Yahoo News The Crown, season 5 episode 2, The System, review: plumbing new depths of tastelessness
Is Peter Morgan devoid of empathy in general, or for the upper classes in particular? Whichever it is, this episode of The Crown should leave him feeling utterly ashamed.
I do not mean the nudge-nudge, wink-wink inferences about the Duke of Edinburgh’s relationship with Penny Knatchbull. The show has hinted at the Duke’s wandering eye before, so that’s par for the course. I mean Morgan’s unforgivable decision to use, as a plot device to get the pair together on screen, the death of the Mountbattens’ five-year-old daughter, Leonora.
There is no earthly reason why the death of a young child from cancer – a real person, whose parents and siblings are still living – should be shoehorned into this soap opera. But there is Natascha McElhone as Penny, weeping at her daughter’s funeral. Why are we intruding upon this family’s private grief? Because it provides an opportunity in the script for the Queen to suggest that Philip pays a visit to the Mountbattens’ home.
And while there – at Leonora’s grave, no less – Philip takes the opportunity to deliver a speech. While the stability of his marriage to the Queen has been reassuring to someone who had an insecure childhood, he explains, “it doesn’t take into account the one thing human beings do the minute they make a commitment to a life together: grow in separate directions”. In other words, Philip is spinning the old “my wife doesn’t understand me” line.
The episode doesn’t push things too far – there is no sign of an affair, or of Penny reciprocating Philip’s interest. Netflix lawyers will have seen to that. But the camera focuses on their hands touching as they go carriage-driving; later we’re given another hint that Philip regards extra-marital affairs to be perfectly acceptable if conducted discreetly, when he tells Diana: “You can make whatever arrangements you need to find your own happiness, as long as you remember the one condition, the one rule: you remain loyal to your husband and loyal to this family in public."
At the end, Imelda Staunton comes pootling onto the screen in her sensible nightie, as a contrast to the gorgeous McElhone. The message is clear: Philip is married to this old frump, so of course he has had his head turned by a glamorous blonde.
Diana occupies the other half of this episode, as she arranges through an intermediary to collaborate with Andrew Morton on his bombshell biography. I suppose audiences in other countries may not be so familiar with this, but the story has been told and retold so many times that it feels boring.
We do feel sorry for Diana, though, living in “the leper colony”, as she calls the apartment complex at Kensington Palace. She is lonely and paranoid. Elizabeth Debicki’s performance doesn’t have the same impact as Emma Corrin did in the last series, but she has perfected the Diana Gaze.
When Philip comes to visit, he tells her not to go public with her complaints about the Royal family. “Don’t rock the boat,” he warns. But that horse has already bolted.
