It’s Complicated
While the majority of the episodes in Season 3 are stand-alone pieces, episode 9 picks up right where episode 8 left off with the death of Uncle David. The Duke of Windsor’s body is airlifted to England for burial which is where we find our main characters sharing several intense looks- Wallis at Charles, Charles at Wallis, Elizabeth at Charles. Back inside, Charles looks into a picture frame of his uncle, and their reflections blend in one, emphasizing Charles’s theory that he has replaced his uncle as the new “outcast” of the family. But, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Wallis gives Charles a compass with the inscription: “No excuse for going in the wrong direction.” She tells him she missed seeing his girlfriend there, and his eyes dart around the room nervously as he says, “she’s not official yet.” Wallis then gives him those two pieces of advice that were the standout lines of the trailer: 1. Never turn your back on true love. 2. Watch out for your family. There’s the slightest, comic change in Charles’s face after he says “they mean well,” and Wallis replies, “no they don’t.”
Next we see Camilla and Charles talking in bed together (That seems fast from the last time we saw them? Again it feels as though the show skips over the substance of their relationship). As they rehash the day, we get flashbacks to particular moments. Camilla says she saw Wallis, “the black widow,” who stared knowingly at her. Charles exchanges rather formal farewells with his family before leaving for the naval academy. Mountbatten tells him Dartmouth “will be the making of you.”
When Charles turns to go, he tells Camilla, he looked back and saw his family as his uncle must have seen them. Charles says of David:
He wasn’t like them. He was brighter, wittier, more independent of thought, more true to himself….as they looked at me, I realized I had just replaced him.
Although we certainly sympathize with Charles, this seems like an unfair assessment of his family’s feelings towards him. I think we can say they all wish him well and want him to succeed, at the very least for the sake of the future of the crown. Ironically, what comes across the most like the late Duke is the fact that Charles is convinced the whole family is against him. Charles’s words to Camilla could have just as easily been one of David’s letters to Wallis.
And then suddenly we’re in Kent, 1925, and a young boy is surprised with a piano. “We can’t afford it!” he says. When the camera cuts to a close up, it’s older hands we see, and they belong to newly elected prime minister, Edward Heath. His rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata plays over footage of the riots of the National Union of Mine Workers who are striking for higher wages.
When he arrives for his audience with the Queen, Heath makes the dreadful mistake of insulting the corgis, saying “animals are but a meal away from barbarism.” Elizabeth questions him on his talks with the union leaders, and Heath confidently assures her that the strike will soon end in humiliation for the workers. The Queen looks less than convinced.
In the next scene we get a little background on Heath courtesy of Prince Philip who tells Elizabeth that Heath has never moved past a certain girl to whom he was too chicken to propose. “When you find the right one, snap them up,” Philip concludes, interestingly using the same phrase uttered by Charles describing Camilla in the previous episode. The topic arises of their 25 year wedding anniversary, but Elizabeth is preoccupied thinking about Charles. To her credit, she tells her husband she thinks they need to take Charles’s feelings seriously, but Philip says “you don’t love a girl like Camilla Shand…she’s a bit of fun, a welcome distraction.”
Charles reflects on that distraction in voiceover as we see his naval training. While morning drills and astronavigation classes keep him busy, it’s out at sea with the waves that his mind daydreams of long walks with Camilla, and we get a small insight into why Camilla specifically has captured Charles’s heart: she gives him “a sense of safety and belonging.” With her, his “loneliness vanishes.” All the while we’ve been thinking he must be recording this in some personal diary, but with his declaration, “I think you’re miraculous!” we see he’s actually on the phone relaying this directly to Camilla.
It’s clear in Camilla’s response that while she has feelings for Charles (“I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you”) those feelings are nowhere near the level of the Prince’s for her. In fact, unknown to Charles, Andrew Parker Bowles lurks in the background waiting for Camilla to get off the phone.
When Charles runs out of coins and the line drops, he isn’t the Prince of Wales, he could be any man. Ever the loner, Charles opts not to join in the fun being had by the other cadets and retreats back to his room, his head hung at that familiar angle.
During a visit from Uncle Dickie, Charles professes that Camilla’s the one, and asks Mountbatten for his help with the family. Poor, naive Charles.
By the way, if you’re wondering what that haunting new musical piece is, it’s “Black Widow” by Martin Phipps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OnyhncXNVQ
We’re then taken to a meeting between the Queen Mum and Lord Mountbatten. They’re both in agreement that Camilla, for a variety of reasons, is not marriage material. Mountbatten says he’ll take care of Charles by arranging a posting on the other side of the world, if the Queen Mum will take care of Camilla and Andrew’s parents. It should be noted that Charles was extremely close with both Mountbatten and his grandmother. As his relationships with both his parents were distant, these two people were huge influences in his life, giving advice and providing listening ears.
Next we have the meeting between Heath and Arthur Scargill. The union leader says that miners work “in hell” for the benefit of the whole country. He alleges that Heath has never seen the inside of a mine or any other kind of manual labor with his elegant, piano-playing hands. Heath refutes his assumptions saying his parents couldn’t afford his piano, that they come from similar backgrounds, but that he has chosen democracy. Neither man yields, and the result is a 3 day work week to conserve electricity.
And so by candlelight the Queen Mum meets with the Shands and Parker-Bowleses. The story, according to actual history, is that Mr. Shand and Mr. Parker-Bowles really did scheme to get their children engaged by placing an engagement announcement in the paper, leaving Andrew no other choice but to propose to Camilla. There’s no evidence to support that the Queen Mum was involved, but it sure makes for interesting drama.
When Charles is offered the new posting by his commanding officer, his eyes travel to a portrait of the Queen, his mother, and the wheels start turning. Next thing we know he’s at Elizabeth’s door asking Martin Charteris for an audience. Sidenote: I read that the royal family, meaning the immediate family unit, actually had to make appointments on one another’s daily schedules in order to see one another due to the busyness of their day-to-day duties.
Charles accuses his mother of arranging the posting in order to “break us up!”
It amuses everyone to take two people who are perfectly happy together and find a reason to break them up…there is history of that cruelty in this family!
Prince Charles speaking to his mother
Elizabeth is genuinely befuddled at first, but by the end she’s telling Martin to arrange a meeting with the Queen Mum and Mountbatten immediately. Having lived through the Margaret/Captain Townsend fiasco, as well as the repercussions of Edward III and Wallis Simpson’s relationship, Elizabeth has no interest in repeating the past.
She defends Charles, telling her mother and cousin that she had her choice when she married Philip. She also astutely notes that Camilla is the first woman to give Charles real comfort and confidence. But Mountbatten and the Queen Mum are insistent that the system is “too fragile to let in unpredictable and dangerous elements.” They also imply that there’s more to the situation the Queen doesn’t know.
Cue Princess Anne driving and singing along to David Bowie’s “Starman.” What a treasure.
What follows is one of the more entertaining scenes of the episode thanks to Erin Doherty’s portrayal of the no-nonsense princess. The candlelight (a result of the 3 day work week conserving electricity) adds to the clandestine nature of the meeting among the Queen, Prince Philip, Mountbatten, the Queen Mum, and now Anne. She fills them in on the full story of the romantic entanglement she and Charles have been caught up in. When they tell her Charles is considering a proposal to Camilla, Anne quips, “Fine…as long as he’s prepared for there to always be three in the marriage.”
That phrase may sound familiar to you as it is the exact choice of words Diana famously used to describe her marriage with Charles, with Camilla being the third party.
Elizabeth feels for Charles, although she also calls him stupid and naive. When the Queen Mum informs her that plans are already in place for Camilla to marry Andrew, Elizabeth decides that it should be Dickie to tell Charles.
After he’s heard the news, Camilla assures Charles over the phone that her feelings for him were real but “complicated” and that marrying Andrew would be better for everyone “in the long run.” It’s an interesting turn of phrase considering what we know will actually come to pass between these two.
Meanwhile, the state of the country is deteriorating. The Queen urges Heath to come to an agreement with the miners as the blackouts are now severely disrupting everyday life.
As they prepare for their anniversary dinner, Philip reassures Elizabeth that while Charles will hurt for a while, he will eventually get over the heartbreak. Strangely, neither one seems to have any plans of actually talking directly to their son about it.
Elizabeth’s anniversary speech closes the episode. She speaks of family as the cornerstone on which a marriage is built. We see Charles traveling to his new posting and it’s all he can do to get to the privacy of his room before he totally breaks down. We believe Charles is totally wrecked (thank you Josh O’Connor), but we still don’t quite understand why.
Who is to blame? Is it Dickie for interfering? The Queen Mum? Elizabeth for allowing the interference? Or were they all genuinely concerned Charles was being played by a woman who did not truly love him? We believe Camilla is conflicted, but again we’re not given much more than that. But perhaps The Crown is not interested in the answers to those questions, as much as portraying the impact of the relationship on the characters and ultimately on the monarchy.
And of course, this episode’s chief end is to lay the groundwork for the entrance of Diana in season 4. We know what a disastrous match Charles and Diana were as a couple; when you read historical accounts of their marriage and its subsequent breakdown, you can’t help but wonder how on earth the union came to be in the first place. Hopefully we can look forward to The Crown exploring that story in season 4. With “Dangling Man” and “Imbroglio,” we certainly get the prelude.
Odds and Ends
Memorable Line:
I hope that wasn’t too emotional for you all.
Princess Anne to her family
Memorable Soundtrack Moment:
Princess Anne singing along to David Bowie in her car:
I saw a headline recently that the real life Princess Anne has been experiencing a boost in popularity since the release of season 3, and it’s no wonder why!
MGC 