After three queens and six seasons, The Crown will draw to a close this winter, with the final installment of Peter Morgan’s frequently soapy, always polarizing drama due to hit Netflix in two installments. The first, consisting of four episodes, premieres on November 16, revisiting Diana, Princess of Wales’s final months as well as the royal family’s reaction to her axis-shifting death. If British monarchists (and the tabloids they read) have taken issue with Morgan’s decision to rehash the near-institution-toppling tension between Diana and the Windsors in recent seasons, then this season will, inevitably, prove the most controversial yet—not only recreating the actual death of the People’s Princess in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, but the personal trauma and public failings of both King Charles III and the late Queen Elizabeth II in its aftermath, to say nothing of the impact of Diana’s passing and funeral on the young Princes William and Harry.
Ahead of Season 6: Part I’s release, Vogue breaks down the best episodes of The Crown to date.
Season 1, “Hyde Park Corner”
Regardless of your political stance on the royal family, there’s something uniquely moving about the scene in which a 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth learns that her father, King George VI, has died, making her a bereft daughter and Elizabeth Regina in a single stroke. Claire Foy and Matt Smith are at their absolute best here, wordlessly communicating the crushing weight of their grief and the heavy burden of their duty as they gaze at each other across the plumeria-filled gardens of Kenya’s Treetops. The message is clear: Heavy is the head that wears the crown, a fact underscored as the newly anointed monarch is draped in black crepe and mourning pearls on the Royal Plane while reading a letter from her grandmother, Queen Mary: “Dearest Lilibet, I know how you loved your papa, my son. And I know you will be as devastated as I am by this loss. But you must put those sentiments to one side now, for duty calls. The grief for your father's death will be felt far and wide. Your people will need your strength and leadership. I have seen three great monarchies brought down through their failure to separate personal indulgences from duty. You must not allow yourself to make similar mistakes.”
Runner-up: “Pride & Joy,” if only for the glimpse of the making of a royal tour wardrobe.
Season 2, “Matrimonium”
Princess Margaret’s clearly doomed affair with Vogue photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, played irresistibly by Matthew Goode, is far and away the most interesting story arc in The Crown’s second installment—a fact that’s self-evident in “Matrimonium.” The episode begins with Margaret nursing a hangover with Alka-Seltzer brought to her on a silver tray in Clarence House, then shattering a crystal vase of hyacinths after reading a letter from Group Captain Peter Townsend, in which he admits to proposing to the 19-year-old Belgian heiress Marie-Luce Jamagne. Thus begins Margaret’s desperate quest to issue a marriage announcement before her former paramour does, with “Tony” ultimately proposing with a ruby hidden inside a film canister, inside a Fortnum & Mason package, inside a hat box. The Princess and the haute bohemian’s relationship is so clearly combustible—even the Earl of Snowdon’s proposal feels more like a challenge than a declaration of love—but together they are almost impossibly seductive, achingly cool, qualities not readily found among the Windsors. The scene in which Margaret and Tony roar away from Buckingham Palace on his Triumph motorcycle to the strains of Max Richter’s “Four Seasons: Reimagined,” the Victoria Memorial receding behind them in the distance, is one of the most memorable and poetic of the entire series.
Runner-up: “Dear Mrs. Kennedy,” because the peculiarities of the English are never more apparent than in the presence of Americans.
Season 3, “Aberfan”
“Promise me one thing: not to bore me,” Tony implores Margaret as they decide to wed. The Crown’s showrunners made no such promises, because season three is as dull as the Galapagos documentary the Queen Mother watches in “Matrimonium.” (Exhibit A: “Moondust,” a 56-minute-long episode about the Duke of Edinburgh’s fascination with astronauts.) There’s one notable exception, though, and that is “Aberfan.” Yes, this is The Crown, meaning the royal family’s response (or lack thereof) to the mining disaster is the focal point of the episode, but Morgan makes the true human cost of the colliery’s collapse on October 21, 1966, felt in the most visceral of ways. If you can listen to the pupils of Pantglas Junior School—116 of whom would die in the landslide—singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in preparation for their half-term assembly without crying, you are made of sterner stuff than I—or maybe you’re not, actually, because “Aberfan” also asks us to consider whether the queen’s lack of access to her own emotions, her inability to shed a tear beside a grave or a hospital bed, is in fact a strength, a weakness, or a pathology—a theme that comes up again in “Tywysog Cymru.”
Runner-up: “Tywysog Cymru,” for bringing the not-always-sympathetic Charles’s humanity to the fore.
Season 4, “Fairytale”
In art as in life, with Lady Spencer’s introduction to The Crown, every other member of the royal family became just that little bit less interesting. “Fairytale” is unsettling in its depiction of the Princess of Wales’s induction into the House of Windsor, managing, in the course of just one hour, to set up the various points of tension that would nearly cause the monarchy to implode over the ensuing decades—most of which, on screen at least, boil down to Diana’s desperate need for affection and Charles’s innate inability to confer it. It’s in this episode, too, that The Crown really drives home just how unbearably naive Diana was about what she was getting into with her marriage, and how little time it took for the scales to fall from her eyes. One minute we see her celebrating her engagement by driving past Buckingham Palace in a London cab, listening to the “Edge of Seventeen” with her fellow Coleherne Court Sloanes, then—mere minutes later—she’s sitting across from Camilla Shand at a restaurant, the appallingly named Ménage à Trois, beginning to register the extent of the problem that is “Fred and Gladys.”
Runner-up: “Terra Nullius,” a crucible of modern celebrity and ancient royalty.
Season 5, “Couple 31”
The penultimate season of The Crown felt undeniably Lifetime Movie-esque in moments, but compared to the fireworks of the Panorama-focussed previous episode (“Gunpowder”), “Couple 31” feels intimate, understated, even—whisper it—relatable, particularly the denouement between Charles and Diana in her apartment at Kensington Palace; you almost wish that the entire 52 minutes had been devoted to their marriage “autopsy” over what was meant to be an omelette but turned into a scrambled egg. You can forgive Morgan the awkward metaphor, because Dominic West and Elizabeth Debicki are so heartbreakingly good as two people who, after much hysteria, have resigned themselves to the fact that they have failed both themselves and everyone in their orbit, while still underscoring the fundamental incompatibility of the future king and his would-be queen, their quiet reflections on what they “could have done differently” evolving into an explosive row. Their finals words to each other are so bitter, it’s an almost physical relief when their divorce is decreed in the following scene.
Runner-up: “Mou Mou,” where Mohamed Al-Fayed takes center stage in a sign of things to come.