‘The Crown’ (Season 3)…Still a brilliantly made show, but loses the steam of its predecessor seasons.

Last month, my mother finally understood the meaning of binge-watching.
It often puzzled her, how my brother and I would park ourselves in front of our laptops for days on end, trying to complete a tv series. For her, television, movies, shows, are something you watch when you find absolutely nothing to do or a once-in-a-while indulgence if something interesting pops up when channel surfing.

Well, all that changed last month, when I got Netflix. I asked her if she wanted to watch The Crown together. With twenty episodes and a good whole month in between till the start of the new season, I envisioned a pace in which we would finish the second season right before the third one began. But guess what? We finished all 20 episodes in less than a week.

Oops.

My mother surprisingly plonked herself on the couch for three to four hours straight every day and if there was any free time that was spent without watching the show, she would keep coaxing to play just another episode.
I don’t blame her, because the first two seasons of The Crown were outstanding. Claire Foy was marvelous as the young Queen Elizabeth II, who after coming into power, had to learn (and come to terms with) to straddle the two personas within her — one as the Sovereign, and the other as a daughter, a sister and a wife.

The show skillfully weaves the politics of the times with the royal families' private lives, with episodes chronicling Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding, coronation, her tour of the Commonwealth, Princess Margaret’s affair with Peter Townsend, her marriage to Anthony Armstrong, the Great Smog of 1952, the Suez Canal dispute, The Marburg Files, among many others. Each of these episodes divulges into the Queen’s involvement with these incidences and events and chronicles her views, opinions, and decisions regarding them.

The importance of protocol, rituals, rules, most of them dating back centuries, are regularly emphasized and even something as simple as selecting the Queen’s personal secretary follows a designated order, which even she isn’t allowed to break. There is a wonderful scene shared between the Queen and her grandmother, Queen Mary (played by Eileen Atkins), where she encapsulates the importance and reverence of the Crown with these lines,

“Monarchy is a calling from God. That is why you’re crowned in an Abbey, not a government building, why you’re anointed, not appointed. It’s an Archbishop that puts the Crown on your head, not a minister or public servant — which means that you are answerable to God in your duty, not the public.”

For someone who isn’t supposed to do or say anything, the Queen does seem largely involved in the workings of the government, and Foy breathes life into this larger than life personality. She is adept at expressing the worries, the nervousness, the anger with just a few short words, and sometimes with just her eyes. Foy is paired with the spirited Matt Smith as Prince Philip (who looks and walks every bit like him), focusing on his adjustment in living under the Queen’s constant shadow. But the highlights of the first two seasons are Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret and John Lithgow as Winston Churchill.

Described as the most fun royal to come out of Buckingham Palace, Kirby is excellent as the beautiful and haughty Princess Margaret. She captures the Princess’s wild spirit, while also rendering her sympathetic, as she, like Prince Philip, is regulated to stay in the Queen’s shadow. As a result, her relationship with the Queen is strained, owing to the latter’s position as the head of the church, which doesn’t permit the Princess to marry Peter Townsend, a divorcee. Her relationship with Tony Armstrong (an outstanding Matthew Goode) turns up the heat in the second season. Far removed from the royal decor of the palaces and in a dimly lit photo studio, their chemistry oozes magic but juxtaposed with the bright red light of the darkroom, it also evokes a sense of danger.
John Lithgow on the other hand, lets us witness a vulnerable side of Churchill in the masterfully directed episode Assassins, which occurs towards the end of season one when Graham Sutherland (played by Stephen Dillane) is commissioned by the parliament to paint a birthday portrait for Churchill. Through a series of sittings, we become privy to the artist’s and his subject’s conversations, which slowly unravel the pain felt by the Churchill on the loss of his fourth child.

The third season in comparison pales. It is still a well-directed season, with a completely new cast — Oscar winner Olivia Coleman replaces Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II, Tobias Menzies takes over as Prince Philip, Helena Bohem Carter plays Princess Margaret and Josh O’Connor and Erin Doherty play Prince Charles and Princess Anne respectively; but it seemed to be missing the warmness of the first two seasons.

Each episode stands on its own, meaning that episodes can be viewed at random, and viewers can still make sense of it. One political or a personal issue highlights every episode, similar to the predecessor seasons, but because the Queen is now well adept at…being Queen, the scenes that used to show her nervousness due to her lack of awareness of the situations, which led to her reading up about them, and asking advice from numerous people, and then eventually taking a decision best suited at the time, are now gone, meaning that the Queen is often relegated to the background, with Prince Philip and Prince Charles taking center stage this season. But the problem just isn’t that; these events, incidents just don’t flow from one episode to another, leaving those realizations, teachings, lessons, right there at the end of the fifty minutes mark, making the season as more of a checklist of the events that occurred during this set time period.

Helena Bonham Carter is largely underutilized as Princess Margaret, with the subject of her failing marriage occupying only the very last episode and the repeated argument of how she was born to be the Queen is revised in Margaretology, where she wins over President Johnson, and secures Britain with a bailout through singing, dancing, limericks, and an open bar.

It is understandable that with season four covering the highly anticipated Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s romance, this unexciting season acts like an intermediary, bringing the younger royals more into focus. This will however not dampen the show’s run in any way, as the royals still relevant to this day, are stepped with so much history and mystery, there is still a lot to look forward to.