The Crown abdicates without a successor

This month, the Netflix series The Crown reached its conclusion. I came along with it through six inconsistent and sometimes downright sour seasons, watching to the end out of what must have been an unaccountable loyalty to the series. In that sense, my viewing experience recapitulated a running theme of the show: the simple question, Why are we doing this? I could find no answer, either in the show itself or in my own pleasure as a viewer. But I couldn’t stop, and I guess that’s why this show, for all its missteps and false notes, has been allowed to play to the end of its story.

For most of the last two seasons, Elizabeth II (played perfectly by Imelda Staunton, using her facial expressions as eloquently as Olivia Colman used her vocal inflections in the previous two seasons) receded into the background as the melodrama of Charles (Dominic West) and Diana (Elizabeth Dibecki) took center stage. The series never succeeded at making those characters equal to the media frenzy that surrounded them, and the telescopic focus on the last few weeks of Diana’s life did not help. Her last paramour, the unlucky Dodi Fayed, comes off as harried and lightweight, while Diana herself is a melancholic blank, pretty and tenderhearted but possessing no real interest apart from her fragility.

In the worst scenes of the whole series, both Diana and Dodi appear after death, respectively to her ex-husband and his father, to hold the hands of the bereaved characters and the audience toward moments of unneeded and undeserved closure. The dominant figure in the first half of the sixth season is Dodi’s father Mohamed Al-Fayed, a socially ambitious businessman looking for an acceptance into the British elite that equals his wealth and deference to its culture. When his share of the grief at the death of his son in the accident with Diana—and his gestures of friendship—are callously ignored by a royal family that seems determined to downplay its connection to an Arab Muslim, it feels inevitable that they will return in the form of conspiracy theories.