“The Crown” PEOPLE Review: It's the Final Chapter for the Netflix Windsors

The acclaimed Netflix drama brings in a new William, Harry and Kate for its final episodes

The Crown, a show known for dramatizing the private history of the Windsors with politely inventive panache, veered off course into magical realism when the first four episodes of the final season began streaming last month.

In the fourth hour, Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki), lately dead in Paris, returned in spectral form to share some hard-earned home truths with both Charles (Dominic West) and Queen Elizabeth herself (Imelda Staunton).

Now, Netflix has begun streaming the six remaining episodes, bringing the series to a close with Charles's marriage to Camilla in 2005. Not too surprisingly, the show devotes a fair amount of time to Princes William and Harry (Ed McVey and Luther Ford), both of whom are on the verge of adulthood and already growing sick of each other.

The older royals, meanwhile, are on the verge of joining Princess Diana — and if she was allowed to play fast and loose with eternity, why can’t they?

Princess Margaret (Lesley Manville) makes a dream-like cameo moments after her 2002 death, in which she chats with her younger selves. The episode detailing her physical decline and last days is wrenching, and so is Manville's performance.

Elizabeth, still in vigorous good health but rattled by having to plan her own funeral, has a solemn, visionary glimpse of the casket that she’ll someday inhabit. There are even several scenes in which she has chats with her younger selves, played by Claire  Foy and Olivia Colman. It could be the Buckingham Players production of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women.

Like Diana’s visits from the beyond, these moments are a dramatic cheat — an easy way to dress up the story with some sentimental plushness — and not really worthy of this unstintingly great series, or the no-nonsense Elizabeth. If there’s such a thing as an interior castle, she probably didn’t want hers lined with the emotional equivalent of flocked velvet wallpaper.  But maybe viewers do as it’s a very sad thing to have to say goodbye to The Crown.

Foy, Colman and Staunton formed a tremendous acting triumvirate, and to see them united here stirs up both admiration and nostalgia. It’s also important to remember that of the three, Foy probably gave the most impressive performance as a young Elizabeth yielding to the duties and burdens of the throne. And it’s moving to reflect, again, on the staunch, serene and at times, humdrum majesty of the real Elizabeth. The Crown is a magnificent tribute to her.

The young Windsors, as portrayed here, pretty much conform to what we already know from endless media coverage. Although, Luther Ford's Harry watches the family goings-on with an unnervingly penetrating stare that doesn't seem right.

William, on the other hand, often has the soulful look of someone about to play a depressing solo on the acoustic guitar. Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy), gradually establishing herself as William's one true love, is insipidly pretty, and not nearly as interesting a character as her mother, Carole (Eve Best), a cheerfully determined social striver set on marrying into the royal family. She could be spun off into her own series, a kind of Dance Moms with a priceless tiara and a throne as the prizes.

If The Crown hints, ever so very lightly, that William may be the only Windsor with the same sensible rigor as Granny, it also remains ever so slightly ambivalent about the ultimate destiny of the British monarchy in modern times. American viewers will probably think nothing of Charles digging into a bowl of muesli and fruit, telling a skeptical William, "It's delicious," but in the context of The Crown, this doesn't seem like a vote of confidence.

If Elizabeth was, in some ways, the most ordinary of the Windsors, happiest when thinking about horses, she was also the most extraordinary. The Crown's finale cleverly — and perhaps, rightly — suggests she full well knew it.

In the last minutes, Elizabeth delivers a charming and funny speech at Charles’s wedding but withholds giving him the one present he truly craves: an announcement that she’ll retire.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 

All six seasons of The Crown are streaming now on Netflix.

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.