"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Other Doctor Lives: The Crown: Season 1, Episode 3 – “Windsor” (2016)


As I mentioned last week, most of my knowledge of the British monarchy comes from movies, and when it comes to this show, it’s nice that I’ve already seen The King’s Speech. Even though The Crown focuses on a different era and a different monarch, the events of The King’s Speech lend important context to what’s happening in the story and help some of the plots hit home better for me.

The royal family prepares for George VI’s funeral, which puts them back in touch with the late king’s older brother David, who’s been abroad after abdicating the throne and ceding responsibility to George VI. David regards himself as an exile who’s been thrown over by the family for the crime of falling in love, while his sister-in-law the Queen Mother thinks David unfairly thrust his own duty onto her husband, consigning him to an early grave. Elizabeth tackles her first days as queen, finding Churchill and his cabinet attempting to manage her on one side, and to a lesser extent Philip on the other.

I feel like the “Wallis and Edward/David” stuff would’ve come across clearly enough in the episode as is, but again, having the background on the two brothers from The King’s Speech gave me a jump on this, and as soon as someone mentions David coming back to England for the funeral, I realized it was going to go down. All this drama plays well, with both sides entrenched in their own perceptions of what happened back then and what’s happened since. Elizabeth is a bit stuck in the middle, not wanting to instantly tar her uncle with the brush her mother uses but at the same time not quickly accepting his “poor old me, I’ve been so cast out” routine either.

Elizabeth navigating uncertain waters is the main theme of this episode. We see it with the family stuff, and we definitely see it with her and Churchill. Right from the start, as the young queen attempts to get off on the right foot with the aging prime minister, he moves to run roughshod over her. He “kindly” corrects her “mistakes,” doesn’t let her get a word in edgewise, and intimates that she’ll need considerably more time than her father to get her bearings, planning to push out her coronation for more than a year. Even though it’s obvious that Elizabeth isn’t a weak or incapable person, he kind of makes her feel like one, and she has to learn to adapt to break through Churchill’s blustery way of “this is how we’ve always done things.” (Side note: I think I’m coming around to John Lithgow as Churchill. I’m settling into his performance more as the season goes on.)

And, unfortunately, we see Elizabeth having to do the same sort of work with Philip, who seems to be having a “two steps forward, one step back” approach to being the queen’s husband. Here, he has some unrealistic expectations about what their lives are going to be like moving forward, and he tries to set the terms without ever really 1) checking in with how she feels about that or 2) considering that, as queen, there may be certain things required of Elizabeth regardless of what she may or may not wish. He doesn’t come off particularly well here.

Although I understand the expected gender roles of the time and how Philip is struggling to recontextualize his place in the household, it’s also frustrating to watch. During this episode, I couldn’t help but think, “Elizabeth was already her father’s heir when Philip married her – he knew she’d be queen eventually. How did he think this was going to look?” But maybe that’s the key. Maybe his notions of marriage and family are so set (even unconsciously so) that it never did occur to him that he can’t be married to the queen and expect that his life will only change to the extent that he wants it to. Matt Smith plays it well, and Philip comes across like a person rather than a Symbol of the Patriarchy or whatever, but I do hope he starts getting his head around this a little more. Elizabeth is up against a lot and will need support, and as George VI informs Philip in the pilot, that’s his most important job now.

I can’t remember if he popped up at all before this (at the wedding in the pilot, I suppose,) but this episode also gives us some longer scenes with Philip’s father, and I realized where I know him from: it’s Greg Wise, Mr. Willoughby from the Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet version of Sense and Sensibility!

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