Netflix has split the final season of ‘The Crown’ in two parts. The first was released on Thursday, November 16, 2023, but viewers will have to wait until December 14 for the second. The point of this decision is that it gives the series the ending it deserves and that the audience wants. Because one is the long-awaited ending, which everyone has been wondering about since November 4, 2016, when the platform premiered the series.

Since that first episode in 1947, the series has covered 50 years of the trials and tribulations of the House of Windsor, all the while audiences have been wondering: will Diana die? At first it appeared that she would die, then it appeared that she wouldn’t die, and finally it went back to the original plan: the series would continue until recently, including Diana. The four episodes of the first part finally put an end to this mystery.

The second ending is to the series itself, which will wrap up in six more episodes in December. This ending is a bit more “open”. The previews show that he is looking towards the future. As in reality, William is the protagonist. And that’s the problem, but also the success of “The Crown”: it’s become so connected to our lives and what we know that it’s very hard to remember that it’s fiction.

And that means morbid curiosity is satisfied, with all the elegance of a detailed and highly polished British blockbuster. But overall, we can’t wait to see what we know is coming…

It’s the last time Diana will see her children, we think, as if looking into a crystal ball. This is her last supper. This is her last car ride. We already know the fate of the characters, or rather their misfortune. As always, it’s the details that make the show. We don’t know if some of them are real or if they are part of a fantasy that has become a new reality.

Diana, Diana, Diana… The royal family is secondary, Andrew and Edward, Elizabeth II’s youngest children, don’t even appear, while Camilla only appears in a few scenes. Diana is the real queen of this part of the season. In these episodes, Elizabeth II is shown at her most cold and unfriendly, until she is redeemed at the last moment. This is a redemption that, of course, we know. It is in the history books and on the BBC. The Duke of Edinburgh doesn’t make much sense either. Young Princes William and Harry, like sullen teenagers, reflect on the happy summer they spent with their mother before her death, which acts as even more of a counterweight to seeing them in mourning. “They’re not crying for her, they’re crying for you,” their grandfather Prince Philip whispers to William as they follow their mother’s coffin.

Al Fayed’s profile is similar to what they had in 1997. We see a lot of them during the summer when Dodi and Diana were dating and little after her death in Paris. The most striking character is the father, the tycoon Mohammed Al Fayed (Salim Do), who owned the Harrods department store and the Ritz hotel in Paris. He is introduced as the “general” of the loving couple, with Dodi as a puppet at his side taking orders. That’s the beauty of ‘The Crown’: we’ll never know what reality was like or how twisted it is… No one is completely good or bad – there are infinite shades of gray in the people of the stories. There are still more as time goes on and the voices get quieter. Mohammed Al Fayed died on August 30, 2023, one day 27 years after his son.

Charles and Diana’s marriage was recreated (off-screen) in season four. In the fifth came their divorce and the growing role of the princess. Season six was meant to focus more and more on Princess Diana, but in these four episodes she is the outright star.

It is true that the Australian Elizabeth Debicki she is fascinating in her role. She looks so much like the Princess of Wales. Once again, fact and fiction blur and further fuel our morbid fascination with how the princess meets her end.

The viewer suffers from the constant attention of the paparazzi next to her. The car chases are just as exhausting, annoying and suffocating as they were for Diana in real life. The idea of ​​escape, a possible departure for California, is always present in the series. It strikes a chord with the departure, 25 years later, of Prince Harry, Diana’s youngest son, to a dreamland free of the same media harassment his mother suffered. As the Queen says in the first episode, with Diana out of the royal family and Tony Blair trying to capitalize on her image: with the Windsors you are or you are not, there are no half measures. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will also be familiar with this story.

When season five premiered last fall, Elizabeth II had just died. In fact, the sixth season was being filmed at the time and filming stopped for a few days as a mark of respect.

What can ‘The Crown’ give us that we don’t already know? It has a plot that while perhaps not different, is full of details, and, as always in his narrative, these details play on a higher level between fiction and reality. We will not know whether this or that happened, whether this or that private conversation took place or the like. We won’t know if that person cried or if that hug was given. We’d like to know and believe it. But we can’t. The people involved are gone and the series plays to the advantage that those who remain will never comment on the matter…