The Real Problem With The Crown ’s Ghost Diana Is That It Doesn’t Go Far Enough

I wasn’t planning to watch the final season of The Crown, the Netflix drama that has charted the lives of the British royal family. This last, sixth season, the first half of which was released this week, was expected to cover the death of Princess Diana and other events in the life of the royal family in the 1990s, and firstly, as a British person, I’ve probably heard the story of Princess Diana’s too-brief life a few hundred times already. There is nothing to surprise me there. Also, the series has been in decline since about the third season. I’d already had the thrill of “Oh, doesn’t Elizabeth Debicki do that Diana head tilt thing well” from seeing her in Season 5, along with the accompanying feeling of puzzlement over Dominic West’s total lack of resemblance to then-Prince Charles.

But Thursday, as I scrolled through X/Twitter, I came across a review of the new series by Lucy Mangan in the Guardian. She’d given it one star. This was intriguing in its own right, but what really grabbed my attention was the subheadline below this rating. “Despite the brilliant cast, it’s a crass, soapy dive into the abyss—not least in the atrocious scenes featuring Ghost Diana.”

Ghost Diana? Ghost Diana? Surely this was too good be true. While I’ve had my fill of the facts of Diana’s life and death, I hold a special place in my heart for terrible dramatic representations of the princess. My first time seeing Naomi Watts’ titular performance in 2013’s Diana is one of my most treasured memories. I cried laughing. God bless Watts, who did what she could with a script that couldn’t have humiliated her more if it was trying to. There is one horrendous line in particular, said by Diana’s sometime boyfriend, a heart surgeon, that I think of fondly and often: “You don’t perform the operation. The operation performs you.”

And so, to me, the phrase “atrocious scenes featuring Ghost Diana” promised so much. We’ve had the recent K-Stew Diana, but that was actually decent, and Diana’s appearances in The Crown so far have also not given us much to laugh at. So I sat down to watch the four episodes that have been released so far, eager to see this new entry into the canon of televisual Diana garbage.

Diana doesn’t die until the end of the third episode, so there is, of course, no Ghost Diana in these first three. And yet still, these episodes are not great. The dialogue is clunky and expositional, which is an especially odd choice to make for a production about events that half the world already knows in great detail. But I am here for the spooktacular main event: Diana, Princess of Wails.

She turns up first about 15 minutes into Episode 4, on a plane. Prince Charles is returning to the U.K. from Paris, where he went to identify her body. (One small mercy of this new season is that we are spared seeing the body ourselves.) She speaks before we see her, saying, extraordinarily, “Tada!” I guess a tiny part of me really thought she might appear as an actual spirit, sort of see-through and shimmering. She doesn’t: Diana is just suddenly seated opposite Charles, shot and dressed as she would be if she were alive. But still, it is an astonishing choice. It is, just as the Guardian wrote, so crass to have Diana come back from the dead, and the crassness of the gimmick sucks all the pathos out of the scene. Charles and Diana’s conversation, too, is slightly odd, with Diana thanking him for how he behaved at the hospital—and how hot he looked as he gazed over her corpse: “so raw, broken, and handsome.” And then—tada!—she disappears.

Arguably worse than this scene, though, is when Ghost Diana returns for a second haunting, this time at Balmoral. She pops up again, this time seated on a sofa, opposite the queen. Here the lines are absolute howlers. “As long as anyone can remember, you’ve taught us what it means to be British,” Ghost Diana says, as the queen watches footage of people grieving the dead princess in London. “Maybe it’s time to show you’re ready to learn too.”

It’s mostly naff rather than funny, gauche rather than ghoulish. I am disappointed. If they weren’t willing to go full camp—and that would have been utterly ill-advised but also therefore delightful to me—they shouldn’t have gone there at all. I see now that creator Peter Morgan has heard that people are not loving Ghost Diana, and is trying to walk it back. In an interview with Deadline, he said, “The word ghost is unhelpful, I was never writing anything from a supernatural perspective, not at all,” he explained. “It felt to me more like an extension of her in real life, rather than a ghost.”

A highly respected, serious filmmaker like Peter Morgan having to defend himself against scurrilous ghost rumors is, itself, quite funny. So in a way I got my fix. But also, he’s kidding himself if he thinks the problem is the word ghost. Whatever Diana is supposed to be in these scenes—physicalized representation of grief, a memory, a phantasm who forgot to bring along the sheet with the two eye holes—it doesn’t work.