a triumphant portrait from the 1980s with a perfectly wide-eyed Diana

Peter Morgan’s fourth season of The Crown faces perhaps its biggest challenge yet. The 1980s was one of the most documented, cataloged, debated and scrutinized decades for the House of Windsor. Morgan will undoubtedly be keenly aware of viewers using telephoto lenses to, once again, see if show makers “get it right.”

They do.

Season 4 is a triumph of precision combined with creative invention that continues the show’s process of centering the Queen (Olivia Colman).

Queen Elizabeth II’s main rivals in center stage are Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (played dazzlingly by Gillian Anderson) and Lady Diana Spencer (played wide-eyed and pointed by newcomer Emma Corrin).

The production, casting and acting standards are excellent; the script structure now well known to fans of the series; costumes are without a stitch out of place; And even, I never thought I would write these words, they got Diana to have the right hair and voice.

Royal rituals

The series revolves around episode two, The Balmoral Test. Thatcher and Diana must adjust to royal customs during the Windsors’ annual move to Balmoral in Scotland. The seemingly humorous initiation ceremonies disguise a deeply serious process of investigating suitability for entry into the royal fold.

Will they bring the right footwear and clothing for life in the country? (Diana yes, Thatcher, no). Do you know that dinner is at 8 pm, not 6 pm ?; that no one should sit in Queen Victoria’s chair? (Thatcher, no).

Do you love blood sports like fly fishing, grouse hunting, and perhaps the bloodiest of all, after-dinner parlor games? (A big “no” for Maggie; Diana proves best at pretending).

The initiation rituals reveal the royalty’s ignorance of the seismic social change taking place in Britain. Thatcher’s rise to Downing Street signaled the emergence of a system that recognized the validity of meritocracy over the aristocracy, including the monarchy.

Colman’s queen starts off enjoying getting rank and scrubbing the rug under Thatcher’s muddy feet during her bleak Balmoral summer, but finds herself increasingly baffled by a prime minister who imagines herself more regal than her sovereign.

During the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the Queen overstepped her constitutional role and lobbied for political action; the prime minister’s tears strip her naked and put her in her place with a level of imperious coldness that would have put Queen Victoria to shame.

The scenes between Anderson and Colman are fascinating.

The hunter and the hunted

The season shows the UK’s civic unrest during a period of high unemployment and clashes over nationalist spending on initiatives like the Falklands War.

Episode five brings this narrative thread along with the robbery at Buckingham Palace by the unemployed and socially dispossessed Londoner, Michael Fagan (Tom Brooke). After scaling the palace walls, he sits on the queen’s bed – a symbol of bleeding and broken Britain under Thatcherite rule.

The other important story is the courtship and marriage of Charles (Josh O’Connor) and Diana. During her first visit to Balmoral, Diana undergoes one of her first tests. She and Philip (Tobias Menzies) go deer hunting together with the aim of taking down a 14-pointed imperial deer that has been badly injured by a “foreign” hunter (echoes of the paparazzi?).

With Diana’s help, Philip cleanly dispatches the deer. The royal couple return to Balmoral before a procession of the dead animal now tied to the back of a horse, a haunting premonition of what Diana’s coffin will be in her funeral procession 17 years later.

Having been one of the first allies, Philip decides to read Diana the rule book when the princess threatens to break in with her own royal show. Felipe tells him:

Everyone in this system is lost, alone, irrelevant, [an] outsider, apart from the only person, the only person who matters. She is the oxygen we all breathe, the essence of all our duty. Your problem […] is that he seems confused about who that person is.

A closing scene sees Diana framed against a wall mounted deer, her horns appear to be Diana’s. The message is clear: Assassins Diana must watch out for can lurk within the palace walls.

The naked bride

It is touching and clever that we do not get to see a complete re-enactment of the “fairytale wedding of the century.” The Charles and Diana we meet at St. Paul’s are there simply for their wedding rehearsal, Diana in plain clothes and a fake wedding veil and train, the rehearsal wedding vows interrupted and unspoken.

This is the naked bride, the marriage ended before it even began.

The rest of the royals drift adrift exhibiting degrees of pain and loneliness, all yearning for affection, recognition and meaning.

Princess Margaret continues to celebrate and suffer greatly. Princess Anne’s marriage (barely glimpsed in the four seasons) completely disappears. Prince Andrew emerges as a cocky and entitled buffoon (brings Season 7); and Camilla is, to say the least, equivocal about a future with Charles.

Only the queen and her husband seem to have found a happy place, with Philip her chief protector, her Walsingham.

This latest series of The Crown begins with a close-up of the queen preparing for ceremonial duty and ends with a close-up of Diana’s face as she poses for a family photo at Sandringham.

The Crown’s coronation of the two leading royal women indicates that next season will be the Windsors’ reckoning in the late 20th century, a period of enormous adjustment and reinvention for the family.

The Crown season 4 premiered on Netflix on November 15.

Giselle Bastin, Associate Professor of English, Flinders University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.