‘The Crown’ Recap, Episode 2: “Hyde Park Corner”

We open Episode 2 of The Crown touching our royal wheels down in Nairobi, where a very unenthused collection of locals pretends to enjoy having the Queen (Claire Foy) inform them that the British Empire has done a bang-up transforming their city from “a savage place” to this fine center of commerce she sees before her.

To the show’s credit, and my mild surprise, their wish to humanize the young Prince Philip (Matt Smith) does not outweigh their sense of responsibility to showcase his notoriously virulent racism and legendary penchant for saying deeply offensive things on foreign trips. He immediately accuses a heavily-decorated Kenyan of having stolen his medals. “Nice hat!” he says to a gentleman wearing a crown, by way of pivoting. That no hook emerges to pull him off-camera is unfortunate.

John Lithgow continues to be having the best time of any actor on this show, tossing back juice tumblers full of whiskey in the bath, snoring during meetings, and waddling around like a champ. Jeremy Northam is our Anthony Eden, and those of us who remember him gaily entertaining the crowd at Gosford Park are made to feel very old by his sudden evolution into a statesman. Eden, of course, wants Churchill to retire to a nice farm upstate and is hoping the King will help him nudge it along. Jared Harris’s George VI is more than well positioned to warn Eden about the pitfalls of gaining power before you are ready for it.

An obviously expensively-shot elephant hunting excursion straight out of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” video (mid-century Kenyan safaris topping the list of weird colonial nostalgia standbys) gives the young Mountbattens something to do with the final days of their time as second tier royalty. Philip gallantly pulls the elephant’s attention away from stomping Elizabeth into a posh paste, though my sympathies remain with the elephant in this particular power struggle. Later, giraffes and hippos will do a “Kiss the Girl” scene while the couple smooches. It’s…a lot.

I feel it is VERY unfair of the showrunners to offer up Princess Margaret and an increasingly infirm George VI crooning a sweet duet together on “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” in direct violation of my resolve not to get attached to him. Dad feelings! Dad feelings everywhere. Of course, he dies immediately afterwards. Better than being morphine overdosed to death in order to make the evening news, like his dad was, I guess.

The King is dead. Long live the Queen (who is briefly pant-less and making a NSFW photo montage of her nude, sleeping husband.) The race to break the news to Elizabeth before the radio does it for them is a bit filled with unnecessary tension (it’s not like TMZ was hanging off the balcony), but her devastation at seeing Philip’s face rings true (to the character and to history.)

The decision to spend most of this episode in Kenya without giving more than a single line to an African character (mostly politely milling around with drinks on trays and pointing out local sights) is a decided failure of the imagination on the show’s part. Watching Elizabeth have her feet literally kissed by a black servant sorry for her loss is the blonde-Khaleesi-being-lifted-by-brown-people moment of the series to date, and it’s hard to draw a line between “look at us, showing how bad this is” and “this is very bad.” You can almost feel an exhale of relief on the show’s part when the action drifts back to the rainy British isles, as though the tension of briefly depicting the reality of the British Empire took a lot out of the writers.

Princess Margaret and Married Peter, engaged in their first onscreen sexy clutch, are here to remind us that there will be plenty of family drama to come, now that the blood-kerchiefing is behind us. The Queen Mother makes up a fake job that would keep him about the house for Margaret, which gives us a DEEEEE-LIGHTFUL scene where his boss is like “we all know you’re hitting that, buddy boy” and “don’t think our discretion is us being chill with this, you snake in the grass, think about your wife.” (I’m translating from very tight snotty English here.)

The boss in question, who I sense is about to become a bit of an antagonist, is Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, played by Poldark’s Pip Torrens, who, as private secretary to the sovereign, is booting out the nice man who’s helped Elizabeth manage things for years. The Mountbattens see him as a stick in the mud with no concept of the modern world, and he has CLASSIC villain-face, I’m so excited to dislike him. Lascelles only held the position for a year, so let’s get ready for some conflict!

The other excellent character coming to the fore as the second episode draws to a close is Queen Mary, George VI’s mother, played by the LEGENDARY Eileen Atkins, who sets us up brilliantly by telling Elizabeth exactly what she must do to succeed where previous sovereigns have failed: leave her personal indulgences behind at all costs, burn the young wife and mother Elizabeth Mountbatten, and let Queen Elizabeth II rise from the ashes.

So, you know, everything I said at the end of last week. I’m basically Mary of Teck now.

Despite Margaret and the now Queen Mum dropping their first curtsies before her, and a slightly miffed Philip told he must now trail behind her entering rooms, the money shot is unquestionably the spectral Queen Mary, covered in mourning dress, creakily sinking to her knees before her new sovereign.

I’m getting pretty into this.

[Watch The Crown, Episode 2, “Hyde Park Corner” on Netflix]

Nicole Cliffe used to run The Toast, a niche site for queer archivists which Hillary Clinton at least pretended to like, but is now mostly just dicking around on Twitter.