12/20/2023 0 Comments Netflix aftermath movie true story![]() ![]() ![]() Morgan frequently lays the symbolism on much thicker than in previous seasons. William, Charles, and Harry in ‘The Crown.’ Keith Bernstein/Netflix It doesn’t have nearly the weight of that earlier one because Dodi is so much less important to Diana, and to The Crown. ![]() There’s even a scene late in the third episode where Morgan imagines what Diana and Dodi’s final conversation was like, clearly designed as a sequel to the riveting argument sequence between Diana and Charles late in the fifth season. But because Diana’s death is such an enormous part of the royal family’s story - even Charles recognizes immediately that, “This is going to be the biggest thing that any of us has ever seen” - Morgan feels compelled to build this entire section of the season around that relationship. They’d only been dating for a couple of months, and while Mohamed would later claim that they got engaged, and/or that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s child, all other indications suggested this was still just a fling right before his car crashed in that tunnel. 'Black Mirror' Renewed for Season 7 on Netflixīeyond that, Morgan runs into the dramatic problem of Dodi being a relatively minor figure in Diana’s life up until that terrible night in Paris. There are certainly many things Mohamed could be condemned for - allegations of sexual harassment and assault, or his later attempts at accusing the royals of perpetrating a conspiracy to murder Diana - but Morgan treats his thirst to be accepted by the royals as the true crime that makes him worthy of all this condemnation. It’s cartoon villainy, in a show that has previously tried for nuance and at least some degree of empathy with almost every historical figure it’s depicted. The episodes are so overwhelmingly weighted against the duo that even after his son has died, we see Mohamed looking at this as one last opportunity to bond with the queen. Here, it’s Mohamed who points Brenna at them, angling to show the world that his son is romancing a princess - and, perhaps, to pressure Diana into looking at Dodi as her inevitable new husband. Depending on who was asked back in the late Nineties, Brenna either stumbled upon the couple almost entirely by accident, or Diana herself tipped him off, as part of her ongoing PR war with Charles ( Dominic West). Much of the narrative treats a collection of photos of Diana and Dodi vacationing together, taken by Mario Brenna - which earned him a small fortune from the British papers that published them - as the tipping point that led the paparazzi to so aggressively pursue Diana that it led to the Paris car crash. And Dodi in turn is treated as a spineless daddy’s boy whose inability to read the room ultimately dooms himself and his relatively new girlfriend. Here, he is presented as ruthless, controlling, and oblivious to the impact his manipulations have on both Diana and his son. The fifth season treated Mohamed’s desperation to ingratiate himself with the royals as a sad but understandable flaw. The thesis of these episodes is that Diana’s death was almost entirely the fault of Dodi and, especially, Dodi’s wealthy, imperious father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (Salim Dau). This is a conflict between queen and prince, rather than aristocrat and civil servant, because Prince Charles has improbably become the tragic hero of The Crown. While the series has in the past treated various prime ministers as characters with equal narrative weight to most of the royals, Blair is an afterthought here. Now he comes across as an explorer who has gone native. But it long ago stopped feeling as if Morgan was writing about them with a pure outsider’s perspective. The show is not blind to the faults of the royal family as both institution and as individuals. Over the years, though, the scales have tipped increasingly in the favor of the House of Windsor, and particularly to certain members of it. ![]() That movie, and even the early days of The Crown, treated the monarchy with at least as much skepticism as affection, if not more. It’s a telling choice, less indicative of a writer not wanting to repeat himself than of Morgan’s shifting attitude toward the royals since The Queen was released. Only this time, the anguished voice of the people is not Blair, but Prince Charles. In the fourth episode of the sixth and final season of The Crown, Morgan finds himself essentially remaking his earlier film. Much of the conflict comes from Queen Elizabeth’s reluctance to publicly address the grief of her subjects, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair pleading with her to speak. The 2006 film The Queen, written by Peter Morgan, dramatizes the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. ![]()
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