The Crown, season 2, episode 8 review: Elizabeth bonds with Jackie Kennedy, and it's glorious
In some episodes of this patchy second series, the revelation that even the Queen has a rented telly would have been the most notable point of interest. This episode, Dear Mrs Kennedy, doesn’t start very promisingly, with some heavy-handed business about ailing great oaks and the decline of Empire.
But, happily, it evolves to allow The Crown writer Morgan to weave the political and the personal together with a deftness not always in evidence this year, as the geopolitics of the Cold War collide with the private insecurities of the monarch.
The two venues are Buckingham Palace, soon to receive the universally feted Kennedys, and the Ghanaian capital of Accra, where President Kwame Nkrumah has announced his intention to lead his newly independent nation into the arms of Communist Russia, currently outbidding the United States to build the Volta Dam.
There is, rightly, a palpable sense now of Britain being a pawn in a much larger game: a nation worth consulting but seldom able to dictate events post-Suez. A passing mention of De Gaulle and the EEC hints at one likely future narrative to dread for viewers and Olivia Colman alike.
Stuck in the middle is Elizabeth, fretting about her age (“you haven’t even finished having children yet,” comments her mother, helpfully) and sense of marginalisation or even anachronism. These concerns are hardly helped by Jackie Kennedy’s seduction of the rest of Europe a with her physical and intellectual attributes. Philip, tongue all but lolling, hungrily petitions his unimpressed wife to be seated next to the most glamorous woman in the world.
The Kennedys’ visit proves an apparent triumph for everyone bar the Palace mandarins who are appalled by their disregard of protocol. Elizabeth takes Jackie on a tour of her gaff, finding common ground over shyness, dogs and sisterly rivalry – Claire Foy is fantastic here, fully capturing the guilelessness of a woman unused to making honest personal connections, and then her devastation when she hears of Jackie’s unkind comments at a later gathering.
Whether or not it actually happened is, of course, hardly the point - my hackles had risen and I was on the verge of belting out God Save the Queen.
And thankfully there’s that minor crisis in the Commonwealth that might just allow her to prove a few points back on the world stage. It’s thrilling to see Elizabeth’s dander up again, an active, independent agent rather than passive observer, buffeted by events and the actions of others. Defying her PM, her advisors, the press and her husband, she travels to Ghana determined to bring the nation back into the Commonwealth by any means necessary.
In consenting to a foxtrot with Nkrumah, she duly achieves more in a few minutes than British diplomats, wrongfooted by Nkrumah’s horsetrading, have managed in weeks. It’s ludicrous but glorious, written and performed with real charm and energetically directed by Stephen Daldry.
The Crown cast and characters
Equally daft is the idea that the chastened First Lady would open up to the Queen about her post-natal depression, her husband’s philandering and their drug regimes, but Foy once again salvages matters with her restraint, pouring tea and handling scones while herself aching to show the same honesty.
Hall is a rare piece of miscasting, favouring impersonation over characterisation, and he’s hardly helped by having to deliver a gigantic and redundant slab of exposition explaining to his wife why everything that’s happened has happened. Fortunately, he’s hardly in it so it doesn’t unbalance the piece. Jodi Balfour (last seen in Rellik) is fine as Jackie, and Danny Sapani (latterly of Penny Dreadful and Harlots) makes an excellent Kwame Nkrumah - imperious, proud and pragmatic.
It’s an enthralling episode, one of the best so far, let down only by its final quarter. If it sounds odd to say something could "peter out" with the Kennedy assassination, this at least demonstrates the excellence of what came before. And Her Majesty’s closing observation on unhappiness – “all it takes is for something worse to come along and you realise it was happiness all along” – bodes ill for her but well for the remaining two episodes.
