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

There’s many reasons why I’ll never be the show runner of a television series, but one major factor is the anxiety of crafting a series finale. The show runner has to balance a great number of things when making a series finale: fan expectations, lingering plot threads, and providing a sense of finality that fits the overall tone of the show. Thankfully Peter Morgan was given the leg room to end The Crown on his own terms, as opposed to any number of shows that end prematurely. That he had real-life events to fall back on doesn’t hurt either. 

I don’t know why I was caught off guard by Sleep, Dearie Sleep being so concerned with the funeral plans of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. It gives Peter Morgan the excuse to look back on Elizabeth’s earlier life, and wrap things up tidily. It also gives the show the opportunity to bring back the show’s past iterations of Elizabeth. I still don’t know how I feel about The Crown’s more surreal side, with Olivia Colman and Claire Foy returning to advise Imelda Staunton on whether or not she should step down. I’m sure I’m not the only one to wonder how much Morgan’s plan changed after the real-life death of Elizabeth last year, but I think it adds an extra layer of poignancy to the fictionalized Elizabeth saying goodbye.

Foy’s scene works like gangbusters, a smart deconstruction of what the monarchy means, and what Queen Elizabeth’s reign specifically means to her. It gives her a chance to wrestle with her loss of self, the life she gave up when she took the crown. But there never really was an Elizabeth without the crown; she’d prepared since birth to become the Queen, and was never given the opportunity to form another identity. Before watching Sleep, Dearie Sleep, I had seen the image of Foy, Colman, and Staunton gathered together circulated online, and while the image is indeed a little silly out of context, Morgan manages to not make it feel as hokey as it could have been. I’m not ashamed to admit I got a little teary-eyed at the final moments of the show.

The rest of the episode is decidedly more messy, if blessedly short. Morgan, for whatever reason, feels compelled to run through the other tertiary events of the time, including the country turning against Tony Blair, and Harry’s ill-advised Nazi costume. My biggest complaint is not in these storylines, but in Morgan’s over-written script. Consider the scene where Blair meets with Elizabeth to discuss the quagmire in Iraq. He espouses the hope for an exit strategy, and Elizabeth replies “there’s been a lot of talk about exit strategy lately.” She’s referring to funeral plans, in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious.

There’s a lot of talk in Sleep, Dearie Sleep about the United Kingdom’s previous kings and queens, and that’s no accident. The Crown has concerned itself with a singular royal family, but it’s an institution that’s lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years before Elizabeth ever came along, and will last for hundreds more after her death. 

I don’t know what The Crown’s ultimate long-term legacy will be now that it’s concluded. The show ushered in an extravagant era for Netflix, with lush production design, costuming, and all manner of technical elements – and became a perpetual Emmy juggernaut, at the very least. Yes, the final two seasons saw some bumps along the road, but there’s no other show like it today, taking real-life well-known events and making them dramatic and compelling, on a grand scale.