Matt Smith starred as Prince Philip in the first two seasons of Netflix’s The Crown, and while the show is all about Elizabeth (as proven by the final moments of the series), I had hope I’d see him again—mainly because a season 6 trailer showed a moment I do not remember ever being a part of this series.
The trailer featured Philip (Smith) and Elizabeth (Claire Foy) driving in a car together. Now, if this was part of season one of the show, I just don’t remember because that was over seven years ago and I’ve lived through a pandemic in the meantime. Sorry if I don’t recall that one scene. But it seemed new to me. So I had hope we’d have flashbacks in this season, and in a way, I was right. We did get flashbacks. We just didn’t get any with my boy.
That’s not to say we didn’t get any Matt Smith. We did. Very much so. We just got glimpses of Matt Smith in the most wild of ways because for some reason, older Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce) has not heard of a projector screen in his 84 years of age (at the time). So my Matt Smith fix throughout the last season of The Crown was not, as I thought, flashbacks in all of the young Prince Philip’s glory, but instead … grainy footage of the Royal family that we watched on the back of a door in Buckingham Palace.
Was Matt Smith busy not coming back to the 60th Anniversary special for Doctor Who or something? Did I miss where he couldn’t come film that car scene I saw in the trailer?
I’m nothing if not someone who will watch a whole show for crumbs of my fave.
Look, I did not like this last season of The Crown. From forcing the ghost of Prince Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) to go and tell the queen (Imelda Staunton) to be there for England after her death, after she comforted her ex-husband, Prince Charles (Dominic West), about her death, to the secret fourth Elizabeth in the end, I just found it to be fine.
Maybe, just maybe, if they snuck in Matt Smith for me, I’d have been invested. (I’m kidding … or am I?) Overall, I always took The Crown as it was: A show that was never going to be the takedown of the monarchy that people thought it was going to be. It was, for the most part, always on the surface, but it gave us a look into Elizabeth that we always assumed was there, and people were fascinated by it.
What I just found so incredibly funny about the Matt Smith of it all in season 6 was that they a) completely ignored the Tobias Menzies era (and when Philip loved space) and took him straight back to when he was young and partying all the time—all featured by having Jonathan Pryce watching family videos on the back of a door instead of pulling down a projector screen.
(featured image: Netflix)
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