\n<\/p>\n
The images are joltingly familiar, even after all these years.<\/p>\n
In one, reproduced with eerie accuracy in the new season of \u201cThe Crown,\u201d Diana, the Princess of Wales sits on a diving board<\/a> off the deck of a yacht, her long legs dangling above the water. In another, she embraces her new boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. And in a third, taken from a security camera, the couple rides in an elevator<\/a> at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, en route to their car late one August night. We know too well what happened next.<\/p>\n The sixth and final season of \u201cThe Crown\u201d begins here, in 1997, on the cusp of one of the strangest and most bewildering periods in recent British history. That is when Diana (played here by Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi (Khalid Abdalla), an unlikely couple thrown together by circumstance, were killed in a crash in an underpass as they drove across Paris, followed by a pack of photographers. Diana was just 36, and her death sent Britain into a paroxysm of grief at her loss and rage against the royal family.<\/p>\n Over the last five seasons, \u201cThe Crown\u201d has been unspooling decade by decade, producing an epic portrait of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, starting with her marriage to Prince Philip in 1947. The earlier episodes could sometimes feel quaint and far away, repackaged history from a semi-distant past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But the new season, which begins a year after Diana has divorced Prince Charles (Dominic West) and ends with Charles\u2019s wedding to his longtime girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams) in 2005, eight years later, is a different thing entirely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The first four episodes of the season (a second batch will arrive on Dec. 14) explore the lead up to and fallout from the 1997 accident. By devoting so much attention to this period, the production risks clashing not just with viewers\u2019 own memories, but also with countless earlier depictions of the same events \u2014 a seemingly never-ending stream of books, dramas and documentaries. To name just two, there\u2019s \u201cDiana<\/a>,\u201d the 2013 film about the princess\u2019s final two years, starring Naomi Watts, and \u201cDiana and Dodi: The Princess and the Playboy,\u201d a documentary<\/a> about the couple that was released earlier this year.<\/p>\n Peter Morgan, the creator and writer of \u201cThe Crown,\u201d is also competing with his own 2006 film, \u201cThe Queen<\/a>,\u201d which covers the same period. It starred Helen Mirren as a bewildered, wrong-footed Queen Elizabeth grappling with the raw emotion and almost feral anti-royal rage that erupted across Britain after Diana\u2019s death. With its intimate scenes of conversations between members of the royal family and public figures like the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), \u201cThe Queen\u201d was a preview of Morgan\u2019s approach in \u201cThe Crown\u201d \u2014 a blend of history and fiction, a muddying of the line between the public and the private.<\/p>\n The new season of \u201cThe Crown\u201d can\u2019t help but revisit the themes of the 2006 movie. It shows Elizabeth (Imelda Staunton, deftly channeling the sound and cadence of Elizabeth\u2019s voice) fretting about whether to stay in Scotland with her grandsons after Diana\u2019s death, as she would prefer, or to travel to London and address the nation, as the tabloids and the prime minister are urging (and which she ends up doing).<\/p>\n But the show gives time, too, to the story of Mohamed al-Fayed (Salim Daw), Dodi\u2019s father, a once-impoverished and now wildly rich and ambitious Egyptian businessman whose holdings included not just the Ritz in Paris but also Harrods department store, a symbol of upper-crust opulence, in London.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In scenes that have already caused some chatter online and in the British tabloids<\/a>, Dodi\u2019s ghost returns to talk to his father after his death, while Diana\u2019s ghost briefly appears in conversations with Charles and Queen Elizabeth.<\/p>\n How accurate are the non-ghostly scenes in this latest depiction of the Dodi-Diana romance? Annie Sulzberger, the head of research for the show \u2014 she is also the sister of The Times\u2019s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger \u2014 said that the research team was mindful of the delicacy around resurrecting a story in which so many participants are still alive.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople who lived through Diana\u2019s death feel a sense of ownership over that history, a sense of participation, which can color their perception of it,\u201d she said in an interview. \u201cWith recent history, you\u2019re constantly battling with people\u2019s intimate and personal perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n Sulzberger said that the research team turned to multiple sources to depict the events of 1997, including memoirs, documentaries and the official government inquest into the couple\u2019s deaths in the car along with a third victim, Henri Paul, the driver.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s a documentary, we watched it; if there\u2019s an article, we read it; if there\u2019s a book, we have it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One particularly valuable source of information was a far-reaching police inquiry known as Operation Paget<\/a>, which investigated claims by an increasingly unhinged Mohamed al-Fayed that Diana was pregnant with Dodi\u2019s baby and that the couple had been murdered by the British security services at the behest of Prince Philip, among others. (Diana was not pregnant, the report found, and the deaths were an accident.)<\/p>\n The inquiry\u2019s final report included testimony from friends and employees of the couple, revealing how Diana described their romance to the vast circle of confidants she spoke to by telephone from France.<\/p>\n Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a friend of Diana\u2019s, told the inquiry that they had talked on Aug. 29, two days before the princess\u2019s death. Goldsmith testified that when she asked Diana whether she was considering marrying Dodi, Diana said: \u201cAnnabel, I need marriage like a rash on my face.\u201d<\/p>\n Richard Kay, a longtime royal reporter for The Daily Mail and a close friend of Diana who spoke to her the day she died, said that nobody could say for sure what happened between Dodi and Diana in those final hours.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is in the realm of fantasy,\u201d Kay said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s just \u2014 what can I say? \u2014 it\u2019s speculation,\u201d he said of the program\u2019s depiction of a last conversation between Dodi and Diana.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n While he agreed that it was unlikely that Diana was considering marrying Dodi, Kay said that Diana was \u201cclearly very taken with him,\u201d in part because Dodi was the first man she could date openly since her separation from Charles, several years before their divorce.<\/p>\n \u201cDodi was a quite gentle, sweet sort of man, and I suspect he was very attentive,\u201d Kay said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just the trappings that made him attractive \u2014 the jets and the yachts \u2014 but Diana quite liked the ordinariness of the family life al-Fayed had with his second wife and younger children.\u201d<\/p>\n As always in \u201cThe Crown,\u201d there is an underlying tension not only between what might be real and what might be imagined, but also how that could color the public\u2019s perception of the truth. Last year, after a wave of criticism from real-life participants of made-up scenes, the series added a disclaimer. It was, it said for the first time, a \u201cfictional dramatization\u201d that was \u201cinspired by real events.\u201d<\/p>\n That gives the production high cover and protection from potential lawsuits from aggrieved public figures. But still, \u201centire generations are getting their understanding of the modern British monarchy from the drama,\u201d the broadcaster and political commentator Andrew Marr wrote recently<\/a> in The Times of London, comparing the phenomenon to the way Shakespeare\u2019s dramas have shaped public interpretations of history ever since.<\/p>\n There are many ways \u201cThe Crown\u201d could have portrayed Diana\u2019s state of mind in those last weeks, and it chose a particularly gentle interpretation of her relationships with both her former husband and her new lover.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n More than 25 years later, it is hard to say definitively whether Diana had indeed found a measure of emotional peace after so much turmoil. Morgan\u2019s is just the latest in a long line of interpretations. But as \u201cThe Crown\u201d moves past the Diana era, perhaps it\u2019s the one that brings the most comfort.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n