Warning: Reviews of The Crown season 6 will contain spoilers.

“Seems like another lifetime.” “And if it were yesterday, too.” This exchange comes early on in Persona Non Grata, the season premiere of The Crown, Netflix’s last gasp at prestige television. It occurs between Queen Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) and Prince Charles (Dominic West), as he espouses the fond memories he had of the precious few moments he had with his mother in his youth, but it doubles as a cheekily meta jab from series creator Peter Morgan. Theoretically, you could start The Crown from the beginning when each of these characters were decades younger – and played by entirely different actors – and, a day or two later, watch this very episode.

It’s a strange sensation to see the show in an era that’s more familiar to the world at large. What once felt borderline surreal with its post-WWII setting now feels surreal in a different way. Netflix has made no secret in promoting this final season in how it would portray certain events in the royal family’s history, events that I myself was alive to witness. For God’s sake, Persona Non Grata includes needle drops of Chumbawumba and Smash Mouth. The times, they are a-changing.

The Crown has always excelled when it plausibly imagines the private lives of these most public figures. Lord only knows how much of the content in Persona Non Grata is factually accurate, but perhaps most importantly, it feels like it is. The season premiere is smaller in scale compared to previous episodes, only concerned with the same weekend from opposing viewpoints. One takes place from the perspective of Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) as she escapes to Saint Tropez and begins the fateful fling with Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) aboard his father’s yacht.

Debicki, who was the bright spot in an otherwise forgetful season five, continues to shine here. She flirts with Dodi and takes care of her children, but is smart enough to know that she can send a powerful front-page message to Charles in a swimsuit and tell off the paparazzi simultaneously. Abdalla is another capable addition as well, as he’s torn between his fiancé Kelly (Erin Richards) and his father’s wishes.

The other half of the episode follows Charles as he’s shunned by his mother by not showing up to Camilla’s (Olivia Williams) fiftieth birthday party. One of Morgan’s greatest strengths is in how the show portrays the ever-present struggle between the royals’ private lives versus their duty to the crown. The stakes here aren’t the highest, but it’s no less authentic to the show, with Elizabeth knowing she should support her son publicly but knowing she ultimately cannot.

But how much of Elizabeth’s lack of support is genuine, and how much is her using the Crown as an excuse? We’ve seen since the beginning of the show that the Queen was never the most attentive mother figure. In Persona Non Grata, it’s underlined here in the contrast between her and Diana, who considers motherhood to be her greatest priority. Indeed, the exchange from the beginning of this review is essentially Charles saying he had an absentee mother. Sure, Diana has more freedom since she has no proper obligations and doesn’t literally have a country to run, but it’s always been in Elizabeth’s DNA to defer her motherly duties to someone else.

I wonder how much the remaining episodes will focus on Elizabeth and Phillip (Jonathan Pryce), if at all. Obviously the show has a tremendous task in front of itself, in portraying the horrific tragedy of Diana’s death, but I hope that the Queen and King aren’t relegated to tertiary characters in the end. Neither Elizabeth or Phillip are given much to do here, so we’ll see if Persona Non Grata is the exception or the rule for this season. The show has done so well in making them front and center through major world events in smart and interesting ways, like during the Kennedy assassination and the Aberfan disaster. That, more than the inevitability of 1997, is what I’ll be tuning in for.