They Went (only) So Far : The Crown, S3 E7 Moondust [Media Notes 24]

The episode is framed by Apollo 11’s lunar landing. Was it profound?
Not in any message one might distill from it, such messages would be as empty as those that Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins offered Prince Philip in a private audience in Buckingham Palace. But perhaps in the flow of it.
Philip is feeling dissatisfied in his middle age. He’d wanted a life of adventure. Instead, he got a life of protocol. The new Rector establishes a retreat house for priests seeking to revivify their faith. He’s asked to speak with the first cohort and, as they tell him why they’ve come to this retreat, he gets restless and ridicules them. “Action, that’s what you need, action” – not an exact quote, but the spirit of the thing is there.
And then he watches the moon landing in the palace surrounded by family – and (liveried) servants, of course. When he learns that the astronauts are being toured about the world and that they’ve been offered to the British royals he’s eager to see them, even requests a private audience. Just him and the astronauts, pilot to pilot(s).
It doesn’t meet his expectations. At all. As they tell banal anecdotes and give pedestrian answers to his questions, and Philip realizes that they not going to give him whatever it is he doesn’t even know how to ask, we’re thinking of those disaffected priests Philip had ridiculed. One wonders whether or not their spiritual seeking is what Philip wanted from these engineer/pilots, but not so much the seeking as the having found it now overflowing with it. But it’s not there.
He shares his disappointment with his wife, the Queen. She understands. They didn’t ask for this. Now they’ll be on public display the rest of her life. She knows what THAT’s about. In an earlier episode she’d revealed that she’d have been much happier breeding and riding horses.
And so the episode closes on Philip once again talking with the priests, this time apologizing for having ridiculed them. And asking for their help.
Very nicely turned.
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This episode bares comparing with a post from last year, First Man and our capacity for experience.