The trailer to the sixth and final series of The Crown certainly packs in the symbolism and yes, it’s all about Diana. Played again by Elizabeth Debicki, the Princess appears in the preview reel among much foreboding imagery and visual metaphors.
There’s Diana sitting on a diving board off the back of a luxury yacht, looking like she has been made to walk the plank. There’s her walking through an actual minefield, as she did as part of an anti-landmine campaign in early 1997. And there’s also a scene where she’s playing some plaintive notes on a grand piano, her face reflected by its black wooden open lid.
The trailer also shows her getting into a car outside a Paris hotel and being harassed by motorcycle-riding paparazzi. But as the show’s creator Peter Morgan told Variety, that will be as far as it goes depicting that night. “Oh, God, we were never going to show the crash. Never.”
The Crown’s sixth season consists of 10 episodes. The first four arrive this month and the remaining six will air in December.
The first quartet will be about the last months in the life of the Princess who died in August 1997, her six-week relationship with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) who also died in the crash, and the upheavals after her death.
The era brings Morgan full circle. His 2006 movie, The Queen, plus his later play, The Audience, acted as a proof-of-concept for the Netflix show. Helen Mirren won an Oscar for her role as Queen Elizabeth in the hit film, which covered the royal family’s failure to read the public mood in the wake of Diana’s death and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s urging of the Queen to acknowledge the loss.
No one portrayed Diana in the film, but she has been part of The Crown since Emma Corrin played her in the fourth season. There has inevitably been British newspaper grumblings about dramatising Diana’s demise and tabloid reports revealing that she appears as a “ghost” to the Queen and Prince Charles.
She does talk from beyond the grave, says Morgan, but the show isn’t taking a leap into the supernatural.
“I never imagined it as Diana’s ‘ghost’. It was her continuing to live vividly in the minds of those she has left behind. Diana was unique and I suppose that’s what inspired me to find a unique way of representing her. She deserved special treatment narratively.”
The final six episodes will focus on the Queen and Prince Charles, and the series ends with the 2005 marriage of Charles and Camilla. Morgan said he rewrote the ending after the Queen’s death last year.
“We’d all been through the experience of the funeral. So, because of how deeply everybody will have felt that, I had to try to find a way in which the final episode dealt with the character’s death, even though she hadn’t died yet.”
The post-Diana episodes also feature storylines featuring the Princes William and Harry and the former’s university days’ courtship of Kate Middleton. The disgraced Prince Andrew, who has barely figured in past seasons, won’t be any more prominent this time. “Haven’t gone anywhere near him,” says Morgan.
Among other notable events of the period, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother both died in 2002, the same year that Queen Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee.
She was, of course, to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee 20 years later, before her death last year.
By the time the sixth season finishes, some 60 hours of television would have been dedicated to the Queen and her descendants covering nearly 60 years of her life. The Crown might be the biggest and most expensive multi-generational family saga in screen history and it has required three actresses to play her. But in a way, its chief subject still managed to outlast it.
The Crown Season Six Part 1 streaming on Netflix from November 16. Part 2 from December 14.
