1x08 Pride & Joy

[8.2/10] One of my favorite episodes of the show so far. What I appreciate about it is that you could effectively transpose the story this episode is telling outside of the monarchy, and it would still work well as an intimate and personal story about what it’s like when a family experiences great loss and great change. (Notably, the “Year in the Life” season of Gilmore Girls explored a similar idea.)

The episode tells the story of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Margaret, and the Queen Mother each reacting to their new stations in life in the wake of King George’s death, and the strains and problems between them that emerge in that tender reshuffling.

Of the three, the Queen Mother’s was my favorite, if only because it felt the most poignant and down to Earth. I’ll be frank -- at one point I thought we were getting a romcom subplot with her, or at least the closest thing the English monarchy can muster relative to How Stella Got Her Groove Back. The Queen Mother absconding to the far reaches of Scotland, where she can be someone apart from the royal family, and runs into a charming man who doesn’t quite know where she is, seems like a recipe for soft and sweet romantic hijinks.

I appreciate that The Crown goes in a much more bittersweet direction with it all. My word, it’s sad and sympathetic to hear her confess to her dea friends that she’s rudderless without her husband, thrown by circumstances out of the role and the home that she’d known for some time, bereft of purpose with the sense that her daughters are grown and don’t need her anymore. I’ll confess that I don’t always feel sorry for these pampered doves, however gilded their cage. But there’s something deeply relatable about a grand life transition that shakes your routines dand your self-identity, that makes it hard to pick up the pieces afterwards. You feel for the Queen Mother here, and humanizing her is a strong choice.

I also love how they handle the kind Scottish castle-keep who flirts with the Queen Mother in that proper English way and charmingly doesn’t know who she is. The way their chaste little romance is interrupted when duty calls is a sad popping of that bubble. And the Queen Mother explaining that she didn’t want to explain who she was because people don't act as they really are when they know what she is comes with its own little bit of tragedy. Honestly, her story could have been the whole episode, and I would have been here for it.. The tale of someone forced to mourn, reassess their life, and find a new path forward is one that almost always compels me, and the acting and the writing through it all is outstanding.

In the wake of it is the sibling rivalry between Elizabeht and Margaret. I love it the intricacy of it. Margaret has charisma out the wazoo but can’t hew to the etiquette. Elizabeth is dogged in hitting all the right notes, but doesn't have her sister’s dynamism. Margaret sees her sister championed on television and turns green with envy. Elizabeth sees her sister splashed across the newspapers and feels the same thing. One is devoted to embodying the titular crown, as a symbol and an anodyne representative of the institution. The other is devoted to injecting the much-feared “individuality” into that vessel and reminding the people that there are, well, people behind the royal edifice. And both are very much still chasing their father’s love and favor well after his death.

There is truth in that. Of course, the wrinkles of ceremony and state add a different flavor to the proceedings, but this is, as Margaret points out, something that plenty of family’s experience. Hell, Better Call Saul is basically founded on the same dynamic. The tension between the “achieving good kid” and the “rule-bending but lovable scamp” is a familiar one, and seeing it play out in such heightened tones helps ground the larger than life events into something more personal.

I’ll confess, I find Margaret to be a petulant child much of the time (at least in the context of the T.V. show; I’ll cop to knowing little about the real person). But you can understand her insecurities about feeling overlooked next to the ostensibly perfect daughter who her father was genuinely proud of. So she’s inclined to use the talents her sister lacks -- things like charisma, sparkling wit, a wry sense of humor denied to stiff-lipped royals -- to distinguish herself when given the ceremonies of state.

I cringe when Margaret oversteps her bounds here, but she’s also not wrong in what she says, even if it causes unnecessary trouble when she says it. She feels subject to the strictures of an institution that she doesn't get to control, while not having nearly as clear rules or direction, and envies the spotlight that Elizabeth enjoys.

The grass is, as they say, always greener on the other side. Elizabeth envies the comparative freedom ehr sister enjoys, the ability to live a life unchecked by the responsibilities of state and dignity that Elizabeth must submit to every single day of her life. Most importantly, she envies the sense that, despite all of ELizabeht’s good girl credentials, that Margaret was her father’s favorite.

It’s an interesting idea to play out. As the unveiling of Groge’s statue indicates, all three of the Windsor women are still reckoning with the loss and what he meant to tem in life. It’s plain that Elizabeht sees the Commonwealth Tour as a way to honor her father, carry on his legacy. Churchill basically says as much. And you can feel the sense that, whatever Elizabeth may lack in the way of her sister’s easy charms, she feels she can make up for it in dogged determination and self-sacrifice. She hits every mark on the schedule. She takes injections so she can keep smiling. She does what she’s always done -- meets every expectation, in order to win the day.

I love and hate Philip’s role in all of this. On the one hand, he’s completely right. He correctly diagnoses the tour as a “coat of paint” on an old broken down car, and laments the ridiculous circus of it all. He seems genuinely concerned for his wife’s well being, identifying how distressed and overwhelmed she is, and trying to convey to her that it’s not worth it. Or about the first two-thirds of this one, it’s the most I’ve liked him.

And then, whether from his own overwork or frustration, he gets mean and abhorrent. He draws untoward connections between their current misery and George’s cancer. He pokes and prods at his wife with harsh comments, the worst of them being a call out that she'll never earn her father’s favor, no matter how hard she tries by running herself ragged. The confluence of cruel words and domestic violence from the Queen herself is scary, a scene of marital turbulence only halted by the startling presence of the press outside their temporary home.

It shows how much tension remains, and how sore spot Goerge’s feelings about his daughters still are for each of them. The closing confrontation between the two sisters is another showpiece scene here. Both actresses are on point, and the hashing out of how each envies the other, how this is familiar territory for all sisters, and how they are both still mourning their father and what they didn’t get from him in their way, is superbly written.

On the whole, this is a grand meditation on the complicated feelings, both personal and interpersonal, that linger when someone important passes on and everyone must readjust in the shadow of that loss. There’s obviously more at stake (at least theoretically) when it happens to the royal family, with all the pomp and protocol that officially changes. And yet, this is the most human and relatable the Windsors have seemed to date, with problems that are complex and comprehensible, even when blown up to royal proportions.