The Crown: Season 4, Episode 4- Favourites

 "Our children are lost..."

Hmm. There’s a lot to admire about this episode and much that is interesting- not least our first glimpses of how they’re going with the characterisation Princes Andrew and Edward. But I think, structurally and thematically, it’s a bit of a misfire and doesn’t really work overall, despite some impressive character scenes.

This series is, of course, drama and not documentary, and therefore entitled to balance factual accuracy with dramatic licence, as we’ve often discussed. It’s not unusual, in The Crown, for the chronology of events to be altered a bit so that events coincide where this was not the case in reality, generally as a way of making a character point. This is generally fine. But, in this episode, it’s so obviously done that you can see the joins.

There are three separate threads to this episode- the Queen realising she doesn’t know her four children as well as she probably should; the useless Mark Thatcher getting lost in the Sahara; and the early stages of the Falklands crisis.

Still, the relationship between Elizabeth and Philip is dealt with well, as is the weirdness of Charles, his self-centredness and Diana’s very worrying depression. There’s also Anne’s unhappy marriage and jealousy of Diana’s popularity, and we learn that Edward is an arrogant, entitled git and Andrew a charming pervert, at least the versions we see here.

Most interestingly, though, we see how blatantly Thatcher favouritises her son over her daughter out of probable preference fir the opposite sex, essentially because she worshipped her father and had issues with her mother. This is fascinating.

And yet, good though the character development is here, the structure is just too artificial to hang together. It’s a good execution of a flawed concept.