'The Crown' Season 3 Episode 1 'Olding': Harold Wilson or Anthony Blunt, who was the Soviet spy right under Queen Elizabeth's nose?
Spoiler alert for 'The Crown' Season 3 Episode 1 — 'Olding'
Time has flown by. The Buckingham Palance stands tall on a grey morning in early 1964. Queen Elizabeth II has aged as she looks at her reflection in two portraits standing side-by-side. Taking the baton from Claire Foy, Olivia Colman stands in her place and utters her first words: "A great many changes. Age is rarely kind to anyone. Nothing one can do about it. One just has to get on with it."
Change is the only constant this season. A fresh set of new faces appear for each character but the vibe and aura of the series are blended so beautifully that it will take just a few minutes to adjust with the leap and the new cast. Titled 'Olding', the first episode wades through wavering political waters and addresses the big question: Which face of a man does one see when they look at him?
Leader of the Labour party, Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins) fights his election. Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies) clues in how "his cabinet would be made up of rabid anti-monarchists" and even labels him as a "KGB spy with a code name 'Olding'."
Back at Downing Street, Winston breathes his last as the Queen comforts him with compliments. "I was a terrible bully," he confesses in his final few moments but the Queen has only good words to say. "You were my guardian angel. The roof over my head. The spine in my back. The iron in my heart. You were the compass that steered and directed me."
Little time passes as Wilson is bestowed with the title. The Queen is not quite a fan of Wilson after her first meeting. At a formal dinner, she says his predecessors were "formidable" and "statesmanlike" but Wilson is "neither old nor young, tall nor short, loud nor quiet, warm nor cold." She calls him "unremarkable" and one of the guests passes a comment: "Isn't that the best thing about a spy?"
But is Wilson really a spy? The Queen is devastated when she is proved wrong. The Director of MI5 approaches the Queen about the mole, and the Queen believes he is on about Harold Wilson, but he reveals it is not who she thinks is. "We do have a Russian spy in Downing Street?" she asks, to which he replies, "No. But we may have a spy in Buckingham Palace." She is dumbfounded to find out it none other than the leading British art historian Sir Anthony Blunt.
Advised to keep it a secret, the Queen has to make a speech about Blunt at the Gallery — "The Royal Collection." In the speech, she indirectly jeers at how one person can have two different personalities with stern looks at Anthony. Later, Philip pulls Anthony aside and asks if he could do the "honorable thing." "The least you could do is quietly crawl away," he tells him, only to get a threat in return to unleash his portraits found during the Profumo sex scandal.
Meanwhile, the Queen realizes her mistake and apologizes to Harold Wilson. "Prime Minister, I misjudged you terribly, and I would like to take this occasion to say sorry." He assures her of his loyalty saying: "I am an economist, a statistician at heart. I'm happiest with numbers. You can trust numbers. They're honest. There's no mystery or deception or allegory. You know where you stand. What you see is what you get. And I prefer things that way."
The episode sheds light on the dark, murky secrets that lay within the gold palace doors. To keep Prince Philip's scandal a hush-hush affair, Blunt continued as surveyor of the Queen's pictures until his retirement in 1972. Could anyone imagine this is the crux of being a part of the family that Britain looks up to?