We already warned when we saw the poster, the trailer or basically any promotional element of the final season of The Crown: both Netflix and creator Peter Morgan only have eyes for Diana Spencer, even in the last batch of episodes and because it is supposedly a work centered on Elizabeth of England. And, to confirm suspicions, a significant detail: Diana, after death, seems to appear to characters like the queen or her ex-husband, the then Prince Charles. Will she be a ghost? Not quite.
Morgan wanted to clarify on the red carpet at the preview of The Crown that Diana's appearances after the accident are not intended in a ghostly way: "The word ghosts doesn't help, I was never writing anything from a supernatural perspective, of course." Speaking to Deadline during the preview of the episodes, he explained that for him, when someone dies, they are often alive in the minds of those close to them and those who loved them: “Sometimes it is impossible not to think about them.”
From La Vanguardia, for the record, we have not been able to confirm to what extent the presence of Elizabeth Debicki, who was already nominated for her work as Diana Spencer in the fifth season, expands throughout the season through these appearances. Unlike previous seasons of The Crown, no episodes have been provided in advance to take a look at Peter Morgan's look at this latest stretch of the story.
Debicki, for her part, explained in the preview that she was very "intrigued by Peter's brain", in reference to the author of the scripts and creative head of The Crown, and that she has found an "interesting" and "beautiful" way of have a conversation about the experience of grief. “It is something so slippery, human, shocking and impossible to face, the loss of someone, and I think his way of imagining it was very beautiful to me, it made sense,” she said.
It will not be the first time that Peter Morgan speaks about the death of Diana of Wales. He was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of The Queen, the film for which Helen Mirren won the Oscar and which focused exclusively on the accident of the queen's former daughter-in-law, the way in which she processed her grief and how she earned the hatred and disappointment of a part of the population for not addressing a few words to the nation after the accident.
In fact, Morgan always hoped that Mirren would play Isabel in the last two seasons of The Crown, after Claire Foy in the first and Olivia Colman in the third and fourth, but the actress rejected the offer: she did not want to end up being remembered. solely as an interpreter of the Queen of England. After her refusal, Morgan opted for Imelda Staunton, a well-known face in British cinema, with appearances in the Harry Potter saga and who in 2004 was nominated for an Oscar for The Secret of Vera Drake.
Netflix, for now, premieres the first part of the sixth season, which is four episodes, this Thursday. As we said, the main plot hinted at in the promotional material is Diana's death on the Alma Bridge on August 31, 1997. Taking into account that The Crown returns set in that fateful 1997, while Diana spent her last days in the Mediterranean with Dodi Al-Fayed, son of the Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed, a heart-stopping start is expected.
The remaining six episodes, which will conclude the reign of Elizabeth II, will be introduced into the Netflix catalog on December 14. As is customary on the platform, when it comes to productions with the potential to generate conversation and viewing, the season is divided to obtain a double impact on the media and the public.
