They’ve got to find something to fill the time.Įxcept the problem also lies in how The Crown chooses to spend its time. The Crown is a lengthy series about a monarch whose primary action is choosing to do very little, so … yeah. We’ve heard nothing at all about her since, even in this episode designed almost entirely around Churchill’s self-reflection.) We already had an entire episode about him realizing he’s well past his prime, although The Crown needed to literally kill a bright young woman to bring him to this revelation. The Crown is all about the transition from one outdated paradigm into something more modern, and much of this season has focused on Elizabeth’s struggle to take up the mantle of an ancient tradition that doesn’t fit a modern context. The thematic relationships are there, I suppose. And it takes up a huge chunk of this episode, occupying a great deal more space than Churchill’s relationship with Elizabeth. It is not particularly effective as a portrait of the monarchy, or Elizabeth, or even a broader portrait of leadership. It would have been an excellent sequence for a series about the life of Winston Churchill, or Churchill’s latter days, or the prime-ministership, or maybe even Parliament after World War II. The most important aspect comes through clearly: Churchill couldn’t understand his own preoccupation with the pond, a reminder that others see us much better than we do. The whole business with Churchill’s obsession with painting the goldfish pond and his grief for his daughter is done well, too. His portrait sittings are themselves a fascinating portrait, and you can watch his face shift from politeness to reluctance, then into sorrow and anger. He bounces nimbly from nostalgia to fury, alternately raging against the unavoidable ravages of age and sinking into them with resignation. Lithgow’s performance of Churchill is pretty much everything you could want. It’s hard to make someone’s inaction look like a willful act, and The Crown has done so remarkably well.īut then we get an episode like “Assassins,” which knits together a lot of appealing stuff in a way that I still wish it wouldn’t. The series is especially strong when it depicts Elizabeth’s self-abnegation as a choice, as a point of agency. The more of Elizabeth we see - the more she grapples with the issues she’s inherited, the media, and her family - the better this story gets. For the most part, though, The Crown has avoided many of those missteps. A scene that depicts Princess Margaret’s terribly uninformed speech about British imperialism in Africa doesn’t also have to suggest the same basic orientation in the series as a whole. A story can be about a masculine world without necessarily re-creating the power dynamics of that world. Of course, that’s just history: Elizabeth has been operating within a male sphere her entire life.īut there are other ways to tell this story, which is something The Crown has failed to do on a number of fronts. In the episodes since, we’ve seen Elizabeth working within, being influenced by, and generally stuck in a hypermasculine world. John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, Claire Foy as Elizabeth.Īt the beginning of The Crown, I wrote about my frustration that the series often places Elizabeth inside a narrative framed by men.
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