The Fairytale Ends

The Crown | Cast: Elizabeth Debicki, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton | Creator: Peter Morgan | English | Netflix

If King Charles had written the first part of the final season of The Crown, he couldn’t have done a better job. The contrast with the late Diana couldn’t be more stark, as his private secretary says so eloquently at one point: Diana stands for St Tropez, scandal, irresponsibility, selfishness, while Charles stands for Scotland, dignity, duty, and principle. In short, she is a tabloid princess and he is a broadsheet prince. The season opens with the Pont de l’Alma crash in Paris and never really recovers from it, the sense of doom hanging over Diana’s last Mediterranean summer with the equally tormented Dodi Al-Fayed. Caught between her desire for good, (evident in her work on landmines) her love for her boys, William and Harry; and the search for a new love and life, The Crown paints Diana as a bit of an exhibitionist, an impulsive woman who acts on her instincts, and a lifelong sucker for publicity. In Dodi, she finds a partner who is no more than a puppet in his father’s plans to become an English gentleman. A marriage between his son, his “Omar Sharif” and the most beautiful woman in the world would make the House of Fayed the equal of English royalty. Or so he thinks. We all know how it ended, with Dodi’s death not finding even a mention in newspapers, Diana elevated as a saint forever, and Charles left to live his life with Camilla. But not before he embarks on his usual whining about his mother (Imelda Staunton) not being able to mother him. The moral of the story: even if you’re the Queen of England, you cannot escape ungrateful children declaring that you were a bad mother.

Why Watch it? Is there a more delicious party game than figuring out the truth from fantasy in The Crown? I’ll be sorry to see it end

When Heroes Rise

The Railway Men | Cast: Kay Kay Menon, Babil Khan, R Madhavan, Divyendu Sharma | Director: Shiv Rawail | Hindi | Netflix

What does it take to be a hero? The Railway Men examines the idea of being a leader, someone who is able to empathise with people, rise above challenges, and find so­lutions where others see only problems. There is an upright station master, played by Kay Kay Menon, who sees a son in the new trainee, played with gangly grace by young Babil Khan; a maverick general manager who does what his heart tells him to, played by R Madhavan; and a railway robber, a genial scammer (Divyendu Sharma, in good form). Adding to this is a fierce reporter (Sunny Hinduja) who refuses to let go of the Union Carbide story. It’s a story of poor cor­porate governance, which is the better known Bhopal story. The role played by the Indian Railways on the city’s darkest night has been less chronicled and celebrated. The city remains scarred still with the effects of the gas leak, with babies born with deformities, and women widowed before their time. The fight for justice has been long, hard and often with little reward. But The Railway Men reminds us it is all too easy to let corporate greed get away with industrial disasters of epic proportions with little accountability.

Why watch it? Dramatic, well acted, and a story that has seldom been told before

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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