Summary
A legitimately moving episode juxtaposes Princess Margaret’s failing health with a touching story of sisterhood through the ages.
The Crown has been rubbish for a while, and Season 6 hasn’t been much better, but “Ritz” sneaks up out of nowhere to deliver easily the best episode of the season and one of the best of the series. It’s a two-pronged affair, chronicling Princess Margaret’s worsening health in one timeline and her and Elizabeth’s boozy night out on VE day in the other. And thankfully there’s no William in sight.
What takes the place of the usual maudlin nonsense is a genuinely affecting story about sisterhood, the sacrifices made for duty, and good, old-fashioned mortality. It works, I’m happy to say, on virtually every level, and it’s about time something in this season did.
The Crown Season 6 Episode 8 Recap
The division between the two timelines isn’t strictly 50/50. The flashbacks to 1945 are infrequent, mostly functioning as teases for a night of debauchery that Elizabeth has kept secretive ever since. It takes the entire episode to find out what she got up to, and when it’s revealed it isn’t that big of a deal these days, but for a future Queen of England in the 40s it certainly was.
But despite being sullied by some inadequate dialogue, the “present day” sequences are enjoyable. Lesley Manville’s Margaret is a delight, and her determination to keep up her rackety lifestyle even at a more tender age is admirable. It’s also the death of her, through complications following several strokes after more Chesterfields and whiskey than her body could stand.
The throughline is the relationship between Margaret and Elizabeth, which remains almost unchanged decades on. They’re sisters, friends, confidantes, support systems; they’re the only two people who understand the other’s circumstances. They are, in a strange way, William and Harry, one bound by duty and inevitability and the other by being surplus to requirements. But while Harry fulfilled his duties as the “spare” with great distaste, Margaret seemed to relish every moment, even with one half of her face paralyzed and her feet scalded and all her favourite pleasures denied her.
The Queen has famously never been a great mother, or grandmother. But she’s quite a good sister. She loves Margaret more openly than she has loved most other people throughout the course of The Crown, and there’s a level of co-dependency stemming from childhood that she shares with literally nobody else. Royals are famously inattentive parents, and siblings have to fill the space they leave. Elizabeth and Margaret are more than sisters, and if nothing else, that connection comes across, especially as Margaret’s mortality becomes more and more obvious.
What did the Queen do on VE Day?
There are two big dramatic devices deployed in this episode. The first is whether Princess Margaret will die (she does, but this is common knowledge) and the second is what the Queen did in 1945 in the basement of the Ritz, which Margaret threatens to reveal several times throughout the episode, mostly for the benefit of the audience.
Eventually the episode reveals the truth of the matter. As it turns out, there was a bar down there, and on this particular day it was filled with American GIs dancing the jitterbug, written off as a classless bit of business by a passing English soldier mistrustful of the dance’s origins in the “ghetto” of Harlem (the word “ghetto” here doing a tremendous amount of heavy lifting.)
Elizabeth, though, is undeterred. She descends into the bowels of the Ritz, dances the night away, and eventually smooches a Black GI. We don’t see it, but she tells Margaret about it as they shuffle back to Buckingham Palace in the wee hours of the following morning.
The GI being Black can’t be an accident, and feels like a deliberate bit of progressivism that is probably a bit too optimistic to ring true (this was the mid-40s, after all, and the royal family aren’t known for being especially tolerant at the best of times.) But it’s a fun reveal that gives Elizabeth a bit more of a human contour that she’s allowed to display as the Queen of England.
How does The Crown Season 6 Episode 8 end?
The episode ends by rather beautifully weaving its two timelines together. In the “present day”, Margaret is dying. In the past, the youthful, rebellious version of her bids farewell to Elizabeth at the palace gates. Elizabeth looks away for a split second, and when she looks back, she sees the grown-up face of her sister telling her she’ll always be with her, in death as she was in life.
It’s a lovely and genuinely moving climax to the season’s best outing by far.
What did you think of The Crown Season 6 Episode 8? Let us know in the comments.
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