3x08 Dangling Man

[7.6/10] There’s a strong conceit to “Dangling Man.” One king is on his way out, abdicated, shamed, looked upon with scorn by his family members for the trouble he causes and the woman he loves. Another is on his way up, feeling a kinship with his dying great uncle, trapped by his circumstances, and destined to cause more trouble with the woman he loves. (Though thankfully without, you know, the Nazi sympathizing.) And in the middle is the current monarch, who loves both her uncle and her son, but worries about the effect that either or both would have on The Crown.

It’s a strong dynamic. “Dangling Man” doesn’t capitalize on every part of it to the fullest. But there's power in seeing a story reach its ending, however pathetic or sympathetic, while another is just getting started, with the dramatic irony that even ignorant Amercans like me know how things go awry for the young Prince of Wales.

I sympathize with him here, much as I did after the events of “Paterfamilias” and “Tywysog Cymru”. The episode focused on his investiture showed the way his mother in particular treats him like an appendage of the monarchy rather than a person, but this episode explores the purgatory of being the heir apparent. You are unnecessary from the time being, without the rights and responsibilities of the sovereign, but you are also not free to live your own life in the interim, since you must constantly be groomed, protected, socked away in waiting for the day you’re needed.

I’m sympathetic to the view espoused by Michael Hobbes of You’re Wrong About when he suggested that whether or not the monarchy is bad for the English people; it’s bad for the people in it. Nothing drives that home like Charles’ plight here, this wells-for-boys, Dean Venture-esque dork who goes on nerdy little dates with the girls he likes and seems beyond his depth. What must it be like, to have the chance to be what you’ve been taught you’re meant to be, the thing that will give your life long-awaited being, turn out to be the death of a parent? It would be a bizarre circumstance, even for the most well-adjusted and capable young man. And Charles isn’t that (at least not in The Crown’s rendition of him.

The circumstances are truly odd. Without giving anything away for folks who don’t know the later history, it was mind-blowing to me that Princess Anne apparently had a fling with Andrew Parker Bowles, and that Charles was dating Camilla Shand as early as 1970. It helps lay the groundwork for how bizarre this little bubble all these well-bred folks live in is. But in a strange way, it sets up the innocence and guilelessness of how this whole thing starts for Charles, a man who, whatever his other strengths of weaknesses, seems genuine in his feelings and incapable of the gamesmanship or subterfuge the more savvy members of his clan seem to possess.

Of course, the obvious parallel to Charles dating a woman his mother doesn’t approve of is seen in his spiritual predecessor, as the abdicated King Edward lies on his veritable death bed with the woman whose love, if nothing else, accelerated his departure from the throne.

And what a sad end it is. I went on record in “Vergangenheit”. I’ll say it again. Fuck Edward, who even in his later years apparently said that Hitler wasn’t such a bad chap.

But the players in The Crown are as much fictional characters as they are real people, if not moreso. Setting aside the sins of Edward’s real life counterpart, it’s hard not to still feel at least somewhat sorry for a man at the end of life who, at least in his own mind, chose love and chose to vindicate the person he was rather than the expectations of “the establishment”, and still finds himself going gently into that good night whilst fumbling for a legacy and a meaning to it all that seems to have fallen through his grasp as easily as the crown did.

There is also a part of our lizard brains that cannot help but feel sympathy for a wounded creature. The Edward we see here is not the elder but vigorous uncle to the Queen. He is, instead, a beleaguered man whose illness is soon to overtake him, coughing and weakened, struggling to hold onto his dignity in his final days. It is a fate that all of us, king and commoner alike, will face if we are lucky enough. To see him brought down to earth from his physical limitations, despite and perhaps because of, his grand aspiration, cannot help but inspire a certain amount of pity.

So there is trepidation and a grave warning for the concordance between the elder King Edward and the flowering Prince Charles. On the younger end of the spectrum, there is hope -- that qualities like change, progress, pursuit of your heart’s deepest desires, may eventually find purchase within the staid confines of the monarchy, that Charles may vindicate the best things his great uncle represented while setting aside the worst.

On the older end of the spectrum is a cautionary tale, that pursuing those things can rock an institution to its foundations, leave you estranged from your family, and still will not keep the cold grasp of fate from making you regret what you might have had, even if you love what is nonetheless yours. There is hardship in store for each of them, one sooner than the other, and in neither case is it fleeting.

And in between past and future sits the present, the Queen, a niece and a mother, trying to hold the line among them all. Hers is to forgive the sins of yesteryear and fear the pitfalls of tomorrow. Edward asks her forgiveness for what he did to her and her family, and in words he doesn’t fully hear, she grants him her absolution. It may have taken almost twenty years, but Elizabeth is comfortable in the role now, maybe even seeing it as a gift, not a curse, with a fanciful if poignant idea from Edward himself that perhaps it was destiny that the crown find its way to one able to rise to meet its challenges like her. Their strife is ended. The King is dead.

But the Prince lives. And in him rests the spirit of his uncle, the mirror’s reflection that puts Edward and Queen into the same frame in one scene juxtaposes Charles and Camilla in another. It is a brittle institution that continues to almost break over love, and those deigned by right, but uncertain in disposition, to assume the throne. However much Elizabeth may worry, as a sovereign and a mother, as she herself articulates, history is all but destined to repeat itself. Sunrise. Sunset.