Not gonna lie, I’m looking forward to finishing Matt Smith’s episodes of The Crown next week, after which I definitely plan to take a break from the show. It’s a bummer, because I enjoyed it quite a bit at first, there continue to be strong moments in it, and I’d had good recommendations from people whose TV choices I trust, but for me, it just hasn’t lived up to its early potential.
Elizabeth is keen to follow advice to send young Charles to Eton for school, but Philip won’t hear of it. He’s insistent that Charles attend the same boarding school he did as a child, the school in Scotland that “made [him] a man.” He’s concerned that Charles is soft, you see, and needs toughening up. Charles’s time at the school is interspersed with flashbacks of Philip, and we learn more about his experiences there.
Before we get too far into things, I have to apologize to Greg Wise (a.k.a. the man who gave the greatest Jane Austen Cad performance to date when he played Mr. Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility.) This whole time, I thought he was playing Phillip’s dad, but it turns out he’s actually Phillip’s uncle – I was confused in an early scene when Charles addresses to a letter to him as “Dear Uncle Dickie,” so I had to Google it and figure out what the actual situation was. Philip’s dad isn’t around, so that at least partly explains my confusion, but it’s also highly possible that I wasn’t paying close enough attention (side note: I was aware that Philip refers to him as Dickie, but I guess I’d figured that it was just reflective of an arms-length relationship between them, not that Dickie wasn’t Philip’s father. Whoops!)
To say that Charles (as well as young Philip in the flashbacks) goes through a time of it in this episode puts it mildly. As a thoroughly unathletic child who never had to deal with toxic-masculinity expectations on top of that, I feel for the kid as he struggles to live up to his father’s dreams for him when that’s not who he is. Alos, I have a soft spot for stories in which the servants of the ultra-wealthy know/care about them more than anyone else, and this episode delivers heartbreaking notes of that with Charles and his bodyguard.
And Philip. Oh, Philip. I will say that the flashbacks shed some more light on his childhood, in which he experienced some wildly messed-up stuff, and that invites at least a little sympathy. But man, here we see him 1) trying to force his young son to endure some of the same torment he went through in the name of teaching him about “the real world” while simultaneously 2) trying to compete with his young son over which of them had the more traumatic childhood? Dude, come on – being a caring father has been one of your most consistently-good qualities on the show, and now your insecure ego has messed with that too.
He also has the audacity to come down so hard on Elizabeth’s desire to send Charles to Eton. Not that he isn’t entitled to a different opinion or that it’s not worth a discussion between the two of them. But the way he comes at it, all, “I’m sorry, I was given to understand that this marriage would have at least some semblance of equality,” is just beyond. As if this guy hasn’t been running around largely doing whatever he wants for the last two seasons, constantly criticizing and undercutting his wife the queen while only doing the bare minimum to make her job less difficult when he can bother to care or be shamed into it. He can take several seats with that. (I know I said before that Philip started bothering me less when I stopped having any hope that he’d improve, but that’s how much of a putz he is in this episode.)
All that said, Matt Smith is pretty damn good
here. One thing that I can appreciate about this performance is that, however
inexplicable I find Philip and his
clueless/obnoxious actions, Smith always makes it clear that Philip’s actions
make perfect sense to himself. He’s especially good in a few scenes toward the
end, one where he’s at the school for a special presentation and another where
he’s badly attempting a heart-to-heart with Charles during a tense situation,
and Smith completely sells everything that Philip is feeling.
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