicuously absent.

• The gaiety of this scene contrasts sharply with the next shot, which has Charles and Diana miserably huddled next to each other on a sofa as they sit across from the Queen, Philip, and a counselor of some sort. Diana has her arms crossed and Charles has his hands clasped together (exposing his ever-present signet ring); their body language indicates that they don’t want to be there and don’t feel close to each other at all. DIana’s in a loose green dress with a wide neck; everything about it seems to emphasize how thin she is (it’s very similar to a dress the real Diana wore on the Australia tour. Couldn’t find a screenshot of the dress in the show, but I’ve included the real life green dress to the right). The Queen and Philip similarly have their hands gathered up separately, but they sit with their legs and body posture facing each other, signifying how close they are and only emphasizing the distance between the younger couple

Left: Emma Corrin on The Crown. Right: Diana in real life (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Top: Diana and Charles with William arriving in Australia (Credit: Bob Thomas / Getty). Bottom: Emma Corrin and Josh O’Connor arriving in Australia on The Crown.

• The Queen refers to her and Philip’s tour of the Commonwealth back in 1954, which we saw portrayed in S1E8’s Pride & Joy, and states that it was hard, but brought them closer together. This is hilarious considering that we saw them have a huge fight on that tour, complete with Elizabeth throwing things at Philip. I haven’t had a chance to write about the first and second seasons yet, but apparently their argument in Australia depicted on The Crown actually happened in real life (Source: Express).
  Elizabeth’s obliviousness towards her children (shown previously in S4E4’s Favourites) continues when Margaret wryly asks whether leaving her children behind for six months “might have had consequences” by saying “On what? The tour was a triumph.”

• Diana’s outfit as they board the plane to Australia is similar to one she wore in real life, but with some key differences. In real life, she wore a navy blue and white striped cardigan; her cardigan on the crown has very colorful stripes that are almost childlike - emphasizing both her youth and her connection to baby William. We get a fight on the plane between her and Charles’s long-suffering private secretary Edward Adeane (who yes, was the son of Michael Adeane, who was private secretary to Queen Elizabeth from S1-S3, the one who Philip gave a clock and then promptly forgot about) about being separated from William for two weeks, but as I previously mentioned, in real life, she actually hadn’t insisted on bringing William along. William stayed primarily at Woomargama and the prince and princess visited him several times during the trip. This entire scene is basically just added for drama and to illustrate how different Diana is from the rest of the royals.
  One thing this scene does illustrate though, is Diana’s views on motherhood. She states, “the greatest service I can give the royal family is to be a living breathing present mother – to this child who will someday be king.” Insider has an article talking all about Diana’s approach to raising her sons which is pretty good, although it does repeat the tired, disproven story that Diana insisted on taking William to Australia. 

• There’s a really adorable Town and Country article all about the effect William’s stay at Woomargama Station had on the little town. It’s just. So cute.

• Next we see Charles and a very unhappy Diana getting off the airplane in torrential rain with baby William. In the show, a newscaster notes that in Alice Springs, they’d received more than a month’s rain in a week. Diana says goodbye to William tearily, as Charles snaps at her to get going.
  In real life, the whole Wales family arrived in apparently good spirits on a sunny day. A UPI article from 1983 confirms this, noting that the couple were greeted at their stop in Alice Springs “in brilliant sunshine.” I get why The Crown did this though, as in reality, there HAD been several days of torrential rain and flash floods that disrupted the entire area right before the royal couple arrived. In fact, the rain and floods were so bad in the area that the casino hotel that the couple planned to stay in was inaccessible except by helicopter; they had to make do with a motel that stood on top of a ridge. This wasn’t shown on The Crown, of course, but it would have been interesting to see. Commentators at the time claimed that the motel stay was a “royal first.”
  There was one contrasting report from The Age in 1983, which said “She seemed uneasy, even glum, and looked at the tarmac with downcast eyes throughout much of the brief airport picture session.” This is not demonstrated in photos of the event though. At the very least, if she was visibly unhappy, it wasn’t to the extent shown in the show. However, Diana was very good at hiding her feelings. Years later, she said to Andrew Morton (who wrote the biography Diana: Her True Story), “I’ve got what my mother’s got. However bloody you’re feeling, you can put on the most amazing show of happiness.”

• The Crown also shows the royal family going essentially directly to a press conference to talk to a horde of journalists, where Diana stumbles over her words and accidentally calls “Ayers Rock” “Ayers Dock,” to titters in the audience and the ridicule of the prime minister (watching on his tv set). I couldn’t find any evidence that Diana actually made that large of a gaffe, but Charles DID joke that baby William was being fed “warm milk and minced kangaroo,” which um, angered some people (Source: Meaww).

• Bob Hawke is shown briefly mentioning that there are protests in Canberra about the cost of Charles and Diana’s visit. I couldn’t find ANY evidence of this happening at the time. Please tell me if you do and I will HAPPILY add that information in here. Maybe I just wasn’t using the right magical keywords to appease the Google gods.
  I did find a bit about protests happening in New Zealand? The Telegraph says: “Nor was the couple’s two-week stay in New Zealand trouble-free. On their way to a banquet in Auckland their car was hit by an egg filled with red paint, and in Wellington a Maori bared his buttocks at the couple in a protest over land rights.”

Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II watching film from her 1954 visit to Australia in The Crown

• We get a scene of the Queen reminiscing over her glory days while watching a film of her visit to Australia in 1954. These appear to be film strips of the real Queen and Philip, not Claire Foy and Matt Smith. Philip hears the music of the film and joins her. They talk a bit about the size of the crowds, citing that over a million people turned out to see them in Sydney. This will become important later.
  Philip asks why the Queen sent Charles and Diana to Australia, stating that the country was too important “to send out the understudy.” As I mentioned already, there weren’t any serious fears that Australia would get rid of the monarchy or any need for the royals to keep Australia in the fold; this was a planned, regular visit just like Philip and the Queen’s in 1954.

• Later, we see Diana struggling with the heat at Ayers Rock (now known as Uluru) and unable to climb the tourist site. In real life, it appears that Diana hesitated because of her unsuitable dress and shoes, not due to heat or illness. The Sydney Morning Herald at the time reported “As she stepped off the plane at Ayers Rock, she looked down in horror. Her dress, buttoned down to the front, was immediately blown open revealing her petticoat and knees. From that moment, the Princess made constant but hopeless attempts to keep the dress closed."
  In reality, the royal couple did actually climb Ayers Rock. However, the show didn’t depict this, as Uluru is actually a spiritually important place to the Anangu (a name referring to several aboriginal Aaustralian groups); climbing of it was banned in October 2019 (Source: The New Daily). Although The Crown shot this scene in Spain, not Australia, and digitally added in the rock in post-production, the fact that they didn’t show them climbing the whole rock illustrates the series’ attempts at cultural sensitivity. Apparently some of the footage of this scene in The Crown also features archival footage of traditional land custodian Reggie Uluru; Netflix made a donation to a Mutitjulu community charity in return for this (Mutitjulu is an aboriginal community in the area and the home of Reggie Uluru).

• Later, Charles complains to Camilla about Diana on the phone. This hearkens back to what Charles told his mother in S4E4 “Favourites,” namely, that he called Camilla when he needed cheering up. In this conversation, he refers to Diana as a child and says he misses Camilla’s adulthood.

  Note that he calls Camilla “my darling” on the phone. This will become important later.

Top: The Crown
Bottom Left: Charles and Diana at Ayers Rock (Credit: TIm Graham / Getty).
Bottom Right: Charles and Diana at Uluru (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

Left: The Crown
Top Right: Charles and Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).
Bottom Right: Charles, Diana and baby William (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

• We get another argument of Diana arguing with Edward Adeane over her need to see William. In real life, the royal couple visited William in Woomargama several times throughout the trip. It appears that these visits were always planned.

• After the royal couple arrives at Woomargama, The Crown shows Diana and Charles playing happily with William in front of photographers, recreating a famous picture from the time.

• Next is a scene of Charles and Diana out at Woomargama talking about William while their baby naps, the one thing they seem to have in common at this point in the episode. Charles notes affectionately that he was “crashing and bashing into everything” and also calls him “a mini tornado.” This is very accurate to real life. Charles once recounted a similar event in a letter to a friend, noting that he and Diana had enjoyed watching William crawling around “at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction” (Source: Elle).

• Their conversation about their relationship is very beautifully done, like a scene from a play. The showrunner of The Crown was, of course, originally a playwright.  Charles acknowledges how unhappy Diana is; Diana asks him how she’s supposed to feel about his relationship with Camilla. She specifically refers to the bracelet incident (which was shown in S4E3 Fairytale), his wearing “CC” cufflinks Camilla gave him, and a picture of Camilla falling out of his diary on their honeymoon. The cufflinks and picture incident were both mentioned in Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words,” which was based on extensive interviews with Diana herrself.

  • At the climax of the confrontation, Diana points out that Charles and Camilla are perfect for each other and asks angrily “So where do I fit in?” Charles responds, “You fit because you are my wife. And I love you.” This conversation echoes reports from many of Charles’s friends that Charles did, in his own way, actually love Diana, at least in he early years of their marriage. The lines indicating that they are in fact, very similar and both need more encouragement and appreciation, also echo reports from people who knew both of them. By the end of the conversation, they recommit to their relationship and promise to encourage and lift each other up more. Charles’s last line in this scene is “Happy Easter, my darling,” which, you’ll note, is exactly what he called Camilla just a few scenes earlier.

  • I do greatly enjoy that they’re literally celebrating Easter by hanging out and playing with sheep.

Left: The Crown
Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

Top: The Crown; Bottom photos: Diana and Charles

Left: The Crown
Right: Charles and Diana (Credit: David Levenson / Getty).

• The next few scenes show the couple at their best, happily greeting crowds in a variety of different Australian cities, most notably Sydney, where they’re positioned right outside the opera house. Diana’s outfits are very similar to what she wore in real life, but not always exact copies, as you’ll see above.

• Although I couldn’t find figures on the size of the crowds at the time (except in Melbourne, where 200,000 turned out), everyone seems to think that this tour signified the start of Diana-mania.
  The Telegraph reported: “On a more serious note, police in Australia had vastly underestimated the size of the crowds that would turn out to greet the couple. A senior officer famously said: ’We haven’t seen this in royal tours here before. It is more akin to Beatlemania.’ Thus was the phrase ‘Dianamania’ coined by the tabloid press. The couple often ran late because of delays caused by the crowds, leading to a frenetic atmosphere among those waiting in the heat. Children became separated from their parents in the crush, hundreds of people fainted, flowers and flags were thrown at the couple, and police became seriously concerned about crowd surges. Police numbers were increased by 25 per cent. By the time the couple visited Tasmania ten days into their tour, local police were warned by their counterparts in Canberra to step up crowd control because of ‘an element of hysteria’ that had been evident in crowds in Sydney.

• Content Warning: Eating Disorders. [italicized]
  
  Although The Crown shows the crowds exciting and invigorating Diana, in real life, she found the attention overwhelming and exhausting. Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote a biography about Prince Charles, said “For her part, Diana was upset by the disproportionate interest in her, especially when she realized that it was disturbing Charles. She collapsed under the strain, weeping to her lady-in-waiting and secretly succumbing to bulimia. In letters to friends, Charles described his anguish over the impact ‘all this obsessed and crazed attention was having on his wife.’” This strain become most publicly apparent when Diana burst into tears in the midst of a crowd at the Sydney Opera House; the scene was caught by photographers, but apparently overlooked by Charles at the time.
  
  Content Warning end.

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

Left: The Crown; Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

• The beautiful scene of Charles and Diana dancing recreates some very famous photos of the couple dancing together in Australia, in pretty much the exact same outfits. I did find actual video of their dancing; although they dance to “Can’t take my eyes off of you” in The Crown, it’s a different song in real life (I haven’t figured out which one, but if you do, please let me know!)
  Afterward, Charles joins Diana in her room. We know that despite their unhappiness, the couple did uhm, at least have some fun together after this 1983 Australia trip, as Prince Harry was born in September 1984.

• In the next scene, Charles is having breakfast and is told that Camilla is on the phone; he refuses the call. On The Crown podcast, actor Josh O’Connor said that he had been instructed to think of Camilla as sort of like a bad habit that he’s trying to quit - every time he says “this’ll be my last camilla” and yet he always ends up going back to her. This seems to show one of his attempts to leave Camilla behind. (In the podcast, the actor acknowledged that this was an incredibly reductive way of viewing an actual person, but said it was a good tool for him to understand the situation. Emerald Fennell, who plays Camilla, was NOT a fan of this approach when she heard about it).

• They have a wonderful appearance on a radio show in which Diana says, “I don’t think of myself as royalty, first and foremost I’m a wife and a mother, that’s what is most important thing to me.” This is very similar to something she said in real life: “Most importantly, [my role is] being a mother and a wife. That's what I try to achieve; whether I do is another thing, but I do try.” (Source: Little Things). In The Crown, she also notes “his favorite cuddly toy used to be a whale. Now it’s a koala.” In real life, she really did tell a reporter that William had a koala he loved now. I didn’t find anything referring to his formerly loving a whale, but this was likely chosen because Charles and Diana were Prince and Princess of Wales.

• In the next scene, we have the coolest shot following a woman getting out of a pool, getting out, and going over to the edge of the building’s roof, where she joins others waving down at Diana and Charles, surrounded by gigantic crowds of people. This is an incredibly effective way of signifying the Diana mania. Diana is shown talking to many people in the crowd in a very friendly, interested way, illustrating her real life talent at connecting with people. Diana really was swarmed by a crowd at one point. Again, she’s wearing an outfit incredibly similar to what Diana wore in real life.

  • Footage of Diana in the crowd is shown on TV as the Queen and Princess Anne watch during a joint uniform fitting. Anne smartly notes, “There’s a problem that nobody expected,” pointing out that Diana’s intense popularity (drawing “bigger crowds than [the queen] got back in the 18th century or whenever”) was sure to upset Charles. “You and I both know how much Charles craves attention, reassurance and praise – it was supposed to be his debut. Instead, it’s Diana’s.” Anne also bitterly notes that people are commenting on “what a natural mother [Diana] is,” hearkening back to her words about being constantly compared to Diana back in S4E4 “Favourites.”

•  Anne’s prediction is quickly shown coming true in the Australian scenes. Charles appears at a polo match and the crowd calls to ask where his wife is, saying “we only came to see princess Di.” Charles ends up falling from his horse, which can’t have made him happy, and people chant “We want Di! We want Di!” In contrast, Diana is off posing with some swimmers, and then greeting some sick children to uproarious acclaim.

• The final straw for Charles seems to come when he speaks at a dinner; his comments about Diana are greeted with laughter as Diana blushes at the compliment prettily in the background. He takes this badly and interprets it as "her pulling faces.” During their fight, Diana points out “Thanks to me, people have shown up.” Charles shouts, “People are laughing in my face, booing the heir to the throne, booing the crown.”

  • During this whole scene, Diana wears a red dress with sparkly polka dots on it which combines two real life dresses. She’s also shown wearing the Spencer Tiara, her family tiara. As the blog The Court Jeweller has noted, the tiaras on The Crown unfortunately tend to be just enough larger than the real life things to look slightly absurd.

Top Left: Charles and Diana in The Crown; Top Right: Charles and Diana
Bottom Left: Diana in The Crown; Bottom Middle: Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty). Bottom Right: Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Hazel Hawke, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).

• In the next scene, the royal couple meets the Australian Prime Minister and his wife. The PM talks to Charles and tells him that if Diana hadn’t been with the prince, Australia might have shaken off the royals (which must have done GREAT things for Charles’s insecurity). Hawke notes, “That superstar may have just set back the cause of republicanism in Australia for the foreseeable future.” (remember though, this wasn’t a real concern either for Hawke or the royals at the time.

  • The PM also makes reference to “terra nullius” (Latin for nobody’s land), which is what George III called Australia when the British first arrived. This seems to refer to Charles and Diana’s efforts to strike out new territory in their marriage and ultimately failing. Their attempts to save their relationship are based on basic misunderstandings about each other’s characters, just as Britain’s takeover of Australia was based on (deliberate) misunderstandings about that land and the people there.

  • The costumes are pretty close to how they really were in real life, although the PM’s dress is different in shape. My one big quibble though is that in the show, Diana’s anxiety over the state of her marriage and Charles’s anger towards her popularity is obvious on her face; Diana was well known for putting on a good face when she was miserable, which is partially why it took so long for the public eye to realize that the marriage wasn’t a fairy tale.

• After this, we get a montage of quick scenes of the couple touring in New Zealand just like the one we got earlier in the episode showing them around Australia. However, although the earlier montage was very happy and showed the couple’s increasing closeness, this montage only emphasizes how unhappy both of them are. We get some shots of Diana staring in the mirror with dark circles under her eyes and crying while lying in bed. The tour ends with the couple getting off the plane in England in the rain and getting into separate cars that are literally heading in separate directions; Diana goes to Kensington Palace while Charles goes to Highgrove.

• Diana instantly calls the queen and asks to see her. This is a super quick scene, but while talking on the phone, Diana is shown wearing a white nightgown and a robe with ruffles all down the sides, which match the ruffled curtains behind her. Kensington Palace is clearly HER home that she designed and loves; she is the one that belongs here.

Top Left: The Crown.
Top Right and Bottom Left: Princess Diana (Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty).
Bottom Middle: Princess Diana (Credit: Mirrorpix / Getty).
Bottom Right: Princess Diana (Credit: Kypros / Getty).

• Diana arrives at Buckingham Palace in a green and red tartan dress with a big white collar that calls back to similar tartan outfits she wore at Balmoral in S4E2 The Balmoral Test and during princess lessons in S4E3 Fairytale. Since I’ve already pointed out similar real life tartan outfits in my blog posts on those episodes, I looked at real life Diana outfits with a similar neckline and similar coat this time instead; there are plentiful examples.
  The Queen watches at the window for her arrival, which both hearkens back to the way she saw Diana at Balmoral in S4E2 and also illustrates her anticipation of why her daughter-in-law is there. She walks in quickly and never takes off her big dark blue coat during the entire scene. In the story, this is clearly because she’s too upset to even consider it. Thematically, it seems like she wants to go somewhere else, away from her marriage; she already has her coat on and is ready to go. The coat actually covers up the tartan for most of the scene; in the screenshots I’ve found of it, the dress appears black.

  • Diana refers to the Queen as “Mama,” which clearly startles Elizabeth. Diana really did call the Queen “mama” in real life, as does Prince Edward’s wife Sophie, Countess of Wessex and Prince William’s wife Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (Source: Marie Claire). Note that when the Queen sits down, she’s backed by pictures of Charles’s investiture as Prince of wales from S3E6 Tywysog Cymru, which indicates her long-standing connection to her son vs. her shorter acquaintance with Diana, and also refers back to the first time we saw Charles really struggling with his role as prince of Wales in the series (we did see him struggling with his father’s expectations of him back in S2E9 Paterfamilias, but not quite in the same way).

  • Diana begins by saying that she’s come to the queen because she’s struggling. The Queen, sitting in front of a table full of positive coverage of Diana, asks why, as she’s just had a triumph in Australia; echoing her language about her own 1954 tour earlier in the episode (which then, illustrated her indifference toward her children). Diana responds by saying that she didn’t consider it a triumph if at the end of it, she and Charles are “wretchedly unhappy” behind closed doors and then goes on to say, “He resents me, resents the attention I get.” The Queen asks why he resents her and Diana says she doesn’t know, and that’s why she’s come to ask his mother.
    The Queen ends up taking offense at Diana’s words and asks if she’s saying that Elizabeth and Philip have been terrible parents (which Diana strenuously denies), hearkening back to the earlier conversations with Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. She then notes that she herself also struggles to understand Charles too, but that “us sitting here sticking knives in him isn’t helpful either.”
    Elizabeth also quietly notes that perhaps Diana is playing to the crowd a bit too much and overdoing it, saying “We do all know when we’ve played to the gallery excessively.” Diana agrees slightly, but also says that she’s doing the best she can, as she was thrown into the deep end of being a royal with no help or assistance (in real life, she was even less prepared than she was in The Crown. She was certainly never given any princess lessons like those shown in S4E3 Fairytale). Diana then emphasizes that all she wants to do is play for the team and be part of it, but feels resented by most of the family, and begs for the Queen to help her by showing her love, approval, and acceptance, saying that she believes the rest of the royals would follow suit.

  • In real life, the Queen and Diana were relatively close at the beginning of her marriage to Charles, as Diana came to call on her for advice several times. Eventually though, the Queen began to really dread Diana’s visits, as the princess would often cry during them. (Source: Reader’s Digest). I don’t know of any specific incidences regarding the Queen being startled by Diana hugging her though; I couldn’t find any references to it.

  • The Queen tries to dismiss Diana but her daughter in law ends up hugging her for a long, sickening moment, as the queen stands there in shock, unsure what to do. Diana tells her that love and acceptance is all she wants from her, all that ANYONE wants from her, and at that, the Queen promptly flees the room. People generally are summoned into and dismissed from the Queen’s presence, so this signifies how rattled the Queen actually is to just leave herself.

• The episode is bookended by another luncheon scene with the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne, in which the others react with shock to the news of Diana hugging the Queen. Anne actually says “I feel sick.” Although people rarely hug the queen and it’s generally seen as a breach of protocol, the Queen doesn’t actually seem to mind it when it happens. After Michelle Obama rather famously hugged the Queen in 2009, the Guardian reported that at least four other people have been known to hug the queen: a community activist named Alice Frazier who met her on her U.S. tour in 1991, Prime minister of Australia Paul Keating in 1992, Prime Minister of Australia John Howard in 2000 (although he disputes this), and Canadian cyclist Louis Garneau in 2002. The queen did not object or seemingly mind the hugs on any of these occasions. There have also been numerous photos of the Queen being kissed on the cheek by various family members (including Princess Anne). Since the royal family is obviously more reserved in public than they are in private, it’s certainly likely that they would hug at their own private family gatherings.

  • There are also lots of photos and reports of the younger royals, Princess Diana, and even Prince Charles hugging fans.

  • It seems like the Queen really did think that Diana needed to just get on with it and deal with her unhappy marriage (source: readers digest). The Queen was from a different time in which it was pretty much expected that you’d ignore the problems under the surface and carried on (see, how the Queen approached most of her marital problems with Philip in Seasons 1 and 2 really quietly). Diana was clearly not made for that life and didn’t want to hide how miserable she was.

Left: Olivia Colman in the Crown
Right: Diana on the tour of Australia (Credit: David Levenson / Getty).

• The fact that in this scene and in her scene with Diana, the queen is dressed in a very similar print to one Diana wore in real life does seem to indicate that she heard her and sympathized with her, but wasn’t sure how to help her or what to do. She appears to still be considering her experience with Michael Fagan from the previous episode, as she points out that the crown stays relevant by changing with the times, and perhaps Diana has a point.

• The Queen Mother has a particularly heartless moment in which she calls Diana an immature child and notes that Diana, like Philip, will someday give up her struggles and bend, and when she bends, she will fit. When the Queen asks – “what if she doesn’t?” – Princess Margaret says, not unfeelingly, but prophetically, “then she will break.” This ties Diana and Philip together again, and points to Philip’s struggles with his role as the Queen’s consort seen throughout season 1 and 2.

• Alas, the Queen Mother and Diana really didn’t seem to get along very well. The Queen Mother was extremely close to Charles and also seemed to be predisposed to dislike Diana, as her lady-in-waiting Lady Fermoy was Diana’s grandmother (who testified in court that Diana’s mother was unfit to care for her children) and generally didn’t get along with Diana (Source: GoodTo, quoting Andrew Morton’s biography).

• The very last shot of the episode has Diana back at Kensington Palace, blending in with the ruffled curtains in her ruffled nightgown, sitting at the window just as she did in S4E1 Gold Stick, back when she was a young teenager full of hope and excitement about Prince Charles visiting her sister. She looks very young and very alone and lost, very much like the child the Queen Mother just called her. Keep in mind, at this point in the story, Diana is only 21.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E5 Fagan

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

The Queen (Olivia Colman) wakes to find Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke) at her bedside, in The Crown.

[I really don’t want to make y’all wait any longer for this post, so I’ll add in more photos later this week!]

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 5 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

• The episode starts off with news announcements about Michael Fagan breaking into Buckingham Palace, asking “Is anyone safe?” The Queen watches the TV quietly, in a brown and red paisley outfit. The print is rather confused looking, indicating the Queen’s personal inner turmoil over the entire situation. The announcements end with the thesis of basically the entire episode: “How did he get in, and what did they talk about?”

  • In real life, we have no idea what they talked about. The Queen has never spoken about it. Fagan has given numerous statements to the press over the years, but his stories have changed several times, so he’s not exactly a reliable witness.

• After the credits, the story jumps back three months prior, where we see Michael Fagan waking up in his flat to Thatcher speaking on his radio (he tells her to f off). He walks about his dingy, water-damaged apartment and looks sadly at empty bunk beds and pictures of his kids and their drawings. He wraps himself in a yellow and white floral blanket and stares out the window.

  • The show made sure to actually shoot all scenes set at and around Fagan’s flat at an actual housing estate that still exists today. The director of the episode noted on The Crown podcast that they really didn’t need to change anything about the estate to match the early 1980s except remove the satellite antennas.

    • American note: Although estate sounds very grand to many of those outside of the UK, inside England, “housing estate” usually refers to high density, multiple-story tower block public housing. These estates are usually administered and run by a ruling council, as shown later in the episode.

  • Thatcher is really an ever-present figure throughout this episode. Her voice and stories about her policies show up in Fagan’s apartment several times on radio and TV, play in the background at the unemployment office, and her picture is proudly displayed in the MP’s office. This illustrates the effect of her harsh economic policies on Fagan’s entire life.

  • The events of this story have been foreshadowed for a few episodes now. Thatcher’s cabinet questioned her economic policies in Episode 2, The Balmoral Test, and The Queen noted the huge rise in unemployment in Episode 3, Favourites. The Falklands War also began in Episode 3, in which it was noted that Argentina entered the war partially to distract from their own interior economic problems. It’s clear that Thatcher is doing the same thing here, as the civil unrest the Queen discussed in episode 3 has now turned to overall patriotic fervor.

Left: Tom Brooke as Michael Fagan in The Crown.
Right: Michael Fagan in real life (Credit: James Mullin / Shutterstock).

• As he rides his bus past Buckingham Palace on the way to the job center, “Boys Don’t Cry” by The Cure plays in the background. This 1979 post-punk/new wave song likely came out when Fagan was still doing well, living with his wife and kids, and working regularly. The lyrics are very on point here, as the song talks about a man who has given up trying to regain his lost lover and hides how sad he really is. Similarly, Fagan’s wife has left him, but he makes no attempt throughout this episode to try to win her love back; his focus is, instead, seeing his children. The music in this episode is really important, as the songs are almost entirely modern rock/punk songs about male disillusionment and sadness. We haven’t heard songs like this in the show before, as we haven’t focused on a commoner male character before like this, who’s at such an incredibly low point in his life. I feel like the most similar situation we’ve seen to this before is when we saw Princess Margaret breaking down in S2E4 Beryl to “Angel Eyes” by Ella Fitzgerald, but even that is from a specifically female point of view.

  • Fagan wears essentially the same outfit the entire episode, a distinctive dingy green and red coat over various blue shirts, which looks VERY MUCH like a coat the real life Fagan wore. If you pay attention to this episode, you’ll see that the background in both the estate and Buckingham Palace shows a lot of red and green; the Queen wears a lot of red, green, and blue as well. This seems to illustrate both their similarities and their differences.

  • The job center is super crowded with long lines of people who look similarly tired and dispirited. He’s here to collect his jobseeker’s allowance, which is available in the UK to adults who are unemployed and actively seeking work. To get the benefit, the jobseeker must appear at the center in person every two weeks to certify that they are still actively seeking work. This is actually still the policy in the UK, but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, those receiving jobseeker’s allowance have been excused from sign on attendance since March 2020.

  • Fagan gives a lot of cheek to the woman at the job center about how she asks him the same thing every two weeks and how she should know who he is now, but tbh, I just feel sorry for her. She probably deals with hundreds of people a day and couldn’t possibly remember them all. It is a bit ironic that he jokes about how he worked with the Olympic Committee and the United Nations, as that is TOTALLY the type of people we would normally see on The Crown. This intense focus on the real world away from the royals and the top echelons of power is new to the show, except for a few episodes that focused on specific disasters affected the common people, like the smog in Season 1 and the Aberfan disaster in Season 3.

• The rest of Fagan’s day is dedicated to working a “cash in hand” job painting a room, where he quips that the paint color “beige 28” is the color of his life. Conveniently, he’s wearing a beige shirt when he says this. Afterward, he goes to a pub, where he clearly is looking out for his wife. He tries to talk to her about their flat (we find out later that she’s the listed tenant on the flat, so he can’t get any money to fix up the flat without her involvement), but she brushes him off, saying tonight. She also brushes him off when he asks about the kids. This brush off frustrates him and he takes out his anger on her new boyfriend, calling him a Twat. His wife and her new boyfriend both throw the fact that the new guy works for a living and looks after his kids in Fagan’s face, which angers him even more. who taunts him by saying he’s the one who’s caring for Fagan’s children. This almost escalates into a fight, but bystanders manage to pull the men apart before they actually come to blows.

  • This sequence ends with the ska song “Monkey Man,” a cover by The Specials (originally by Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals). A Monkey Man, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is “a weak or gullible man, especially one subservient to women generally.” This ties in with Fagan’s feelings of helplessness about his life, particularly when it comes to his family. The songwriter has said that the song was actually inspired by a girl he loved who left him for another man, which is…very on point for the situation.

• The shots of Fagan’s housing estate, complete with bars at the windows, switch quickly to the metal Buckingham Palace gate - once again juxtaposing the upper class royal setting of the Palace with Fagan’s lower class, realistic life. The director of the episode said on the Crown podcast that he really wanted to make it clear when the episode was in “Faganland,” quipping that Faganland is also known as “real life.”

  • In the Queen’s regular audience with Thatcher, Thatcher’s in her power blue color and the Queen is in a lighter blue (once again matching Fagan’s usual colors- this will happen throughout the flashback in the episode). Thatcher brags a lot about the war in the Falklands.

  • In the next scene, the Queen and Philip are walking to an event together (past some bright yellow flowers that are reminiscent of Fagan’s sad yellow floral comforter), and Philip notes that they should “roll out the red carpet” for Margaret Thatcher, as she pushed ahead with the conflict in the Falklands even when no one else supported it, and it’s turned out to be a huge success. “She’s finally doing what we’ve been waiting years for someone to do …lead this country firmly and decisively after years of incompetence and mismanagement.” The Queen also complains that Thatcher brought up palace security again, which angers her, saying “Do you want our walls to be built even higher? Or the public to stand ten feet further back at engagements.” This foreshadows Fagan’s break-in to the palace while also establishing the theme of the Queen’s need to meet regular people.

  • The Queen says, “I take great pleasure in meeting members of the public and have learnt so much from them. You remember the lesson Lord Altrincham taught us.” They meet up with Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother at a Garden party, where they meet “regular people.” This hearkens back to S2E5 “Marionettes,” in which Lord Altrincham criticized the queen in his newspaper and advises her to become more transparent and inclusive of regular people. The Garden Parties replaced debutante presentation parties (which were only reserved for the very rich and noble) and are still held three times a year at Buckingham Palace and once a year at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Scotland (although they were cancelled this year due to COVID-19). You can see that the Queen IS really trying to reach out to her people, but as becomes apparent throughout the episode with the juxtaposition of her life with Fagan’s, she’s still incredibly out of touch with the lives of regular Britons. It’s also rather funny that they all put on gloves before shaking hands with the regular people, as if they don’t want to actually touch any commoners.

  • Princess Margaret cares far less about meeting regular people than the Queen and specifically checks with Martin Charteris that they don’t have to have actual conversation with anyone. Margaret’s dislike of the whole thing was also demonstrated in the earlier S2E5 episode, in which Margaret complained to Philip about meeting commoners. In that episode, we also saw that the Queen Mother didn’t particularly like the idea either, but she is silent here. Ironically, Margaret wears drab green and red, matching Michael Fagan’s outfit most closely, but I think the use of the colors is juxtaposed to show their differences here, not their commonality. The royal band is also wearing red uniforms and green hats, which again, matches

• The lines of colorfully dressed, respectable, happy commoners at the garden party eager to meet the royals contrasts sharply with the drab despair of the unemployment line at the job center. Thatcher’s voice echoes over the radio in the background (in a distinctly dystopian way, although this of course, is just from a radio broadcast); she’s talking about her up-bringing “we were taught to work jolly hard. you were taught to improve yourself. you were taught self-reliance.” This is a pretty tone-deaf message when there are clearly no jobs to be had for so much of the country. As Fagan said in an earlier scene, everything in here feels pretty beige and dull and dreary. Fagan is again back here to collect his check, and quips sharply to the worker that he works as james bond, who (quite rightfully, in my opinion), calls him a twat. He asks who he can complain to, and she says he should go contact the MP, who can contact the parliamentary ombudsmen. This is ultimately the comment that sets his whole plot in motion. The worker then shuts the window in his face, which seems symbolic of a lot of the bureaucratic obstacles he’ll face in this episode.

  • We get another shot of Fagan in his sad, empty apartment, watching footage of a military parade on TV and listening to Thatcher speaking on the radio, defending her economic policies again by describing her actions as some sort of tough life.

• Fagan’s next at his MP’s office; he’s waiting for him to arrive because frankly, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. He tries to talk to the MP “about the system,” calling it “unfair and a disgrace.” He calls Thatcher “devil woman” and complains that he doesn’t have any work to do because she’s spending money on the war instead of using it to build houses he could paint and decorate. The MP seems rather stand-offish from the beginning, insisting that he supports the war and not really listening to Fagan’s concerns. Fagan lays out his central frustration in a simple question: “Why would you spend over three billion pounds on a war against total strangers rather than looking after your own family?” This points to his views of the country as a family and as its responsibilities to its citizens.

  • Fagan calmly points out that the MP hasn’t actually noted his concerns, and hasn’t taken any notes the entire time, and ultimately forces him to write down /something/. Fagan says that having Thatcher’s picture in the office makes it feel like “we’re in turky or iraq,” which adds to the previous dystopian like feel of Thatcher’s voice over the unemployment line.

  • Finally, in frustration, after a few minutes of arguing about the workings of democracy, the MP tells Fagan that the Queen has a private audience with Thatcher every Tuesday and quips, “Why don’t you drop in at Buckingham Palace and tell her? “

• And we’re back to the Trooping the Color, which we saw previously in S4E1 Gold Stick. This shows the passing of time, the Queen taking the salute from her troops (which we’ll circle back to later), and refers to various lucky members of the public getting to attend the event, again illustrating the royal family’s attempts to connect to the public and ultimate failure at doing so.

• Then a sharp cut from the “regular people” at the trooping the color, sitting in rows watching the event, to people waiting in rows at the social services office. Again a cut from bright outside light and music to a drab, dreary office setting. Fagan’s in a terrible situation here, we find - as Social Services won’t let him see his children until he fixes up the water damage in the flat, he can’t get money or help to fix the flat from the Council or social services because he’s not listed as the primary tenant on the flat, and his wife, who IS the primary tenant of the flat, won’t talk to him about it (as we’ve already seen happen in the pub). So he’s completely prevented from seeing his children at all. The office worker tells him he needs to talk to the estate council, but as Fagan has already told him, the council pointed him to social services, so he’s left without anyone to help him.

• On his way home on the bus, he passes by Buckingham Palace and abruptly gets off, looking up at the palace through the barred gates. He then manages to get in by jumping over the fence, climbing up a drain pipe, and crawling through an unlocked window. He sees a few guards but manages to avoid them pretty easily. He then basically just wanders around the palace, trying various door handles and even sitting on the throne at one point. He enters a room full of gifts (notably with a portrait of the queen there, staring at him) and downs half a bottle of wine pretty quickly, managing to knock over a vase in the process. He manages to get into the Queen’s bedroom, but it’s empty. Eventually, a maid sees him and rushes to the security office, sounding the alarm.

  • Fagan really did sit on the throne. He said in an interview with The Independent in 2012, “It was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears; I tried one throne and was like 'this one's too soft'. I was having a laugh to myself because there was one right next to it, so I tried another.”

  • The creators of this episode said on The Crown podcast that it was kind of unbelievable how easy it was for Fagan to get into the Palace, and that if it HADN’T happened in real life, no one would believe it.

  • If you’ll note, the carpet throughout Buckingham Palace is red, calling back to Philip saying they should roll out the red carpet for Thatcher.

  • Fagan wasn’t the first intruder at Buckingham Palace. A young teenager named Boy Jones repeatedly broke into the palace to stalk Queen Victoria, stealing the queen’s underwear and food. He kept breaking in even after being imprisoned for three months, and eventually was deported to Australia.

• The entire sequence where Martin Charteris reports on the break-in to the Queen and Philip is pretty funny. Philip laughs at the intruder’s drinking a bottle of wine valued at six pounds. Philip is also very proud of remembering the vase that was broken, describing it as “a ghastly little pink thing with little blue worms all over it” and “a strange-looking duck.” The Queen quickly corrects him by noting the exact symbolism of the vase, naming the rivers of guyana and the national bird present on it, which is pretty damn impressive considering how many gifts she must receive every year. Her private secretary looks at her with pride over her recall of these little details.

  • The Queen (in drab green again) asks Charteris to keep the matter away from the Home Office, as she still doesn’t want her security measures raised. Her concern is “Buckingham Palace is too like a prison as it is.”

• Fagan manages to make his situation worse when, after watching his kids play on a playground with his wife’s boyfriend, he jumps over the playground wall and tries to speak to his wife. The wife and boyfriend quickly motion the kids away, which seems only to enrage Fagan. The fight that almost happened at the pub earlier in the episode now actually happens on the playground, resulting in the boyfriend putting Fagan in a chokehold. Fagan leaps back over the wall (similarly to how he got in and out of Buckingham Palace the first time) and runs away, as his wife yells “Are you proud of yourself? Leave us alone. We don’t need you in our lives.”
  The incident at the playground results in a meeting with social services, who says Christine will have permanent custody of the kids and Fagan can’t have any contact with his kids, for their best interest. He doesn’t say anything in response but just looks distraught.

  • What do they know about Fagan that we don’t? Do they perceive him as dangerous to the children? I really haven’t found much information on Fagan’s family life. All the sources seem to confirm that his wife Christine had left him, taking their four children with her, but I can’t find any explanation of why.

  • After the fight, “Twenty Four Hours” by Joy Division” plays in the background, specifically - the lyrics “A cloud hangs over me, marks every move Deep in the memory, of what once was love.” This very sad song, which was recorded just over a month before the band’s frontman Ian Curtis committed suicide, talks about everything in the singer’s life slipping away from him.

  • In real life, Fagan was much more of a piece of work than he’s portrayed as in the series. He complained about his portrayal in The Crown, saying that they made him appear ugly and uncharismatic, but I’m really not sure why, as they actually made him appear sympathetic. In reality, he actually visited Buckingham Palace 12 times in the summer of 1982 and told his mother that he was visiting his girlfriend “Elizabeth Regina,” indicating a far more intense obsession with the Queen than was shown in the episode. Fagan himself told the Independent in one article that he couldn’t find a bathroom and ended up peeing on the corgi food. After his first break in to the palace, he actually was arrested for stealing a car (he was apparently trying to drive to stonehenge in search of his wife. was his wife in stonehenge? i don’t know. maybe it made sense in his head). He also claimed that the entire decision to break into the palace was the result of a prolonged reaction to taking too many hallucinogenic mushrooms several months before.

• After the devastating social services meeting, Fagan returns to TV reports showing that the UK has won the Falklands war. Notably, the news reports that the queen has returned to Buckingham Palace. He looks out from his balcony incredulously, as all around his estate, people are celebrating the victory in the Falklands, singing “Rule Britannia” and chanting “Maggie Maggie Maggie! Oi Oi Oi!”

• Next we see the Queen going about her evening in a very prosaic series of scenes. She watches the news eats dinner alone while wearing green, then gets ready for bed, wearing a blue and white floral robe and matching nightgown. We notably see her praying at her bedside; her faith hasn’t been discussed much in Season 3 or 4, nor has it really been addressed much since Billy Graham’s appearance in S2E6 Vergangenheit, but little moments like this do remind us that she is a Christian and takes her religion quite seriously.
  Meanwhile, Fagan breaks into the palace again, somehow avoiding guards as they change shifts and breaking a window to get in.

  • In the show, a maid walks past carrying a vacuum and later is shown vacuuming the carpet. I’ve seen people complain on Facebook groups and such that this is inaccurate, as there are some reports online that housekeepers are not allowed to use a vacuum in Buckingham Palace. However, The Atlantic reported that Buckingham Palace had a vacuum cleaner as early as 1902, which seems to contradict that report. In addition, The Crown actually has their own royal protocol advisor, Major David Rankin-Hunt, who worked for the royal family for 33 years. He’s very active in the show and often corrects things on screen that aren’t accurate for the royal household, like folding in people’s pocket flaps and making sure their umbrellas are wrapped tightly enough and such. Since the vacuum cleaner is literally a plot point in the script (as it keeps the maid from hearing the Queen’s bell), I find it really hard to believe that Rankin-Hunt would overlook such a big thing if vacuums were really banned in the palace. It’s hard to know though.

  • The floral floor-length nightgown matches Fagan’s description of her outfit in real life: “Her nightie was one of those Liberty prints and it was down to her knees." This refers to a clothing brand called Liberty known for using floral prints.

• As Fagan enters the queens’ bedroom, the queen sleeping says “morning bobo.” This refers to the Queen’s long-time dresser, Margaret “Bobo” Macdonald” who actually served her first as her nanny (which reminds me very much of Queen Elizabeth I’s relationship with her governess Kat Ashley, who rose to become her chief lady in waiting). We saw Bobo in the background a few times in Season 1 and 2, but the IMDB cast list for the show doesn’t show anyone playing that role in Season 3 or 4.

  • The darkened bedroom looks much more like the scenes we’ve seen of Fagan’s life this episode than the royal family scenes, which have all been in very bright rooms or outside in bright sunlight. Fagan actually seems to blend into the background as he moves about initially.

• It’s been really confusing trying to sort out all the different stories about this that Fagan has given over the years, so I honestly just started to look at the police report to figure out what happened.

  • The police report from the time said that Fagan initially got into the palace by climbing over the railings and entering an unlocked window to a room which housed “the Royal Stamp Collection.” All the doors in that room were locked, so he quickly left it through the same window. He then climbed a drainpipe to get to the roof, took off his sandals and socks, and climbed across a narrow ledge to get through an unlocked window in an office of the master of the household which had just been opened for the day by a housemaid. He wandered around the palace for 15 minutes or so without being challenged by anyone. *In the show, the window was locked the second time and he had to break it to get in.

  • The police report notes that Fagan claimed to find his way to the queen’s apartments by “following the pictures.” In an anteroom of the bedroom, he smashed a glass ashtray and brought it with him, intending to slash his wrists in front of her. AGAIN, the show clearly makes him seem much more sympathetic than he was in real life. In the show, his bleeding hand is the result of his breaking the window to get in, rather than breaking an ashtray or slicing his own wrists.

  • In both real life and the show, Fagan opened the curtains upon entering the bedroom. In the show, he prevents her from calling for help, but in real life, she immediately pressed the night alarm bell (this is about 7:15 am). This unfortunately, occurred right after her police sergeant (who’s in the corridor at night) had just gone off duty; this is reflected in the show when Fagan says that there isn’t any officer outside of the room. There were a few servants on duty already. However, the footman who was outside walking the dogs and a maid was cleaning in another room with the door closed. Thus, no one actually noticed the night alarm bell at first. In the show, the maid doesn’t hear the bell due to the sound of the vacuum.

  • The Police report (which notably doesn’t say what Fagan is doing during this time) notes that the Queen next used her bedside telephone to ask the palace telephonist to send the police to her bedroom. The telephonist called the police lodge at 7:18 am. At 7:24, the Queen called again for help, as a police officer still hadn’t arrived. She eventually elicited the help of a maid, who helped her usher Fagan into a nearby pantry on the pretext of getting him a cigarette. At this point, the footman returned from walking the dogs and helped keep Fagan there by supplying him with cigarettes. The Queen “kept her dogs away as the man was getting agitated.” Eventually, a police officer arrived, and then another, and they took him away.

    • The show’s depiction of events diverges sharply from real life at this point. In the episode, the queen and fagan talk for a bit until she points out that he’s bleeding. As he goes to the powder room to clean up his cut, she rings the alarm bell, without any response. She tries to pick up the phone, but he comes back in the room before she can actually call anyone. They end up talking for several more minutes before a maid comes in with the tea and asks the queen if she’s alright (Major kudos, by the way, to the maid, who somehow doesn’t scream or drop the tea or anything). The queen responds calmly, “Yes, quite alright. But you might ask the policeman to come in."

    • The show DOES reference the whole cigarette trick by having Fagan ask the Queen for a cigarette.

    • I actually honestly wish they had followed the real life story a little bit closer, as I would have loved to see the queen trick Fagan into going to a pantry and protect her dogs from him. This show ALWAYS needs more corgis, In My Opinion.

  • The little scene between Fagan and the Queen in the bedroom is very well written and very sad. He says he wants to talk to her about what’s going on in the country, and that she hasn’t any reason to fear him. I’m not going to analyze the substance of their conversation too much, but it’s a really beautiful scene that ultimately brings out the queen’s compassion and sympathy for his plight. He begs her to “save us all” from Thatcher and says that she can actually do something. However, as we’ve seen emphasized throughout this show, the Queen really doesn’t have any power in political situations like this and can’t really do anything to help him besides talk to Thatcher, which ultimately does nothing.

    • Fagan comments that the palace is somehow “posher than you’d think but yet more run down,” as it has chipped paint, peeling wallpaper, and stains everywhere. He made a similar observation in an interview, stating, “It was very ordinary. I don't think they spent too much on decoration. Maybe it was due a redec?"

    • Within the scene, Fagan shows off his intelligence, noting that the palace is actually public property and that trespassing isn’t a crime if he doesn’t steal anything. At the time, trespassing was a civil offense, not a criminal one. He was not charged with trespassing, apparently to avoid having the queen come and testify against him.

    • There’s a very funny moment where Fagan says that Thatcher will put the Queen out of a job next; the queen dryly responds “Let me assure you; she is in an all too committed monarchist,” perhaps thinking of Thatcher’s obsequious curtsies to her.

    • The Queen tries to reassure Fagan by saying “Countries bounce back. People do. Because they have to. One of the most well crafted lines has Fagan saying, “First the work dried up, then my confidence dried up. Then the love in my wife’s eyes dried up, then you begin to wonder you know, where’s it gone, not just your confidence or your happiness…(trails off). They say I have mental health problems now. I don’t. I’m just poor.” As he continues, the Queen sits across from him naturally, a subtle reference to her regular audiences with the prime minister.

    • The Queen ultimately ends up connecting with him and slightly defending him from the officers. Their conversation ends this way:
      Queen: "Is there anything else you'd like to say to me?"
      Fagan: "No. Thank you.”
      Queen: "I do hope they don't make things too difficult for you, in light of all this."
      Fagan: “Thank you."
      Queen: "Well, goodbye." (Fagan stands and reaches out his hand to shake hers)
      Officers, barreling through the door to come help: "Don't touch her!"
      Queen: (to officers) “It's alright.” (she shakes Fagan’s hand) “I will bear in mind what you've said."

    • The handshake with Fagan, with bare hands and no pretense, thematically ties back to the earlier handshakes at the garden party, when everyone was wearing gloves and on their best behavior.

    • Olivia Colman does a great job of looking absolutely petrified of him initially, but in usual queenly fashion, quickly regains her composure as she speaks to him calmly. Her fear is only again evident at the very end of the scene, when after Fagan is taken away by the police and she’s finally alone again, she falls back into her chair, gasping and eyes tearing up, looking completely drained.

• Then we’re back to where the episode started, with the news reports about Fagan’s break in. Margaret Thatcher watches the news with several stone-faced advisors, looking very distressed.

  • The episode makes it look like the final days of the Falklands War happened right when Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace, but that’s not quite true. Fagan’s first break into the palace was in early June 1982 and his final entry was on July 9. The British managed to retake all the islands on June 20, a few weeks earlier.

  • I’m really not talking about the war too much because I honestly don’t know much about it and I don’t want to be run out of Argentina in the future if I get something wrong. However, I do want to note that although Thatcher said in her first audience in this episode that there were no British casualties in whatever specific operation she was talking about, there were actually casualties on both sides of the war. Casualties included 255 British service members, 3 female British civilians of the Falkland Islands, 633 Argentinian service members, and 16 Argentinian civilians. The servicemen on both sides came from several branches of the military, including the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force.

• The Queen does try to speak to Thatcher about Fagan, noting that he is a victim of unemployment and economic problems, which are not his fault, but ultimately is unsuccessful. Thatcher describes the high unemployment as “a necessary side effect of the medicine we are administering to the British economy” and dismisses the Queen’s questions of moral economy by saying, “If we are to turn this country around, we really must abandon outdated and misguided notions of collective duty.” *NOTE: I am only talking about the portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in this show; I have not done in depth research into her real life views on people. I do plan to read her biography in the future and go back and supplement these posts then, but unless I actually say “in real life” or something equivalent, I am always talking about the characters in the show and not the real people.

  • This line demonstrates that in her own way, Thatcher does care about the “common man” as much as the Queen, just in a very different way. When the queen notes, “Perhaps not everyone is as remarkable as your father,” Thatcher stoutly responds, "Oh you see, that is where you and I differ. I say, they have it within them to be." When the Queen brings up Fagan, Thatcher notes that he’s another matter, as he’s been diagnosed with mental illness and schizophrenia. She then quickly excuses herself, as she needs to go to the victory parade (which the Queen was notably not invited to).

  • This scene is set up to emphasize the distance between the Queen and Thatcher in these audiences, which is the same it’s always been, but looks further apart then ever, when compared to how close the Queen sat to Fagan during their conversation.

• Later on, while watching the victory parade on the television with her husband (both of them dressed in similar shades of brown and grey), Elizabeth comments on Thatcher taking the salute from the troops instead of the sovereign. This did happen in real life and raised some eyebrows at the time. In 1945, after World War II, King George IV took the salute from the troops rather than Winston Churchill.

  • As the royal couple talks comfortably, Philip refers to Fagan as a lunatic and a fool. The Queen counters, “but in the best sense, like Lear’s fool.” Philip responds grumpily “Don’t get all Shakespearean with me.” This is a reference to a character in King Lear, which has a couple of interesting layers to it. In the time of Shakespeare, leaders often had fools, or court jesters, to amuse them. They played an important role though, as they are able to speak truth to power and confront their leaders in ways that no one else can. In addition, fools in that time often had mental illnesses, and were considered blessed by God. Within King Lear specifically, the fool serves as the king’s advocate but also his conscience, critiquing Lear’s faults. All of this is a very apt description of Michael Fagan, who has a mental illness and simultaneously served as the Queen’s advocate and critic.

  • We have one of the first really emotional moments this season from Philip when his face breaks apart a little and he says, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to protect you. I feel terrible.” The Queen reassures him in a very loving way, saying “but you're by my side all the time and do much more than keep me safe. but thank you.” They then exchange another quietly funny moment, as she observes, “I suspect Mr. Fagan is rather glad he didn't come through that window and land on your bed.” Philip laughs quietly and responds, “Yes, that would have been a rather different conversation.”

• The show ends with a final look at Margaret Thatcher on the TV screen, waving happily to the crowd at her victory parade. The Queen looks at her with clear concern.

  • The credits run to the 1980 ska song “Whine and Grine/Stand Down Margaret” by The English Beat, which is specifically about the band wanting Margaret Thatcher to resign. At the time it came out, Uncut magazine described the song as “polite insurrection set to uptempo reggae and African hi-life guitar,” which is flipping amazing.

• As the explanation in the credits says, Michael Fagan was committed after his arrest. He only spent three months in the psychiatric hospital. The second photo in the credits shows Michael Fagan saluting alongside four men; they don’t explain this in the show, but this actually shows Fagan with The Bollock Brothers. Fagan recorded a cover of The Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen’ with this punk band in 1983.

  • Over the years, Fagan has continued to distinguish himself with various petty crimes. He was notably imprisoned for four years in the late 90s after he, his wife, and their (now-adult) son were charged with conspiring to supply heroin. He lives in London now,

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E4 Favourites

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 4 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

The Queen and Prince Charles in the gardens at Highgrove in The Crown.

Top two: Mark Thatcher in The Crown.
Bottom Left: Mark Thatcher with co-driver Charlotte Verney (Credit: PA).
Bottom Right: Mark Thatcher in race car (Credit: Fox Photos / Getty).

• The 1,000 kilometer Paris-Dakar car rally starts off the episode in Paris 1982 with zero explanation, leaving any watchers who aren’t aware of the situation to be pretty clueless until Margaret Thatcher explains what’s going on in her meeting with the queen. Although we’ve seen Mark Thatcher very briefly in shots with his family in episode 1 of this season, it was in a very different context.

  • The actor who plays Mark Thatcher in the series reminds me very much of Alfie Allen from Game of Thrones and every time I see him I just go, “THEON!?” But no, this actor’s name is actually Freddie Fox. Which is fantastic and I love the alliterative look alike British actors. More please.

• After Thatcher’s team rolls out of Paris, we get a quick switch to Thatcher arriving at Buckingham Palace, juxtaposing the scenes of mother and son in their cars. Margaret Thatcher is in a dark blue plaid for this meeting with the queen and looks thinner and more haggard than she has in previous episodes. The queen confronts Margaret Thatcher with the state of the country, pointing out that after three years with Thatcher as PM, the country currently has inflation at 12%, unemployment at 3 million, and riots and unrests in several cities. She tries to focus on work for a bit, noting, "It’s true, but there isn’t a magical system whereby you can just push a few buttons and twiddle a few knobs and everything will be alright. Of course i would like to reduce interest rates…[the queen interrupts to ask if she’s alright] ...but to do that, we first need to get the inflation rate down, and that means we need to cut public spending." Then, on the edge of tears, she says, “I would like to be very much tougher, but I can't go faster than parliament and the people will let me."

  • This brief conversation about the economy before Margaret breaks down over her son’s disappearance introduces several themes (unemployment, reduction of public spending, civil unrest over the economy) that is somewhat dropped for the rest of this episode, but will become extremely important in the next episode “Fagan.”

  • In addition, this conversation about the economy clearly places the queen in her role as “mother of the country,” concerned over her people’s welfare and advocating for them in the face of Thatcher’s economic reform. Thatcher is set up as the antagonist willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goals. However, as is about to revealed, this view of “the queen is caring and thatcher doesn’t care” is far too simplistic.

• Thatcher begins to tear up, saying with embarrassment, “the very idea that the first time a prime minister should break down in this room and it be a woman.”

  • I honestly would be very surprised if the Queen in real life wouldn’t have already heard about Mark’s disappearance before her audience with Margaret Thatcher. As we’ve seen numerous times over the series, the royal family actively reads multiple newspapers and regularly follows the news both on the radio and on TV. And she’s the queen. She absolutely would have been briefed on that situation the MOMENT anyone knew about it.

  • The Queen quite matter-of-factly says, "It is by no means the first time a prime minister has broken down in here. This is drawing room, office, confessional, and psychologist's couch," and then offers her “paper hankies” (everyone else calls them “tissues,” Elizabeth, I promise) and a drink.

    • It’s hard to know which prime minister the Queen might be referring to here, but within the show’s story, we know that she rebuked Winston Churchill in S1E7 Scientia Potentia Est (when he hid his two strokes from her, while the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was simultaneously ill and out of commission), confronted Anthony Eden over his secret dealings during the Suez Canal crisis (S2E1 Misadventure), and passive-aggressively criticized Harold MacMillan for resigning in S2E10 Mystery Man. I should note though that, rebuked/confronted/criticized are all relative terms here, and we’ve never seen the queen get truly angry or upset with one of her prime ministers up to this point in the series. And certainly we’ve never seen a prime minister deal with a personal family crisis of this level before. It honestly reminds me much more of the West Wing plotline in which the president’s daughter is kidnapped than any story line we’ve seen in The Crown before.

  • During this scene, Thatcher is in her standard power blue color, but in a softer looser dress than her usual business like skirt suit, perhaps pointing her dual identities as prime minister and mother. The Queen wears a dark blue and purple paisley print dress in a similar dress shape with a pussy bow neck (which we’ve seen Margaret Thatcher wear before in this season and will see her wear again). The matching blue tones indicate the common motherhood between the two very different women.

• The show portrays Mark Thatcher’s disappearance as happening roughly around the same time as the start of the Falklands War. In real life, Mark’s team (which included Mark, his French co-driver Anne-Charlotte Verney, and their mechanic) went missing for January 9-14, 1982. The initial events that led to the Falklands War did not occur until mid-March 1982.

  • All the historical accounts of Mark make him sound like a bit of a prat, honestly. His team was 31 miles off course when they found him, and it appears the whole thing was rather embarrassing to the real life Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister personally paid 2,000 pounds toward the search costs and also took care of Marks’ unpaid hotel bill (one third of which was for drinks).

  • The Crown portrays Mark as the navigator who gets his team lost. In real life, Mark admitted in 2004 that he had not prepared himself for the trip, but also blamed their loss on other teams incorrectly saying his team were 25 miles west when they finished the section of the race, when in fact, they were 25 miles east.

  • Margaret Thatcher’s characterization of Mark as “a very special child, the kind of son any mother would dream of having” seems a bit hyperbolic, as in real life, he didn’t go to university due to poor academic performance, failed his accountancy exams three times, had a series of short-term jobs, set up a racing company which performed badly financially, and caused his mother numerous headaches throughout her time as PM, as he engaged in shady and controversial business dealings with the Sultan of Brunei, a university in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. He also was convicted of funding a coup d’etat attempt in Equatorial Guinea, because OF COURSE that’s a thing that people do.

• The frame story of the Queen’s plot this episode is set when Margaret Thatcher “without equivocation” names Mark as her favorite child. Elizabeth is Capital-A Appalled by this blatant admission of favoritism and tells Philip about it, who just laughs over the whole thing and says that every parent has a favorite. He then quickly, without any thought, says that Anne is his favorite.

  • We don’t know if Prince Philip would refer to Anne as his favorite in real life, but they do appear to be very close. Anne is their only daughter and appears to share a no-nonsense personality and a love for hunting and horseback riding with Philip. As we saw in the first episode of Season 4, Philip is depicted as being extremely proud of Anne’s equestrian achievements, including her participation in the Olympics.

  • Philip seems to think that the Queen’s favorite child is incredibly obvious, saying that “everyone knows” who it is, but he won’t tell her who he thinks it is. This scene is notably set next to their giant collection of framed photographs of their family, which has appeared throughout the series and somewhat shocks me every time, as they seem to have several shelves that are just full to the brim of them.

  • On The Crown podcast, show creator Peter Morgan says this episode was highly inspired by one royal watcher’s theory that Charles (1948) and Anne (1950), the Queen’s eldest two children, have a different relationship to their mother than the younger two children, Andrew (1959) and Edward (1963), as they were born years apart and at very different stages in her life. This theory makes a lot of sense, as the queen had both Charles and Anne before she ascended to the throne unexpectedly in 1952. That 9-15 year gap between the eldest two and the youngest two is definitely significant. It’s said she really was much more present during Andrew and Edward’s childhoods than her older two. Andrew was thought to be her favorite for quite a long time (that uh, may not be the case any more, as Andrew has been pretty much booted from the royal family due to his association with Jeffrey Epstein and you know, sex trafficking and sexual abuse). It’s said today that she tends to be closest to Edward, her youngest, and his wife Sophie (who is often chosen to ride in the car with Queen Elizabeth to church while other family members walk).

• I am ashamed to admit that the ONLY reason I knew anything about the Falklands War prior to this episode was because of the 2014 Top Gear special in Patagonia, which ended uhhh rather badly when protestors in Argentina interpreted one of the license plates on the cars to be an insulting reference to the Falklands war. The show’s producers tried to explain to Argentinian officials that the license plate was real and randomly assigned, but the show’s cast and crew were ordered to leave the area immediately. There is some really terrifying footage of a mob throwing rocks and eggs at the crew’s convoy as they try to flee; the presenters had to stay behind in a hotel and were later snuck out of the country in some mysterious way. The whole situation got widespread press at the time. You can read all about it here.

• From my research, it looks like the Falklands War really did begin just as uneventfully as is shown on The Crown, which Argentinian scrap metal workers arrived at Leith Harbour, South Georgia, and raised their country’s flag. This wasn’t an accident, as they were accompanied by marines posing as civilian scientists; the military junta which had been in power in Argentina since 1976 was having a lot of economic problems domestically and invaded the islands to divert attention from these issues. The junta did not believe that Britain would bother to defend the islands militarily but well, they did. And everything escalated.

  • In the show, the survey team walks down to the scrapworkers and the leader tells them quite clearly that they were on British overseas territory, they had landed illegally and needed to leave immediately and take their flag with them (traditionally, flags are used to claim land and establish sovereignty). The Argentine leader says in response that the British are the ones who are on the land illegally.

    • More signs that the initial confrontation between the Argentinian scrapworkers and the British Antarctic Survey Team was quite intentional: the raising of the Argentinian flag, the slogan “Los Malvinas son Argentinas” which one scrapworker paints on a shed made of corrugated metal (this translates to “The Falklands are Argentine.” Argentina has referred to the Falklands as Los Malvinas for years) , graffiti of a defecating pig on the survey team’s sign, the Argentines immediately bursting into “Viva Argentina!” after being confronted by the survey team, and later singing the Argentinian national anthem.

      • The pig graffiti is shown only very briefly, but may refer to the wild pigs which lived on the Falklands, which were routinely hunted by British and American sailors replenishing their provisions in the 1700s. (Non Sequitur: While researching this, I also came across the fantastic story of Tirpitz, a pig captured from the Imperial German Navy in 1914 after the battle of the Falkland Islands. When the Germans abandoned their ship and scuttled it, they abandoned the pig, but she managed to swim to the nearby British Royal Navy ships, where she was saved, brought aboard, and named Tirpitz after a German admiral.)

      • The Argentinian National Anthem they sing in the show starts off: “Oíd, mortales, el grito sagrado: ¡Libertad, libertad, libertad! Oíd el ruido de rotas cadenas, Ved en trono a la noble igualdad” which translates to “Mortals! Hear the sacred cry: Freedom, freedom, freedom! Hear the noise of broken chains, see noble Equality enthroned.” Interestingly enough, in the show, they then jump down to the NINTH verse of the song, “ya su trono dignísimo abrieron las Provincias Unidas del Sud,” which translates to “The United Provinces of the South have now displayed their most honorable throne". I guess this line just sounded more patriotic then the next line in the first verse?

      • I love that as the Argentine’s song fades, the next scene starts off with a look at the royal standard flying over Buckingham Palace, like a little hat nod to the whole flag/land claim controversy that just happened, but no one else knows about yet.

• The whole favoritism discussion with Philip inspires the Queen to ask her private secretary to set up personal meetings with each of her children. The normally unflappable Martin Charteris looks…slightly taken aback at this request, but takes it in stride. Elizabeth also asks for a briefing document to be prepared on each child, which had me ROLLING on the floor laughing. “One would hate to be uniformed. or cold. or remotely remote.”

  • In this scene, Queen Elizabeth is wearing a strand of pearls. We know that Elizabeth’s first pearl necklace was given to her by her father, King George V. She wears them very often, so it doesn’t stand out as anything too unusual, but it does seem to indicate “family” here.

  • The episode’s frame story is a rather transparent ploy to introduce us to the queen’s younger two kids (who have only been in the background previously; I don’t think we ever have heard them speak before honestly) and check in on where all the kids are in their life, but the actual stories and scenes that come out in this episode are honestly some of the most affecting and chilling throughout the whole season, as they focus really on quiet talks between the royal family members about their roles and lives, rather than intense action.

This exact photo of Margaret Thatcher and her family appears in a quick shot in the show.

• The next shot in 10 Downing Street focuses on two framed photos; one of the family together (which looks to be this real life photo of Margaret Thatcher’s family) and one just of Mark Thatcher alone, indicating his place as the favored child. Margaret, Denis, and Carol all sit close together, wearing various shades and prints of brown and tan, as some of Margaret’s advisors talk to her about possible leads for finding Mark. A Swiss driver apparently saw Mark alive on the previous day, but now they can’t locate that Swiss driver; Denis notes with frustration that “they can’t even find the drivers who aren’t lost,” and concludes that he needs to fly out to join the search. In real life, Denis did indeed fly out to Algeria to help with the search.

  • The advisors then bring up the Falklands situation to Margaret Thatcher and note that the governor of the Falklands has asked for an ice breaking vessel to come to the island of South Georgia to evict the Argentine scrap metal workers. Margaret, who is looking increasingly gaunt and hollow eyed, doesn’t even look as her advisors as they bring this up, and her husband ends up quietly shooing them away. They conclude that they’ll bring it the foreign secretary.

  • Margaret’s apparent paralysis due to the disappearance of her favorite child is in sharp contrast to the way she interacts with her daughter Carol, who looks at her with concern and unease, as if she doesn’t know how to interact with her. Margaret doesn’t even acknowledge that Carol is in the room as she knocks back another glass of whiskey.

  • The theme of caring vs. not caring flips here, as it becomes obvious throughout the episode that the normally tough and seemingly uncaring Margaret Thatcher is very close to her son and is an absolute wreck while he’s missing. This is pretty historically accurate, as numerous people close to the PM at the time have said that this is the only time they saw her basically unable to function as a leader, completely consumed with worry over her son (source: The Crown Podcast). In contrast, the Queen, who is traditionally seen as the softer, more caring person in the Thatcher/Queen relationship, has a far more distant relationship with her children, to the extent that her asking to see each of them privately causes them alarm.

Left, Prince Edward in The Crown.
Top Right: Prince Edward with Queen Elizabeth (Credit: PA / Getty).
Bottom Right: Prince Edward (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

• The 18-year-old Prince Edward is introduced with a bit of a bang, as we hear him before we see him, bitching about traffic, clearly responding to a secretary telling him he’s late for his lunch date with the Queen. The Queen is in yet another loose long sleeved dress with a pussy bow and her pearls, but this time, it’s in a brown print, which goes with Edward’s tan tweed jacket, tying them together and also hearkening back to the Thatchers’ shared brown tones. Remember also, Edward is attending Gordonstoun in Scotland (where we saw Charles and Philip back in S2E9 Paterfamilias; Andrew also attended Gordonstoun); the tweed cloth (originally made in Scotland) ties him back to that. His youth is further indicated by his braces (which he really did have).

  • Edward says about the secretaries, with no trace of shame, “There’s a nasty, officious imperiousness and sense of entitlement to these people,” and then later in the scene talks about how Cambridge will be glad to have him regardless of his grades, and how the family deserves special treatment for all that they do for the country.

  • One of Edward’s first questions to his mother is whether he’s still getting his civil list money. The Queen raises her eyebrows at this but mildly says, “yes, all 20 thousand pounds of it.” Edward claims it mostly goes to secretarial expenses, but the queen counters that only 800 pounds of it goes to secretaries (indicating that she is far more savvy about her children’s finances than perhaps they realize). Edward waves off her concerns about the cost by saying the money is all put away in a trust, but doesn’t really answer.

    • Although the civil list was abolished in 2011, before then, it referred to the annual grant that covered the expenses of the Sovereign and the upkeep of the royal households (referring to the various departments serving the royal family). The civil list money did not cover transport and security for the Royal Family or property maintenance costs, which were covered by separate departments.

    • I’ve had a bit of trouble finding the details of civil list money for the royals in the 1980s, or any information on at what age members of the royal family would first be given a secretary, but I’ll keep looking and update this as I find out more.

  • Edward says he had a bet with his protection officer that the lunch would be poached salmon. Apparently the queen really does love salmon, and you can even find two of her former chef’s salmon recipes here. This offhand comment also indicates Edward’s close relationship with his protection officers; apparently he was so close to one of them that he’d call him up to tell him about good grades he got at school (Source: The Crown Podcast). Edward then talks about his experiences as guardian/head boy (a position he really had) and his experiences being bullied. We don’t know for sure if Edward was bullied, but Charles definitely had a lot of trouble at school. Edward seems clearly uncomfortable talking about it with his mother, in the show.

  • “Don’t Worry! I’ve met all the Cambridge admissions people, they’re going to make it happen. They’re no fools. It’s good for them too. A member of the royal family at Jesus college? just wait to see how the applications rocket.” When the Queen says this isn’t a very attractive attitude, Edward responds that it’s true, and it would be true with the marines, the City, or any other area of life he might fancy. “People will always want me. and what do you expect me to do about that? Say no? There has to be some upside to being who we are. And some return for what we do for the country.”

    • These few lines have so many real life Edward references in them.

      • Edward DID go to Jesus college at Cambridge, and his acceptance into the program was quite controversial due to his poor grades. I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely understand the British educational exam grading setup, but I do know that O-Levels are required exams usually taken at age 16 and are supposed to indicate readiness for more advanced “A-Level” classes. Edward received 9 O-levels and 3 A-levels. Apparently you also get grades for the A-Levels; generally, Cambridge would only accept students with straight As on their A-Levels, but Edward got a C and two Ds.

      • The Marines had paid 12,000 pounds of Edward’s Cambridge tuition in return for his serving for 5 years, but Edward dropped out of the service only a few months into his training course (his father was apparently VERY ANGRY about that).

      • I’m not entirely sure what “The City” means here, but i believe it usually refers to the city of london? I couldn’t find exactly what this refers to in Edward’s biography.

      • This is the most in depth look we get at Edward for the entire season, so I’ll quickly cover a few more highlights from his life in the 80s. After dropping out of the marines, he COMMISSIONED A MUSICAL from Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice for his mother’s 60th birthday. He then ended up getting a job at Lloyd Weber’s theatre company and worked as a production assistant for a few musicals. in 1987, he put together a television programme called “The Grand Knockout Tournament” in which four teams of celebrities and personalities sponsored by him, Princess Anne, and the Duke and Duchess of York (Andrew and Sarah Ferguson) competed for charity. They actually managed to get big names such as John Cleese, John Travolta, Meat Loaf, and Jane Seymour. The programme raised over a million pounds for its charities, but was roundly criticized by the press and thought of as pretty ridiculous and humiliating for those who participated in it. Apparently in one activity, players dressed up as giant vegetables and threw fake hams at each other? I desperately need to find and watch this.

• We flip back to 10 Downing Street, where Carol Thatcher confirms that her father’s arrived safely in Algiers (and finally gets at least a thank you from her mother), and advisors update Margaret Thatcher on the state of the search. They note that they’ve narrowed the search slightly, but still have a search area of approximately 130,000 square miles, which they note, is larger than the entire United Kingdom. Although the PM acts like she really wants to just focus on her son, she is forced to pay attention to the Falklands situation, which continues to grow in scope. Another advisor reports that the HMS Endurance is on its way to South Georgia with a combat unit of Royal Marines and that the junta in Argentina has responded by sending out its own ice breaking ship and two missile-carrying corvettes (“corvettes” here refers to multi-purpose military ships, not cars); the foreign secretary has advised that the UK call off the Endurance and back off to avoid “unnecessary conflict” with Argentina while the situation is resolved diplomatically. Margaret is appalled by this suggestion, asking repeatedly, “You mean to do nothing?” and “How will it be well if we do nothing” and insisting that the Endurance must continue on, as British citizens far from home are in danger and must be protected. Her advisors and Carol (who has moved away from the table as important government business is being discussed, but is still nearby) share a worried glance, realizing that the PM is clearly projecting her concerns about her son onto this situation. The PM quickly moves back to worrying about Mark again.

  • The PM is in a dark blue outfit with almost a double breasted silhouette to it, with two lines of buttons down the front. This almost gives her a military look, which ties in nicely with her insistence on pursuing military action in the Falklands, despite her foreign secretary’s inclination to drop the matter. Also - it looks like every one of Margaret’s advisors is also wearing some blue in this scene. Carol, in contrast, is wearing a red and burgundy print with no blue, indicating that she’s an outsider in the government situation unfolding in front of her.

  • The “Do Nothing!?” conversation points to several things here: the Prime Minister’s characterization as a woman who needs to act, her worry as a mother over her son, and the repeated characterization of the Queen’s job as “to do nothing” (which has been discussed in depth several times throughout the series). It also foreshadows the Queen’s advice to Anne that will happen in the next scene.

    • This scene hearkens back to S1E4 of The Crown, “Act of God,” which is set before Elizabeth has even been officially crowned. In that episode, which features the famous smog that shut down London for several days, the new queen has an important discussion on her role with her grandmother, Queen Mary.
      
      Queen Elizabeth II : It doesn't feel right, as Head of State, to do nothing.
      Queen Mary : It is exactly right.
      QEII : Is it? But surely doing nothing is no job at all?
      QM : To do nothing is the hardest job of all. And it will take every ounce of energy that you have. To be impartial is not natural, not human. People will always want you to smile or agree or frown. And the minute you do, you will have declared a position. A point of view. And that is the one thing as sovereign that you are not entitled to do. The less you do, the less you say or agree or smile...
      QEII : Or think? Or feel? Or breathe? Or exist?
      QM : The better.

Top: The Queen and Princess Anne in The Crown.
Bottom Left: Princess Anne in equestrian competition (Credit: PA / Getty).
Bottom Right: Princess Anne (Credit: David Hartley).

• Off we get back to the Queen visiting her children. Next up is Princess Anne. Elizabeth visits her at her home in the country, where they ride out together and talk over tea while sitting on a picnic blanket. Everything about the set up for this scene emphasizes how similar Elizabeth and her daughter are, but this illusion is quickly dispelled by their conversation, which reveals how different they really are.

  • The Queen coos over Anne’s horses and talks to them affectionately, as well as specifically addressing the stablehand by name. Olivia Colman has said in interviews that she doesn’t really like horses, but you would never ever guess by looking at her in these little scenes. Such a good actress.

  • The Queen starts out in a green skirt suit and changes into more comfortable green and tan riding gear, including a hairscarf. Anne also wears a hairscarf, but wears blue and white and a black hat over her scarf in an almost uniform look. It hearkens back to her equestrianism, which sadly, isn’t going so well at this point. It’s only slightly alluded to in this conversation, but Anne had a number of embarrassing falls from her horse in 1982 (when this episode is set) that were widely covered in the press, which helps explain her dark mood toward them right now. Their different styles and colors set them apart. In addition, the queen is sort of blending into the green background as they talk, while Anne is clearly standing out from it all, illustrating her discontent with her life.

  • The Queen coos about her daughter’s life being exactly what she wants, out in the country, with privacy, children, horses, and mud, but Anne instantly shoots this idyllic view down, saying acerbically that it isn’t the Eden the Queen makes it out to be. She specifically says that there isn’t privacy, noting bitterly that the press has got it in for her. The Queen rebukes her slightly for referring to the press as “bastards,” and Anne shoots back, “I told them to naff off once. and can you blame me? They’re so mean to me all the time.” This refers back to the incidents in which Anne fell off her horse and yelled at the press for photographing it. This article from Express has some of the journalists saying that Anne actually said worse things, but the press toned it down for print.

  • Anne states that she’s doing work in third world countries for real charities and real causes but that her work is being ignored in favor of Princess Diana, who gets attention for just wearing a new frock. In real life, Anne was president of Save the Children from 1970 to 2017 and during the 70s and 80s, travelled all over the world in support of the organization, including Kenya, Australia, and Gambia. Anne consistently tops the annual lists of “busiest royals” even today and appears at hundreds of official appearances and engagements throughout the year.
    Diana herself said in interviews that early on in her position as Princess of Wales, no one expected her to do anything but show up and look pretty. Diana’s huge popularity from the start of her engagement to Charles was really unprecedented and took everyone by surprise. Although there’s no evidence supporting any serious fallouts or problems between Anne and Diana, it makes sense that Anne might have been annoyed by the disparate press attention they were getting.

  • The Queen brings up rumors she’d heard of Anne having an affair with a bodyguard named Sergeant Cross. In real life, Sergeant Peter Cross worked as a member of the Royal Protection Squad for Anne for about a year starting in 1979. He later claimed that he’d had an affair with Anne and sold his story to the tabloids. Although this doesn’t come up again throughout season 4, Anne would later have an affair with an equerry to the Queen named Commander Timothy Laurence. A few of Laurence’s love letters to Anne were stolen in 1989 and given to The Sun, which published them. Anne would separate from her husband Mark Philips in 1989 and the two divorced in April 1992. Eight months later, she would marry Laurence. They’re still married today.

  • Anne has a deeply moving speech about how unhappy she is, how she used to enjoy being “the difficult one,” but now just feels reckless and angry and upset all the time. It’s hard for me to analyze this much, as we know that her marriage wasn’t terribly happy, but we don’t know much more about that. But it is really beautifully done, and demonstrates why this character is so adored by fans.

  • The Queen suggests that Anne wait out both her unhappiness with her marriage and her unhappiness with her life in general. Anne asks angrily, “Is that it? Is doing nothing your solution to everything?" This points back to the previous scene with Thatcher’s anger over doing nothing in the Falklands. Anne rides away from her mother, clearly still upset.

• Next, we see news reports that Mark Thatcher has been found and is safely coming home. On the news, the PM says “Now of course, you are all used to thinking of me as prime minister. but what the last few days has shown me very clearly is that, above all else, I am a mother.” The Queen watches this report with a troubled expression, as if she’s not sure whether she could say the same about her role as queen vs. mother. Philip uses the opportunity to ask Elizabeth if she’s figured out who her favorite child is yet; she gives him a look of disdain in response.

• Back at 10 Downing Street, the PM’s favoritism toward her son is revealed as she personally serves him a welcome home dinner. Mark continues to be a prat as he boasts about how he was never worried about his life, although his team members “were getting existential,” and wasn’t actually lost, as he always knew where he was. His father and sister look at him with a bit of shock, slightly appalled by his tone and response to the whole situation. Carol points out that he was off course and that his co-driver was taken to the hospital with heatstroke, but he claims defensively that the whole point of the race is that there isn’t a course and says his driver was being overdramatic. His mother encourages him, blaming his team’s fears about death on them being French and his co-driver’s “over-dramatic” heatstroke on her being a woman (this introduces Margaret’s thoughts toward anyone who might be considered “weak”).

  • The trend of spoiled sons commenting on their mother’s meal choices continues as Mark selfishly asks where the gravy is for his favorite dish, Toad in the Hole. Apparently English Toad in the Hole consists of sausages in Yorkshire pudding batter (in the US, it’s eggs baked into toast).

  • News announcers earlier mentioned that his father Denis embraced the helicopter pilot who spotted Mark’s team. This is in sharp contrast to Mark’s own ungratefulness toward his rescuers, which revealed in the dinner conversation as he gets home.

  • The costumes at the dinner table help illustrate the relationship dynamics at work. Mark is in a blue shirt with a yellow sweater tied around his shoulders. Margaret is in a matching gold and tan print. Denis is in blue and Carol is in a dark green print. Mark, Denis, and Carol are all somewhat relating to each other in the conversation and at this moment, but Margaret is clearly only focused on Mark at this point.

  • Carol, disgusted by the obvious favoritism toward her idiot brother, goes off to the kitchen, where her father comforts her, saying “it’s mothers and sons, that’s all.” He then refuses to answer the knock at the door, saying with a smile that it wouldn’t be for him, and that he and Carol are just support acts in the show.

  • Fun Fact: Olivia Colman played Carol Thatcher in 2011 film The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her role as Margaret Thatcher. I haven’t seen it so I can’t speak to whether it portrays Margaret and Carol’s relationship similarly or not.

• The knock at the door brings Margaret Thatcher back to the Falklands War, as her advisor tells her that the Argentinian government seems likely to move ahead with an attack. She closes the kitchen door behind her to keep her family away from the government work at hand. After days of ignoring the conflict herself, she’s irritated to find out that the foreign secretary, the chief of the defense staff, and the defense secretary, are all out of the country at such an important time. She demands that they all come back to the country and see her the next day.

Left, Prince Andrew in The Crown.
Top Right: Prince Andrew in royal navy uniform (Credit: Bob Thomas / Getty).
Bottom Right: Prince Andrew in front of royal navy helicopter (Credit: Hulton Deutsch / Getty).

• Next, Prince Andrew, who’s serving in the Royal Navy as a helicopter pilot, flies to Windsor Castle for lunch with his mother, buzzing close enough to the castle to startle the Queen at her desk, prevent her private secretary from finishing his phone conversation, surprise the Queen Mother in the garden, and wake Princess Margaret, still in bed. Andrew jocularly throws his helmet to a waiting servant and brushes away his mother’s concerns about him taking the helicopter out for just a mother-son lunch, saying “You’re the queen and I’m second in line to the throne. If we as much as break wind, it’s a matter of national importance.” Although I don’t know if he ever did land a helicopter on the palace lawn, Andrew was apparently quite found of practical jokes as a young man, so it’s in line with his usual behavior.

  • Note: Male-preference primogeniture still applied to the succession to the English throne in the 1980s, so Andrew and Edward both came before Anne in the succession, although she was older. In October 2011, the rules of succession were altered so that absolute primogeniture for royals born after the date of the agreement. So although Andrew and Edward both still come before Anne in the line of succession (although all of them are far down the line now, due to Charles’s children and grandchildren), Prince William’s daughter Charlotte, born after the change in rules, is higher up in the succession than her younger brother Louis.

  • Queen Elizabeth has her lunch with Andrew at a small, intimate table, which contrasts sharply with the large table and formal set up in which she met Edward and likely indicates the closeness of their relationship. The Queen is back in her family pearls and in a white shirt with a blue floral print, matching her son’s blue jacket, light blue shirt, and blue, red, and white tie (the tie colors may refer to his role in the military).

  • Andrew asks about what title he may receive in the future when he marries, which leads into a conversation about his current love interest, “the young, racy American actress” Koo Stark. Andrew says he isn’t seriously thinking about marrying her, but in real life, it seemed that their relationship was his most serious except for that with his eventual wife. Andrew then devilishly explains the plot of the “blue” film Stark appeared in to his mother, seemingly amused at her discomfort over the description of the sexual imagery and her question of whether the film was even legal. Although his description does sound a bit like pornography, it’s apparently considered more avante garde.

    • Andrew and the Queen briefly mention that the film was shot at Wilton House, owned by the Herberts; this is due to the fact that the director of the film was literally a Herbert.

    • Although all the facts in this conversation are actually true to life, I have to think that their inclusion in this story specifically point to Prince Andrew’s modern reputation as a pedophile. Although show creator Peter Morgan has talked numerous times about how he wants to portray these people as they were known in the 1980s, and not as we know they’ll end up, I have to think he’d make an exception for Andrew, as completely overlooking his current reputation and portraying him as a good guy could backfire publicly. I honestly…really don’t want to get into all the details of Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and the sex trafficking and sexual abuse allegations against him, because it’s a horrible situation that other people have researched and covered in far more depth than I possibly could, but you can read all about them over here at Town and Country. The Wikipedia article on Prince Andrew also has a very well sourced section about it all. The whole furor forced him to permanently resign from all his public roles, and honestly, he may someday get arrested for it.

  • The Queen ends up saying that she’d like to make Andrew “Duke of York” upon his marriage, as it’s a title traditionally given to the second eldest and has military associations. Andrew seems taken back and delighted by this idea, asking “as in the grand old duke of…,” which refers to an English children’s nursery rhyme.

    • Oh, the grand old Duke of York,
      He had ten thousand men;
      He marched them up to the top of the hill,
      And he marched them down again.
      
      When they were up, they were up,
      And when they were down, they were down,
      And when they were only halfway up,
      They were neither up nor down.

    • Why wasn’t Anne made Duchess of York upon her marriage? I’m not sure, but since Anne decided to raise her children without royal titles (although the Queen offered), she may have just refused. Or it may just be a patriarchal thing. I’ll research this more and update this if I learn something new.

  • Andrew, with a calculating look in his eye, also notes that the previous two Dukes of York both ended up becoming monarch. This refers to George V, who became Prince of Wales and then king after his older brother died, and George VI (Elizabeth’s father), who became king after his older brother abdicated. The Queen points out that in his case, not only would Charles have to die, but Andrew would also have to murder any of Charles’s children for him to ascend to the throne. Andrew then says, “The Duke of York has history in that department too. Richard III.” The queen, through a forced smile, laughs and says that Andrew is clever.

    • In reality, Richard III was never Duke of York, but was actually the Duke of Gloucester. His father was Duke of York and then the title next went to his elder brother’s son Richard. The young Richard, Duke of York, was one of “The Princes in the Tower” whose disappearance was pinned on Richard. As this show is incredibly well researched, I’m sure this inaccuracy was left in intentionally, to refer to both Andrew’s and the Queen’s relative lack of historical awareness.

  • The segment ends with Andrew asking his mother to ensure that if the conflict in the Falklands proceeds, Andrew is able to serve on the frontlines and isn’t barred from service just because of his role as prince. The Queen heartily agrees. In real life, the British cabinet, nervous about the Queen’s son possibly being killed in action, did ask that Andrew be moved to a desk job for the duration for the conflict. However, the Queen refused, and insisted that Andrew be allowed to remain with his ship, the HMS Invincible. During the war, Prince Andrew served as a helicopter co-pilot and flew on numerous missions.

• Back in 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher is back in her usual power colors and looks much better than she has this entire episode, now that her son is safe and sound. She holds a cabinet meeting in which several of her cabinet members advise against taking military action in the Falklands, pointing out the unpopularity of her administration, the cost of such military action, and the fact that the country is still in a recession. However, Thatcher insists on pressing forward with military action to defend the Falklands. This all appears pretty accurate to real life. She took a big gamble on the Falklands War, which ended up bolstering her image considerably.

• After Margaret asks for Carol to help her prepare dinner for the chiefs of staff, Carol finally stands up to her, confronting her with her obvious favoritism toward Mark and mistreatment of her. Margaret initially denies the favoritism, and then admits to it, claiming that it’s because Carol is weak. They discuss Margaret’s relationship with her mother and father as well; I’ve had a bit of trouble finding information about her father and mother online but will look into this more (probably through an audiobook biography when I get a chance) and update this later.

  • Carol is writing notes at a table, surrounded by papers, when Margaret comes into the apartment. It’s never mentioned in the show, but in real life, Carol actually worked as a journalist, first in Australia and then in the UK. She wrote a book about following her mother around on the campaign trail in 1983, wrote a biography of her father in 1996, and produced a 2003 documentary about him which featured the only public interview he ever gave. She didn’t actually live at 10 Downing Street, but it’s likely that she spent a lot of time there acquiring material for her book about her mother’s campaign, which is what seems to be shown in The Crown. It does seem that she really was there a lot in the run up to the Falklands Invasion, and did indeed help her mother feed her ministers.

  • Unfortunately, it appears that Margaret really did play favorites with her children. Carol spoke about it publicly, saying “I always felt I came second out of two” and “He was always more glamorous. In comparison, I was one-dimensional and dull.”

• The last of the Queen’s private lunches with her children is with Charles at his new home in Highgrove. Charles himself is seen advising on the menu and fussing with the silverware on the table, further emphasizing how particular he is about things (something Camilla commented on in the previous episode). He shouts at Diana through a closed door about how she should come out and have lunch with the Queen, but the heavily pregnant Diana ignores him and watches TV instead (Bagpuss again).

  • Content Warning: Eating disorders, attempted suicide. [italicized]
    
    In real life, Diana had terrible “morning sickness” (hyperemesis gravidarum) and episodes of bulimia throughout her pregnancy with William. She also was dealing with horrible pressure from the press and depression. The depiction of her in The Crown is actually a bit tame here, as in real life, she actually threw herself down the stairs during her pregnancy.
    
    Content Warning end.
    
    In The Crown, Elizabeth says that she was lucky and that pregnancy didn’t seem to affect her. In real life, Elizabeth had some struggles with morning sickness, but nothing even close to the extent of Diana’s hyperemesis.

  • I talked a little bit in the previous episode’s post about how happy Charles-and-Diana seem to be represented by the color blue, while unhappy Diana is shown in yellow. In the scene where Charles is whisper-shouting at Diana through the door, he’s wearing a blue sweater and is surrounded by yellow walls (Remember: it’s Diana who decorated Highgrove). Diana herself is in a white nightgown with a blue floral robe, but clearly ignoring Charles so - she’s still trying at their relationship, but severely disillusioned.
    The Queen is again in her “family” pearls and green. She’s somewhat connected to her eldest son (who changes into a grey double breasted suit with blue shirt and tie), but there’s a big distance still between them. Charles is STILL known for wearing double breasted suits, by the way.

  • Charles shows his mother around the gardens at Highgrove rather pompously, expounding about his many gardens (which Camilla and Diana spoke about in the previous episode) and his plans for the whole place. He states that he wants the house, the land, and the gardens to express who he really is, and what he really is all about (notably never mentioning his wife or his soon to be born child). The Queen gently pokes fun at him, pointing out that his plans seemed perhaps a bit self-involved (“so the big idea is you”). Later, after he expounds on wanting an organic, natural garden, without any straight manicured lines, she playfully notes that the pool has straight lines and that the tennis court didn’t seem particularly organic.

  • Charles even says that he wants Highgrove to be his own Shangri La or Xanadu. Shangri-La is a fictional location described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” and is commonly used to describe an earthly paradise now. Xanadu was a secondary name for Shangdu, the summer capital of the Yuan dynasty of China, which was described in ecstatic terminology in a 1368 poem by Toghon Temur Khan and the 1797 poem “Kubla Kahn” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (which is what Charles begins to recite). These literary references to various paradises pairs nicely with Anne’s earlier description of her own life as “not the Eden you think it is.”

  • Charles then starts to recite poetry, which seems to dismay his mother; she finds an excuse to talk about his wisteria soon afterward and stop him. This is the second time this has happened this season (Margaret Thatcher also recited poetry by Charles McKay to the Queen in S4E2) and also reflects back to Lord Mountbatten’s recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” in S3e5.

A pregnant and miserable Diana in The Crown.

• Over lunch, Charles talks about how unhappy Diana is, and how he doesn’t know how to cheer her up, specifically noting that she grew up in the country, so he thought she’d be happy there. In real life, Diana talked a lot about how much she loved living in the city and disliked HighGrove. This does contrast with what she said in S4E2 “The Balmoral Test” to Prince Philip. But then, she realized at the time that she was being tested, and may have exaggerated or lied about some of her true feelings as to the country.

  • Charles also complains about Diana being intellectually incurious, and not caring about his tutorials in Shakespeare and poetry. This further illustrates their very very different personalities and interests. He also specifically refers to writer Laurens van der Post visiting. In real life, Charles brought several books by Van der Post along on their honeymoon, hoping that they could both read and discuss the books together. This was not exactly Diana’s idea of fun.

  • The Queen rebukes Charles for his self-absorption, his close friendship with Camilla, and the way he’s treating Diana. When he says he talks to Camilla more when he needs cheering up, the Queen distinctly raises her voice at him, sharply saying “When you need cheering up? You’ve just bought your dream house, your Xanadu, that you and an army of sycophants are turning into the living embodiment of your soul. And your young, beautiful wife, struggling with pregnancy, has locked herself in a room upstairs and is refusing to come out. You know how I hate interfering. It’s not for me to tell a grown man what to do. But in your position I might be inclined to worry less about my own happiness and pay a little more attention to the well-being of the mother of my future child.”

  • Charles /almost/ seems to listen to his mother’s advice there, and looks up the staircase toward Diana’s bedroom while thinking, fiddling with his signet ring (remember, he gave Diana a signet ring of her own right before they married). However, he ends up turning away and going off on his own.

• The episode’s main story with the Queen concludes with a few quick scenes. The Queen looking through family photos of her children at younger ages, gazing particularly at pictures of her father holding baby Charles in his arms, Philip (Matt Smith) playing tag with young Charles and Anne, Edward and Andrew as children, and a solemn young Charles dressed in the Eton uniform he tried on before his father decreed he was going to Gordonstoun instead. We then see her meeting with her mother and sister for an emergency talk, although we don’t see the actual conversation (note, all three women wear shades of brown and pearl necklaces in this scene, tying them all together). Finally, it all wraps up with a conversation with Prince Philip. Despite her attempts at subterfuge, Philip has known the whole time that she was meeting with all their children one on one, as they each called him to ask what was going on after receiving her invitations.

  • The Queen concludes that instead of Mark Thatcher, "it's our children that are lost, each in their own deserts." Philip dismisses this at first, saying roughly that Anne isn’t lost. The Queen mildly says that Anne’s marriage is lost, pointedly not revealing the other issues in Anne’s life that have been making her deeply unhappy. He then claims that Edward isn’t lost, but the Queen disagrees, describing him as “entirely lost, and bullied, and vengeful.” Philip agrees that Charles is lost, but says he always has been. She concludes with Andrew (who Philip quietly points out is her favorite), noting “I was shocked,” and then saying with foreboding, “If he doesn’t change…”, leaving the idea hanging in the air.

    • Sources do seem to think that Andrew is the Queen’s favorite child in real life.

    • The actual scene with Andrew is so subtle that I initially was left wondering why the Queen was left so worried about Andrew. I think she’s referring to his delight in freaking her out with the details of his girlfriend’s sexy film, his casual disregard to whether the film itself was legal or not, and his plain avarice and desire to be king, as evinced by his jokes about going Richard III on Charles. It’s all very under the radar and foreshadowy and I don’t think the story line would end with her so concerned about Andrew in 1982 if real life 2020 Andrew weren’t a screwup and possible criminal.

  • She asks Philip what their children’s unhappiness says about them as parents, noting that her mother had excused it by saying she shouldn’t blame herself, as she’s already mother to the nation. Philip agrees, and after hearing out her story about her regrets as a mother, firmly says that she is a perfectly good mother and their children, as adults, must now sort themselves out.

  • In this scene, the Queen is already ready for bed, wearing a nightgown and wearing no makeup, all pretense and pomp swept away as she talks about her regrets as a mother, saying she didn’t know how to be maternal toward Charles when he was a child and so let his nanny bathe him, while she watched. This story is based off of some of Charles’s own stories of his childhood. The underlying theme continues the show’s portrayal of the Queen as not really knowing how to handle emotion, previously discussed in detail in S3E3 Aberfan. Have to say, I really disagree with this line of thought. The queen may have been a bit more distant from her children then she would have liked as a mother, due to her responsibilities as monarch and the traditional child-rearing practices of both the royal family and British upper class society, but there’s never been any sign that she doesn’t know how to express emotion. There are pictures of her looking absolutely distraught at Aberfan, and she’s cried in public on numerous occasions.

  • The whole story overall does really underline the difficulties each royal child was facing in the early 80s, and highlights what Queen Elizabeth really gave up in order to be a good sovereign.

• The episode ends with the British royal navy ships sailing off to the Falklands, carrying not only Queen Elizabeth’s son Andrew, but the children of thousands of other British citizens.

Over-Analyzing The Crown: S4E3 Fairytale

All My Posts on The Crown
S3: 1 & 2: “Olding” & “Margaretology” 3: “Aberfan” 4: “Bubbikins, 5: “Coup” 6: “Tywysog Cymru” 7: “Moondust" 8: “Dangling Man” 9: “Imbroglio” 10: “Cri de Coeur”
S4: 1: “Gold Stick” 2: “The Balmoral Test” 3: “Fairytale” ( + Cinderella References) 4: “Favourites” 5: “Fagan” 6: “Terra Nullius” 7: ”The Hereditary Principle” 8: “48:1” 9: “Avalanche”
The Medals, Sashes, and Tiaras of The Crown; Tiaras/Crowns Overviews: Season 1 ; Season 2

Top: Charles and Diana in The Crown at their wedding rehearsal
Bottom: Real life Diana and Charles

Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown, wearing a recreation of Diana’s wedding dress. The recreation of the dress took four weeks and 600 hours to create. The costume is made of 95 meters of fabric and 100 meters of lace, with a 30 meter train. Although they used different fabric to reduce creasing, the lace of the original wedding dress was recreated exactly. It’s pretty sad that we only saw it on screen for like, maybe a minute, because they did a brilliant job recreating it.

Since I had great fun over-analyzing every episode of Season 3 of The Crown last year, I’m doing the same thing this year! I’ll be /trying/ to write these posts up one episode at a time (although I may watch ahead a bit of my writing), so there won’t be spoilers for any main plot points of any episode except that which I’m covering in the post, although I may point out a little foreshadowing to later strife and such. So if you haven’t watched Season 4 Episode 3 of the Crown yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. :)

Content Warning: Eating Disorders. (I’ll include specific CWs on those portions of the post as well.

Upper left: Charles proposes to Diana on The Crown. Other three photos, Princess Diana in real life.

• Content Warning: Eating Disorders [italicized]
  This episode starts with a content warning about the scenes featuring bulimia nervosa. I’m glad they included this, as these trigger warnings are often very helpful for people in recovery trying to avoid relapse, however, there‘s unfortunately pretty good evidence that it doesn’t help as much as we might hope, particularly for people who are currently battling an eating disorder. This article talks about the issues with trigger warnings for eating disorders in-depth.
  Content Warning end.

• Quick source note: I’ve been referencing Diana’s biography “Diana: Her True Story in her own words” by Andrew Morton a lot. This book is really the closest thing we have to a Diana autobiography, as she authorized it and gave hours of taped interviews for it. We really have to keep in mind though, that Diana’s interviews for it were conducted in the early 1990s, years after most of the events discussed had taken place, and was looking back at everything with the hindsight of knowing that her marriage hasn’t worked out very well. She also very much had an agenda with the book, as she wanted to get her side of the story out into the world so that if she began the process of separating from Charles, she wouldn’t look like the villain. In the original tapes, she never mentioned her own affairs or many of her own faults in the marriage. Although the author did do a lot of outside interviews and research and filled in the gaps around that, the book must ultimately be viewed through a lens of caution to this bias. After I finish that book, I do plan to go read the authorized Prince Charles biography by Jonathan Dimbleby, which was put together under similar circumstances and with similar motives, and come back and fill his viewpoint in a lot of these blogposts.

• The episode starts with a montage of Diana leaving Windsor Castle and all the women in the royal family sitting by their phones, waiting for the news of Charles’s proposal to Diana.

  • We see: The Queen looking at a box of mementos, Princess Margaret getting her nails painted, Queen mother sitting on a couch, and Princess Anne wearing a colorful sweater and sitting on a couch between two large dogs. Their respective phones are all placed very prominently as we see each royal.

  • A mouse runs across the front of the scene featuring the Queen Mother and has become VERY NOTORIOUS ONLINE. The Crown’s official Twitter account even acknowledged it by tweeting “Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series?” in response to someone’s screenshot pointing it out. There’s really no way to know whether the mouse’s cameo was intentional or not, as no one has spoken out about it, but I think it could be either. The relative neglect and decay of the palace has been mentioned before in Season 1 and 2, and it will come up again in a few episodes, when a visitor tells the Queen that the palace has a lot of peeling wall paint and such, so it really might have been a quite indication of that.
    The exact location of the mouse is hard to pinpoint, as it’s not clear where each of the family members are at in this scene, though. Generally during their lives, the Queen Mother lived at Clarence House and Princess Margaret lived at Kensington Palace. Princess Anne lives at her own house in the Gloucestershire, which is further demonstrated in Episode 4. Throughout the year, the Queen lives mainly at Buckingham Palace, is usually at Windsor Castle from March-April and on the weekends, celebrated Christmas/New Year at Windsor for much of her life but now is usually at Sandringham for the winter holidays, and spends her summer holiday at Balmoral. This episode starts in 1981 at Windsor Castle; although there isn’t a month specified, in real life, they got engaged in February. So presumably the Queen was at Buckingham Palace when she got this call.

    • Also, there have been reports of mice at Buckingham Palace.

    • Also Also, I personally like to think that this mouse cameo might be a reference to the Great Mouse Detective, which features a mouse queen who’s based off of Queen Victoria and lives in a palace that likely refers to Buckingham. You can find out more about the inspirations for the mouse queen’s look in one of my blog posts on the crowns and tiaras in Disney films.

  • As Diana drives away, Charles places a toy soldier in his hand by his phone. This seems like a reference to Lord Mountbatten. I feel like toy soldiers have appeared in The Crown before in Seasons 1-2 and I’m just not remembering the exact context. I’ll do a re-watch here soon and try to pinpoint the exact spot. I think there also was a brief moment with a toy soldier in Episode 1 of this season.

• “It’s done. I did it.” - Charles to the Queen. What a romantic way of telling his mother he proposed. He did indeed propose to Diana in the nursery at Windsor Castle. He makes something of a big deal about not getting down on one knee to propose, as “i thought in terms of rank the prince of wales only knelt before the sovereign” (“it's a proposal of marriage dear, not a show of strength"), but in real life, he apparently did get down on one knee. She herself said that she nervously laughed at the request, thinking it was a joke at first, but said “yes.”

  • In the flash back to the proposal itself, Diana wears a red floral dress, and a bright blue cardigan with red, yellow, and blue detailing. Diana wore several red floral dresses in real life with distinctive collars like that. I couldn’t find any cardigan pictures quite like that, but Diana was very well known for wearing bright, often delightfully ridiculous sweaters, like a big koala sweater while she was pregnant.

  • In the biography “Diana: her true story in her own words,” based off of taped interviews with Diana, Diana said that she often said “yes, please” to Charles during their brief courtship, so her saying "yes please" in the show rings pretty true.

  • The entire phone conversation between the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne, makes it clear how relieved they are that he finally proposed but how generally appalled they are by how not romantic it was (“the nursery?”) and Charles’s tone deaf approach to the whole down on one knee question.

  • “Prostitutes and Australians. Isn’t that who lives in Earl’s Court?” Margaret is a delight. Also, apparently there was a pretty large population of Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans living in Earl’s Court at the time. It began to be known as “Kangaroo Valley.” It also was known for having a thriving gay nightlife in the 1970s and 1980s; unfortunately, some of those clubs were known for prostitution, as Margaret astutely notes. The fact that Diana so happily lived in this area of London illustrates an early openness and love of all people. She would later become close friends with numerous gay celebrities, including Elton John and Freddie Mercury (who supposedly took her clubbing dressed in drag to keep her anonymous) and was famous for showing great compassion to AIDS victims and actually hugging them, in a time when people were often terrified of touching anyone with HIV.

• Diana, on her drive back to her flat in London, listens to upside down by Diana Ross, which is all about love messing with your head.

  • I said upside down
    You're turning me
    You're giving love instinctively
    Around and round you're turning me

    Upside down
    Boy, you turn me
    Inside out
    And round and round

• Diana immediately swarmed by reporters and photographers outside her flat as she leaves her car, many more than last episode. She just ignores all their questions. This is both accurate to real life and also sad foreshadowing to her own end. Diana was eventually given a few security officers to protect her, but not until after the engagement announcement and her move into the royal family’s homes. There were considerable complications before that as the press followed her and hounded her everywhere. She was so desperate to escape them that she would play tricks by switching cars with one of her flatmates, or her grandmother, and at least once she climbed out the window.

Top and bottom left photos: Diana on The Crown celebrating her engagement with her friends. Bottom right: Princess Diana (Credit: Tim Graham / Getty).

The entry hall to the Jungle Bar and Nightclub in London, which I’m 99% sure served as the location for the clubbing scene in S4e3. This club is the reimagined, one building over set up of Annabel’s club, where Diana held her hen do in real life.

• Diana celebrates her engagement with her flatmates by dressing up, driving around town, and going dancing at a fabulous looking club that I’m nearly positive is The Jungle Bar and Nightclub in London. This club is actually a redesign of Annabel’s, an exclusive nightclub where Diana had her “hen do” (bachelorette party, for Americans), and is one building over from the original location.

  • Her biography by Andrew Norton said that Diana drove around town but didn’t talk about dancing. You can’t see her dress very well in the club scene but it’s sleeveless, with lots of ruffles, mid-calf length, and appears to be covered in light pastel flowers, mid-calf length. It looks very much like a ballgown she wore in later life.

  • This entire scene is set to the chorus of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen,” which actually came out on her album in July 1981 and as a single in 1982, so later than this scene is set place, but decently contemporary to the events. This is a really symbolic song inspired heavily by the death of Nicks’ uncle Jonathan and the death of John Lennon, which sounds really exciting and energetic and fun, but deals almost entirely with death. It’s yet another song foreshadowing Diana’s spiral and unfortunate end. Nicks has said that the “white winged dove” represents the spirit leaving the body on death. The “ooh baby ooh” section is meant to sound like a dove’s song.
    
    Just like the white winged dove
    Sings a song Sounds like she's singing
    Ooh baby, ooh, said ooh [repeated]

  • The scene ends with her friends uproariously singing “God Save the Queen,” but Diana said in her life that she had a premonition that she’d never become queen, even when Charles proposed.

Diana with her mother, Frances Shand-Kydd, both wearing their similar sapphire rings, at Wimbledon in 1993 (Credit: Daily Mail / Shutterstock).

• The next scene shows “a rather special box of chocolates” of rings for Diana to choose from. She apparently did choose her ring from a selection of them. She initially looks at an oval ruby ring surrounded by small diamonds. The jeweler explains that it’s from the Mogok valley, the queen asks if she knows where that is, and Diana responds “oh i’m rather thick at geography.” The queen promptly says “Burma,” while Charles makes a face and chuckles, illustrating the divide between Charles and Diana which will only become more apparent as the episode and season goes on.

  • Burmese rubies are very popular and known for having a deep red color. They tend to be very rare and expensive. There really are several legends about the rubies in Burma, which the jeweller began to explain before he was interrupted by Diana choosing a different ring.

  • This ruby ring could be a reference to a few different things actually! The most famous burmese ruby in the English royal collection is the controversial Burmese Ruby tiara (much credit to the Court Jeweller for this post and everything I have ever learned about royal tiaras and jewels). Apparently this was made from the Nizam of Hyderabad Tiara, a diamond floral tiara that the queen received as wedding gift, from the Nizam, an Indian monarch who literally told Cartier to let the then-princess choose whatever she wanted from their collections as a wedding gift, much like in this scene with Diana. The tiara was dismantled in the 1970s and combined with another wedding gift, 96 rubies from the people of Burma, to make this tiara. People really liked the previous tiara and were upset at its being taken apart.

  • The ring itself in the show much more resembles a jewel from a different royal family, specifically, Queen Marie-Jose of Italy’s Ruby Ring, which is, in fact, made with a large Burmese ruby. It was offered for sale at auction recently with an estimated value of $5.8-$8.7 million.
    The ruby ring also slightly resembles the ring that Prince Andres later gave his future wife, Sarah Ferguson (Fergie).

  • Diana’s actual ring features an 18-carot oval-cut Sri Lankan sapphire. There is evidence that in real life, Diana did choose the sapphire ring because it reminded her of her mother’s ring and matched her eyes (her reasons given in The Crown) as well. It wasn’t custom made nor was it an heirloom ring, which made it unusual for royal ring (the queen’s ring was designed by Philip, Prince Andrew designed Fergie’s ruby ring, Charles proposed to Camilla with his grandmother’s diamond ring, and Prince Harry designed Meghan Markle’s diamond ring using diamonds that belonged to his mother). Prince William later used his mother’s ring to propose to Kate Middleton.

  • In this scene, Diana is wearing an outfit so similar to her engagement outfit that I initially thought it was the same one! The blue is almost exactly the same color. She’s sporting a pie crust collared shirt that’s very similar to those she wore in real life. She ended up really popularizing that collar style actually.

Upper left: Diana in The Crown looking at her new engagement ring. Upper Left: Princess Diana in a green dress.
Bottom: Princess Diana in various outfits
Left:Credit: Kypros / Getty; Right: Credit: Princess Diana Archive / Getty.

Left: Diana in The Crown, meeting the Royal Family after her engagement. Other photos: Diana in real life.

• Next, the queen’s private secretary Martin Charteris passes on two suggestions from the Queen Mother: 1, that Diana be moved into Buckingham Palace before the engagement announcement to protect her from the media, and 2, that Diana be given some tutorials as to how to behave like a royal. Charteris suggests that the Queen teach Diana how to be a royal, but the Queen says she doesn’t have the time and that Lady Fermoy, Diana’s grandmother and the Queen Mother’s lady in waiting, can do so.

  • She was actually moved to Clarence House the day before the engagement was announced. She was later moved into Buckingham palace before the wedding.

  • I’ll talk about this more later on when we get to the actual “princess lessons,” but Diana said in interviews during her life that she was not given any training or education when she married Charles, although she really could have used it.

  • Note: Martin Charteris retired in 1977, so i’m slightly confused as to why they kept him as the queen’s secretary throughout all of season 3, which goes through 1990 - they must really like the actor!

• We have a quick scene where Diana is hanging out with her flatmates for the last time before moving out and living with the royal family. As she walks down the stairs away from her flatmates, the camera actually spirals down with her. This is the first time this style of shot appears in this episode, but we’ll see it several more times, likely to illustrate her spiral down into her eating disorder. Diana going up and down stairs is also heavily featured throughout the stair, possibly referring to her change in status.

  • Note: Diana actually lived that flat in Earl’s Court, which her parents gave her when she was 18, after she had begged to be allowed to live in London for years.

  • In this scene, Diana says she’ll be on the phone with her friends day and night, which they laugh off, saying she’ll be too busy trying on tiaras and having tea brought to her. This illustrates that even her closest friends had a very “fairy tale” view of what Diana’s life would be like.

• The scene where Diana meets all the family again in a more formal setting than Balmoral, forgets to curtsey to anyone, and then gets overwhelmed by all the rules and starts curtseying to the wrong people, is likely an exaggeration. The Spencer children grew up in a house on the Sandringham estate and regularly spent Christmases with the royal family while they were growing up. Both of Diana’s grandmothers served the Queen Mother (Lady Fermoy served the Queen Mother, as shown in the show, from 1956-1993, and her maternal Grandmother, Countess Spencer, served her from 1937-1972). They probably had royal protocol drilled into them by the time they were very young. Nerves could possibly excuse this though.
  We know that Diana’s brother Charles DID make a similar error to this out of pure nerves at a post-wedding rehearsal party at the palace; he said he just bowed to everyone in sight and ended up accidentally bowing to a waiter (I read this in Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words).

• I couldn’t find a pastel plaid ball gown exactly like that shown in the awkward curtsey scene, but Diana certainly wore several similar outfits.

Left: The Crown. Right: real life (Credit: Reginal Davis / Shutterstock).

Left: The Crown. Right: real life (Credit: Anwar Hussein / Getty).

• The Crown recreates Charles and Diana’s engagement announcement outfits almost perfectly. They also recreate the most famous segment of their engagement interview, in which a reporter asks if they’re in love, Diana says “of course,” and Charles says “whatever love is.” We have a video of the whole fiasco here, at about 7:40 in the video.

  • Diana’s family is never even shown in The Crown at all, except for Sarah in episode 1, but the engagement announcement does introduce her as “The Lady Diana Spencer, daughter of the Earl Spencer and the Honorable Mrs. Shand Kydd.” This is the only discussion we’ll ever see of the fact that Diana’s parents are divorced and had a very acrimonious separation, which involved Diana’s mother leaving her children and losing custody of them entirely. This tense childhood likely fueled her anxiety and mental health issues throughout her marriage and also contributed to her refusal to even consider divorcing Charles for a very long time.

• I can’t find a screenshot from the Crown’s scene showing Diana saying good bye to Charles at the airport in the rain, but she wears a red velvet jacket with another piecrust collar shirt that’s tremendously similar to outfits she wore in real life. I did find a screenshot from another scene showing Diana in a outfit, with a green coat however, and have included that above side by side with photos of the real life Diana. Their conversation at the airport echoes their conversation after the opera in Episode 2, when Charles shrugs off the length of his trip away and Diana points out that their separation will be very long to her. This further illustrates that she’s much more attached to him than he was to her.

  • The Crown makes it look like the engagement was very short and that Charles was away on his trip almost the entire time, coming back only shortly before the wedding. In real life, Diana actually went on a trip to Australia immediately after Charles proposed in early February (he said later that he wanted to give her time to think about it if she didn’t want to say yes or no immediately), their engagement was announced in late February, and the two went to several public events together before their wedding happened in July 1981.

  • Charles tells Diana as they part that he’s asked Camilla to get in touch with her; Diana is already aware that Camilla is his ex, but doesn’t seem to realize how close they are yet. Charles seems to be trying here, but doesn’t seem to understand why Diana might not want to meet her or spend time with her, because after all “she's great fun...she's the best company.”

Left: Diana in The Crown, starting her princess lessons which absolutely did not happen in real life. Right: Diana in real life.
Bottom Right: Credit Julian Parker / Getty

Upper left: Diana in The Crown, watching news coverage about children making her congratulatory cards. Other photos: Diana in real life. Bottom Left: Credit Tim Graham / Getty

• Honestly, the thing I despise most about this episode are these princess lesson scenes. These in no way happened. Diana spoke several times in real life about how she was thrown into the deep end of royal protocol and public appearances without any education or preparation. She also specifically noted that she was never given any training in public speaking. People have said that The Crown was deeply unfair to the royal family in this season, but honestly, I think they’re actually being a bit too nice in this sequence. The royals may not have realized how unfair this was to Diana at the time, as they were just a bit oblivious and likely thought her background as a noblewoman had already readied her for this sort of thing. Thankfully, the royals have really really worked to learn from their mistakes with Diana and gave considerable training AND additional security to both Kate Middleton (Prince William’s wife) and Meghan Markle (Prince Harry’s wife) before their weddings.
  But yeah. These sequences where Diana’s grandmother trained her in royal protocol, public speaking, and the way that the royal household is run, are pure invention. They more resemble the plot of The Princess Diaries than real life. They’re most useful in showing how much Diana had to learn when she married Charles and how hard it all was on her, but the very fact that she DIDN’T get any of these lessons in real life only underlines how tough those early days were on her. I’m not going to get into royal protocol or expectations here, as there are a ton of them, but this article from Harper’s Bazaar talks about a lot of them (I should also note that things have definitely loosened up since the Queen Mother’s death and a lot of these rules aren’t really enforced anymore).

  • This sequence also does seem to indicate Diana’s rough relationship with Lady Fermoy. As I’ve noted previously, in real life, Lady Fermoy actually mildly advised against Diana marrying Charles, as she didn’t think the royal life would suit her. We don’t know the full details of what happened between them, but apparently Diana was not on speaking terms with her grandmother when Lady Fermoy died in 1993.

  • The plaid outfit Diana’s wearing in some of these scenes is very similar to ones she wore in real life.

  • This episode features a lot of quick shots of Diana looking at portraits around the Palace in awe, probably imagining her new life. In this scene, she’s looking at Queen Victoria’s coronation portrait. Victoria became queen when she was only 18 and married when she was 20/21, about Diana’s age at the time of her marriage (although I should note that Victoria’s husband was about her same age and they seemed to overall have a very happy marriage).

• We have a lot of Diana Montage scenes coming up next, which I’ll run through quickly:

  • A lot of these scenes and in between moments really emphasize how alone Diana feels in her apartments at the palace, a stark contrast to the happy jollity shown in the scenes at her flat in Earl’s Court.

  • The next morning, Diana wakes up to Vienna by Ultravox playing as her alarm clock, which is a song written about a holiday romance with a dark tone. It’s only a very brief snippet, but the lyrics we hear are: “The music is weaving. …The image has gone, only you and I. It means nothing to me.”

  • Diana (once again shown with a portrait of young Queen Victoria, this time, wearing her wedding dress) appears in a white pie crust collar shirt with black ribbon tie to receive and start reading through all her post. She’s shown writing a letter to at least one person. In real life, Diana apparently did write lots of letters.

  • The dance lesson sequence kind of makes it look like Diana isn’t enjoying herself and is forced into it, as she has sort of a forced smile on her face, but in fact, she specially requested that the dance teacher and piano player come to the palace for lessons, as ballet helped her deal with stress. I couldn’t find any real life photos of Diana in dance costume that seemed legitimate (there are a few photos floating around claiming to be Diana as a teenager in a leotard doing ballet, but I couldn’t find a reliable source and her hair was dark brown rather than light brown, so I elected not to share those here, as I somewhat suspect they’re actually of one of her sisters). However, she did do ballet in school and really loved it, sneaking out of her dorm at night to go dance as stress relief. She also taught ballet for a while until a ski accident put her out of commission for several months. I did find some photos of her working out in a leotard and with several dance groups though.

  • Diana watching television alone as the news reports about elementary school children sending her wedding cards. She’s wearing her notorious “black sheep sweater,” which real life Diana wore several times in public over the years.

  • Diana listens to Girls on Film by DuranDuran on a tape deck as she skates around the palace. Diana definitely roller bladed in her life, but I’m unsure whether she would have roller skated inside a palace. Apparently there is evidence that she rode her bicycle around the palace though, so - maybe! She skates past the throne room and ends up stopping and looking at yet another painting of Queen Victoria (I figured it out it was this one) as grand soundtrack chords overpower Duran Duran, indicating her thoughts.
    This Duran Duran song really speaks to the situation, as it was inspired by the dark side of glitz and glamor. The song’s music video was actually quite controversial as the time, as they made it with lots of nudity with the idea that it would just be played in nightclubs, but then it showed up on MTV (with the nudes removed) and pissed everyone off.

    • This continues the trend of often using vaguely foreboding songs when Diana is around.

    • The actual lyrics in the show are:
      And I sense a rhythm humming in a frenzy
      All the way down her spine

      Girls on film [repeat several times]

  • Another scene of Diana sitting alone in her apartments looking anxious, looking out the window.

  • Diana meeting and learning all the staff titles with her grandmother, wearing a light blue floral vest and matching skirt with a white shirt.

  • Diana watching more footage of her wedding and trying to contact Prince Charles’s private secretary, then the Queen, and unable to reach anyone. The congratulatory flowers in her apartment are starting to multiply and become really apparent in this scene.

  • Content Warning: Eating Disorders [italicized]
    
    Another spiral staircase scene, as Diana runs down the stairs in her pajamas and a pale yellow robe to the kitchen, where she stress eats several desserts and then throws them up later. This is the first sign we’ve seen of her bulimia in the show. Diana claimed that her bulimia was sparked by Charles putting his hands on her waist during their engagement and saying something along the lines of “oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?”
    
    Content Warning End.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Middle: Diana with Prince Harry as a child. Right: Diana roller roller blading.
Middle credit Time Graham / Getty.

Upper left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Upper right: Diana working out in real life. Bottom pictures: Diana meeting various dancers. Bottom right credit Princess Diana Archive / Getty.

• Diana, bored in her apartments, starts to watch a children’s cartoon, Bagpuss, barely looking up as multiple carts of post (mail) are brought into her apartment, along with more flowers. The bouquets continue to multiply in her apartment rather ominously.

  • Bagpuss was a children’s show that aired only 13 episodes in the 1970s. This scene again underlines Diana’s young age and despair.

• Diana calls a friend and walks around her apartment, where flowers now appear all around, on every surface and in every frame. She tells her friend that she hasn’t heard from Charles in three weeks. “I get letters from people all over the world but nothing, not a squeak, from the man I'm supposed to marry.” In real life, Diana said that she received a bouquet of flowers from Charles, but the lack of a note on it indicated to her pretty clearly that it was sent by Charles’s staff, not him personally. She finds a note from Camilla Parker Bowles and hangs up on her friends abruptly, without a goodbye. We get magnificent screechy horror strings music in the background as well.

Left: Emma Corrin as Diana in The Crown. Other Photos: Diana in real life.

Top: The Crown; Bottom: Real Life.

• She goes to lunch with Camilla at a place literally called Ménage à trois, which is a bit on the nose, huh? (a Ménage à trois is an arrangement in which three people have a sexual relationship). My husband pointed out that the restaurant has a French name but that the waiter speaks to them in Italian, which is weird. This was ACTUALLY a real restaurant that opened in London which only served starters and puddings, just like the one in the show.

  • Diana is dressed in a skirt suit in a pale yellow color, which contrasts a very feminine, young color with a more grown up silhouette. Camilla is in a very grown up looking black suit. These clothes resemble outfits their real life counterparts wore, but their juxtaposition highlights their age difference. Diana is barely 20 at this point in the story, while Camilla is 33 (actually a year older than Charles).

  • Apparently to heighten the tension and awkwardness of this scene, the director brought in the actor who plays Charles and had him sit between the women as they rehearsed their scene. He told the women, “only one of you can put your hand on his,” and Emerald Fennell (who plays Camilla) immediately put her hand on Josh O’Connor’s and kept it there the whole time. This ended up really making the actors feel Charles’s presence, even though he’s not there in the final scene.

  • I have a small theory that this season, with Diana and Charles, blue and yellow are important colors (these are both represented in the Prince of Wales’ seal, which is on a ring that Charles gives to Diana later in this episode). Once they’re a couple, they both wear blue when they are in harmony and their marriage is going well; Diana’s dissatisfaction with her relationship is represented by her wearing yellow. This trend won’t really become apparent until later in the season, but I think it’s noticeable that she’s wearing yellow in this particular scene, when she begins to realize how little she knows Charles and how very very close he and Camilla are. She also was wearing a yellow robe in the scene where she begins to binge and purge.

  • I think I’ve mentioned this before, but both Camilla and her husband were at Balmoral on the first weekend Diana spent there, so she had already met them in real life.

  • Conversation highlights indicating how very odd and specific Charles is:

    • "He's so fussy and set in his ways. He'll love it if you adapt to him."

    • Camilla reveals that Charles doesn’t eat lunch, as it’s supposed to be good for his health to only have two meals a day. This is true, and also finally explains Anne’s thrown off comment that “he doesn’t eat lunch anymore” in S4E1. It’s also rumored that Charles really does eat a soft boiled egg with everything.

    • "You know how he surrounds himself with old men and daddy substitutes." As was revealed in Season 2 and S4E1, Charles does NOT have a good relationship with his father Philip, and latched on to Lord Mountbatten as an elder “daddy substitute” figure. This is pretty accurate to real life as well.

    • Charles and Camilla really did call each other Gladys and Fred, names drawn from The Goon Show. Camilla didn’t tell this to Diana though; Diana figured it out from Charles’ friends and various notes he left behind.

    • When they banter about who should take the check and Camilla finally agrees to go Dutch, she says “I’m all for sharing, “ which again, is a bit on the nose, y’all.

    • Immediately after the lunch with Camilla, Diana retches in her apartments at the palace.

• The incident where Diana found drawings of a bracelet with “Fred and Gladys” and “GF” on them on Charles’s secretary’s desk is pretty close to what happened in real life (Note: Diana is wearing yellow again in this scene!). In real life, Diana found the actual bracelet, with the initials “GF” on it. Just as the secretary in the show won’t answer who the bracelet is for, one of Charles’s servants wouldn’t answer Diana’s questions about it in real life.

  • Right after this scene, we get another spiral scene, of Diana running up the stairs to her apartment, where she is completely SURROUNDED BY FLOWERS, and after being told the Queen is unavailable, has a bit of a breakdown, pushing things off a table and putting her face in her hands in frustration.

  • In real life, Diana also determined before the wedding that she really should call it off. She told her sisters this, but they joked that her face was already on the tea towels, so she was stuck.

• In the next scene, Diana dances first sedately and then more energetically and improvisationally to Elton John’s “Song for Guy,” which is a mainly instrumental song released in 1978. Elton John said later that he wrote this song while thinking about death; he was told the next day that Guy Burchett, his 17-year-old messenger boy, had been tragically killed on his motorcycle the day before. It’s one of the only few songs written by Elton John alone and only includes a few words at the end, which are simply “Life isn’t everything” repeated over and over again. Again, lots of foreboding music used when Diana is around. By the end of the scene, the music is drowned out by more somber instrumental music and Diana collapses on the floor.

  • Diana said in “Diana: Her True Story in her Own Words” that she often danced in the large hall at her family’s home in Althorpe, surrounded by large paintings. This scene seems to echo that.

  • Actress Emma Corrin asked if she could make up her own dance in this scene to Cher’s “Believe” (rather than choreographing anything in particular) and the director agreed to allow her to do it. Of course, that song isn’t period appropriate, so they changed it out in post-production, but the song definitely seems to help the actress’s sense of fun and energy come out. Corrin has also said that she’s a terrible dancer, so she was pretty nervous when she found out how large a role dancing played in Diana’s life.

  • Diana was close friends with Elton John in real life. He re-wrote and recorded “Candle in the Wind” in her honor after her death in 1997, which became a hit and raised lots of money for her charities.

• Charles gets back into the country and we see him going to see Camilla first thing. We only see the aftermath of their meeting the next morning, as she's smoking a cigarette.

• “I vow to thee my coutnry,” a patriotic hymn set to “Thaxted” by Gustav Holst (also known as the hymn melody from Holst’s “The Planets”), which plays in the background as Charles arrives at his wedding rehearsal, was actually sung at their wedding. Diana requested the song especially, saying that it had always been a favorite of hers. It was also sung at her funeral.

Top: Various views of Princess Margaret in The Crown in episode 3.
Bottom: Various views of Princess Margaret in real life wearing similar silhouettes and colors. Credit L to R: Central Press / Getty, PA / Getty, Tim Graham / Getty

Top: Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother in The Crown.
Bottom: The royal family at Charles and Diana’s wedding, with Anne, Margaret, and the Queen Mother all visible in a row at the left (Credit: Bettmann / Getty).

• As Charles arrives at their wedding rehearsal at St. Paul’s Cathedral (with lots of crowds cheering outside), Diana sits in the corner quietly freaking out. When he arrives, she stands and quietly but angrily confronts him - asking why he went straight to Gloucestershire and saying that she found the bracelet and knows about “Gladys.” Princess Margaret looks at them with a worried face.

  • They’re wearing basically exactly what they wore in real life.

  • Charles claims that the bracelet was made as a farewell gift, a souvenir, and also states that he went to Gloucestershire to tell Camilla face to face that it’s over, and also to pick up a signet ring for Diana.

  • All the scenes with Charles and Diana in St. Paul’s are shot with the cathedral just towering all around them, illustrating how small they really are in the grand scheme of things in the royal family.

  • In the rehearsal itself, the traditional wedding service is read out, pointing out that marriage should not be entered into unadvisedly. or lightly. Princess Margaret in the background grows increasingly concerned looking, clearly thinking about her own marriage and divorce.

• That night, Prince Philip arrive at the palace and asks how the rehearsal went. The Queen notes that she and the Queen Mother that that it was lovely, but Margaret disagrees. Margaret than logically points out that Charles is in love with somebody else and asks, “How many times can this family make the same mistake. Forbidding marriages that should be allowed. forcing others that shouldn't. Paying the consequences each time.” Philip responds: “He's marrying Diana." Margaret: “But he's still in love with the other one.”

  • Margaret’s words, of course, refer to several situations: Edward VIII abdicating the throne so that he can marry divorcee Wallis Simpson, Margaret herself being forced to choose between her lover Peter Townsend and her royal status, Charles being unable to marry Camilla, and the current situation of Charles being forced to marry Diana, who he barely knows.

  • The argument continues: Philip argues, "The older Diana gets, the more confident Diana becomes, the more beautiful Diana becomes, and she will - the more Charles will fall in love with her - and this will all be fine." Margaret, “in the meantime he juggles them both?" Queen Mother: "That's how it works. That's how it’s always worked." Margaret, the only one talking reason: "That's madness - we have to stop them now - not just for the sake of the monarchy but for them as human beings.”

  • We have no evidence that any of these conversations happened before the wedding. It does seem that both Diana and Charles wanted to call off the wedding beforehand, but it’s unclear whether they brought these concerns to anyone in the royal family itself.

• As celebratory fireworks go off ominously in the background, sounding honestly more like gun shots, the Queen goes to talk to Charles, who is gazing out a window alone and looking extremely miserable. His face looks terribly gaunt and his eyes are all sunken.

  • To encourage Charles, the Queen tells him the story of Mary, who was meant to marry her prince charming, but alas, after he died, ended up having to marry his younger brother, “prince charmless,” noting that there was no attraction between the two of them and certainly no love. But the two focused on their duty to their country, and “worked and worked and worked, and out of that work a tiny seed grew, a seed of respect and admiration, a seed that grew into a flower they could eventually call love.” She ends the story by noting that they were married for 42 years, stabilized a country “that was at war with itself”, while all around them great monarchies fell (here, she likely is referring to World War I, which featured many British royals and descendants of British royals on both sides of the war).

    • Reminder: we saw Mary in the first season of The Crown, as she was the mother of Elizabeth’s father.

    • I don’t know how accurate this story is, honestly. Vanity Fair did a recent roundup of awkward royal engagements that portrayed the relationship between Mary and her two princes very differently, indicating that her original fiance Eddy was actually much more awkward and odd and that Mary preferred his younger brother George from the start. By all accounts though, they did have a long happy marriage, her husband never took a mistress (although his father had had MANY), and they constantly wrote to each other while apart.

  • “I cannot claim to be the most intuitive mother, but i do know when one of my children is unhappy. Whatever wretchedness you feel now, whatever doubts you feel now, if you could follow the example of your great grandmother, love and happiness will surely follow." - The Queen to Charles.

    • I feel like this sort of advice was predicated on the idea that both Charles and Diana would be mature, responsible, and respectful to themselves, their duties, and each other, and honestly, neither of them really did a very good job with that.

• On the morning of the wedding, Diana is no longer surrounded by flowers at least. She looks at her engagement and signet rings carefully and fingers them thoughtfully, like Charles did with his toy soldier at the beginning of the episode. A radio broadcast plays in the background discussing the weather for the day.

  • Note: The Emmanuels, who designed Diana’s wedding dress, actually made a little umbrella to go with it, but the dress’s material would have done Very Badly in the rain and had a gigantic skirt and train that wouldn’t have fit under the umbrella, so honestly, they’re really lucky it didn’t rain. We also see sevearl shots of the huge crowds outside the palace and along the wedding parade route.

• As the episode draws to a close, we see all the royal women we saw at the beginning of the episode waiting for a phone call with engagement news now getting ready for the wedding. Anne and Margaret look miserable, although the Queen Margaret and the Queen look fairly happy. They’re all dressed in outfits extremely similar to what they wore in real life.

  • I wonder at the focus on the royal women. The montage does move on to show Philip, Charles, and Diana all getting ready for the wedding, but the fact that the episode starts and ends with a focus on four royal women is…very interesting. Is it meant to show something about all the relationship sacrifices they made for the monarchy? From all reports the Queen Mother’s marriage was happy, and although Elizabeth and Philip had some issues, they’ve been pretty good, but Anne and Margaret’s marriages both ended in divorce (Anne has remarried since and seems much happier), so they two in particular seem to really realize the situation that Charles and Diana are getting into.

  • Philip looks at his wife after they’re both ready for the wedding, smiles, and then walks away away. They have a friendship and a sweetness to them that I appreciate, but I miss the passion they showed in earlier seasons. The show doesn’t even bother to portray them as romantic beings for the vast majority of this season, which I dislike. There’s like one moment in the fourth episode where the Queen leaves her door open and Philip asks if it was a signal for him to come in, and the Queen instantly shoots him down and says she just wants to talk, which…./sigh/

Upper left, the design of Diana’s dress by the Emmanuels (Credit: Central Press / Getty). Lower left, the dress in The Crown. Right: Charles and Diana on their actual wedding day (Credit: Mirrorpix / Getty).

Left: Charles in The Crown. Right: Charles in real life (Credit: Express Newspapers / Getty).

• The episode ends with the words of the archbishop on their wedding day, over shots of Diana and Charles getting ready. The words of the service would be so very on point if the couple was actually right for each other and loved each other and were willing to wok together, but as it is, it just underlines the sadness of the actual story.

  • “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made. A prince and princess on their wedding day. But fairytales usually end at this point with the simple phrase, ‘They lived happily ever after.' As husband and wife live out their vows, loving and cherishing one another, sharing life’s splendors and miseries, achievements and setbacks, they will be transformed in the process. Our faith sees the wedding day not as the place of arrival, but the place where the adventure really begins.”

  • The IMDB page for this episode doesn’t list any credits for the archbishop, so I believe this last bit was actually taken from the actual audio of their wedding.

  • The creators of the show have said a few times that they didn’t feel the need to show the wedding itself, as it was an extremely documented event at the time. You can actually watch the whole ceremony online and look through their wedding program as well.