Her new lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Cavendish, watches in obvious dismay, but it just feels less necessary than the Beaton photography scene. It’s even worse for the people that the fairy tale is meant to inspire: That amazing, wrong-headed Beaton monologue about the dreary scullery maid whose life is made better just because she had a chance to look at a famous wealthy person in the newspaper for a moment is the closest The Crown has gotten to anti-monarchist sentiment so far.įor further evidence of Margaret’s sadness, there’s also a scene where she gets loaded and listens to Ella Fitzgerald while having an almost-breakdown in her room. It’s an obviously frustrating and impossible situation for Margaret, who’s stuck in an absurd fairy-tale version of a life that’s growing farther and farther from her reality. The photo session with Cecil Beaton is the best one, and it’s a good illustration of one of The Crown’s best features: the way stodgy, idealized abstractions of the royal family harm people on both sides. The engagement, which never even had a chance to happen, is off.īefore getting to the Goode stuff (see what I did there?), “Beryl” gives us several sequences that show Margaret falling apart. He’s barely sober enough to walk, seems to have lost his shoes somewhere, and is just the most pitiable mess you could imagine. The method of cutting back and forth between his slightly drunk account of the duel to Margaret and flashbacks to the event itself is unmerciful to dear ol’ Billy, who gets dragged to the duel by his friends as he weeps and protests. For a series that’s often surprisingly unwilling to take a strong stance on real people (see: Elizabeth’s vague distance, Philip’s sympathy tour), The Crown does not hold back on poor Billy Wallace. She chain smokes and drinks to excess, and finds herself (sort of) engaged to her friend Billy Wallace, essentially because she’s too tired of herself and her life to argue with him.īilly is a disaster, of course. In case you’d forgotten, or in case you needed a refresher on exactly how unhappy she’s become, we rejoin Margaret at the wedding of her friends, where she skulks around like an exhausted, disillusioned crone. Since we last saw Margaret in season one, embittered and denied her love match because a princess couldn’t marry a divorced man, she has grown increasingly unhappy. In the middle of this big question about the season’s direction - is The Crown going to focus on Philip’s side of the marriage, or finally do a deep dive into Elizabeth’s inner life? - we now turn to an episode that is by and large devoted to … Princess Margaret!
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