The Crown's Season 3 Finale Recap: There Is Only One Queen
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Ahead of the season four premiere, take a look back at how season three of The Crown left off.
It’ll come as no huge shock to anyone that The Crown is a show centered around Queen Elizabeth II and her reign. After all, she is the one depicted in all of the marketing materials for the series alongside taglines like "Times change. Duty endures." And really, what other “crown” would the title be talking about? The Queen's perspective shapes the plot, even when the story isn't intrinsically about her.
But over the course of the first two seasons, it was Princess Margaret that captivated my attention more so than Elizabeth. Vanessa Kirby’s depiction of the Queen’s younger sister was electric, and the princess's life—both its struggles and its triumphs—wasn't as familiar to me; its drama was more suspenseful.
Which is why my biggest disappointment with the third chapter of Peter Morgan’s royal saga came from Helena Bonham Carter, who took over the role of the so-called “rebel princess” from Kirby as the character aged. It's not that Bonham Carter's performance is lacking (in fact, quite the opposite), but rather because she was sidelined.
Save for the second episode, in which the Queen’s sister charms President Johnson by singing in dirty limericks, the character who once stood at the center of the show’s emotional arc has been relegated to side plots, scenes which Bonham Carter plays brilliantly, but don’t pierce the core of the story. (This fact sadly mirrors a central theme of Margaret's experience—that she feels forever sidelined, without a clear purpose in life.)
Fortunately, Margaret remerges as central to the plot of the third season’s finale. “Cri de Coeur,” the episode’s title and a phrase that roughly translates to a passionate appeal—or more literally, a cry from the heart—showcases the Margaret I’ve been missing for the past nine episodes. She is passionate, messy, enchanting, jealous, and devastated.
Margaret is a woman who on the surface has everything: beauty, a glamorous lifestyle, and few real responsibilities. But she is still deeply unhappy, and once again I'm enthralled by her story.
Her marriage to Lord Snowdon, which has grown emotionally and physically abusive, is crumbling. (As she did in life, Margaret calls his new girlfriend, Lucy Lindsay Hogg, "the thing.") And yet, even at the princess's birthday party, her family vocally takes his side.
Understandably, Margaret explodes at the dinner table, and storms off, an outburst which the Queen meets with her signature practicality. "We should eat these before they get cold," the British monarch says. "She'll be alright in a minute."
But Margaret never returns, instead boarding a train to her friend Lady Glenconner's Scottish estate for a weekend getaway. The bulk of the episode chronicles the beginning of her relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, a man who by all accounts would go on to make Margaret very happy, at least for a time. The princess first meets Roddy, a gardener many years her junior, at the aforementioned party at Lady Glenconner's. (Bonham Carter's eyebrow raise when she sees him is Emmy-worthy.)
As their affair buds, they travel together to Margaret's favorite island getaway, Mustique, where they are photographed by the paparazzi, and her happiness is deflated as their picture is splashed across the papers, raising alarms at home.
"When it emerged that Margaret was having the relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, we were absolutely in the age of tabloid gossip and celebrity news and this was the perfect story was to feed that machine," Chris Granlund, executive producer of the documentary Margaret: A Rebel Princess, told me earlier this year.
"We are still in the age of the tabloid. We’re also in the age of online news, with instant information. We expect to know all this stuff now, but Margaret was living through an age where people were just gradually moving into that world."
Margaret was truly the first royal to have her personal life play out in the tabloids, and that parallel to the modern royal family, particularly given Prince Harry's searing statement about the media's behavior last month, is fascinating.
But even more interesting, I think, is what happens when the show's focus turns back to Margaret's relationship with her sister. In perhaps the most touching scene of the entire season, the Queen is forced to confront what life might be like without Margaret, a thought she cannot fathom.
"Of all the people everywhere you are the closest and most important to me," Elizabeth says to her younger sister, after kissing her hand. "And if by doing this you wanted to let me imagine for one minute what life would be like without you, you succeeded. It would be unbearable."
In the end though, the show is not called Margaret (as much as maybe I'd like it to be), so the story shifts back to Elizabeth, who upon the eve of her silver jubilee is questioning her successes. Margaret comforts her sister, not with platitudes, but rather with a reflection on the how the monarchy's true purpose lies in its facade and in the narrative that the Queen crafts for herself.
"It's only fallen apart if we say it has. That's the thing about the monarchy. We paper over the cracks, and if what we do is loud, and grand, and confident enough, no one will notice that all around us it's fallen apart. That's the point of us," Margaret says pausing for a moment.
"Not us, of you. You cannot flinch. Because if you show a single crack, we'll see it isn't a crazy but a chasm and we'll all fall in. So you must hold it all together," she says. "There is only one Queen."
She speaks the truth, but as we look ahead to season four, I hope Morgan continues to find room in his story for the princess as well.
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