Death and taxes: life’s two great certainties. Well, if you’re the royal family you don’t have to worry much about the latter, but the former comes for them, just as for us mere mortals. And death hangs over this, the first instalment of Netflix’s two-part final season of The Crown. Whether it’s a paparazzi-hounded Mercedes-Benz streaking through the sultry Paris night, or three generations of monarchs (and future monarchs) standing side by side, united in grief, death makes us all human.
This four-episode arc charts the romance of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) in the days and weeks running up to their deaths in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. You might call it a “slow-motion car crash” except that the moment of impact plays out, just offscreen, twice: firstly, through the eyes of a French moonlit dog walker, and then, again, in the backseat with Di and Dodi. It is the moment the show has been moving, inexorably, towards, and one that plays out while Charles (Dominic West), his parents (Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce) and his young children, stand idle, then dumbstruck, in Balmoral.
