The physical doll in “Doll 123” — the first installment of quasi-biographical ITV/PBS series “Victoria” — is dispensed with about halfway through the episode: After the reality of her situation has been made clear in stark relief, Victoria (Jenna Coleman) herself tucks away her childhood toy into a box, and the box into a locked cabinet… But the spectre of its symbolism towers over everything that follows.
Alexandrina Victoria, made Queen of England at age 18 after the passing of her uncle, was famously petite. This physical stature, coupled with the biological fact of her gender, served — as “Victoria” works overtime to show us — to shape her into a pediment of pure will. Or rather, of will in her best moments, and willfulness (to the point of impetuous contrarianism) in her worst.
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Given that the majority of the (almost entirely male) political figures surrounding her saw her first as a doll-sized child, and next as a delicately tempered female, those willful worst moments in this first installment are ever within arm’s reach:
“You will not meet with any members of government without I, or your mother, present,” seethes the serpent-like Sir Jon Conroy (Paul Rhys) on the first night of Victoria’s reign, after discovering she’s already met with her new royal messengers alone (in her nightgown!) in a kind of preemptive strike.
“Little Vicky told Lord Peel…” a member of Victoria’s ladies in waiting reports to Lord Melbourne (a dashing Rufus Sewell) in the weeks after he has taken his leave from his posts as Prime Minister of the Whig party and personal secretary to the queen — and Victoria, in response, has revolted and refused to replace any of her Whig ladies in waiting to suit the incoming Tory Prime Minister.
“Her behavior is hardly rational,” Conroy rages hysterically around the same time at Victoria’s mother (Catherine Flemming), with whom he has been scheming since the before the king died to force a regency on the young queen, as the two of them continue their ongoing discussion about how, basically, this idiot child, whom they hate and have zero respect for, needs them to scheme her into a corner of scandal and mental breakdown, so they can protect her.
The way in which all players continually make reference to protecting the realm, to the good of the Queen and Country — as perfunctorily and lazily as a starving man crossing himself before digging into dinner — is chilling. Empty allusions to the public good and patriotism that barely even try to hide the agenda underneath are troubling to watch these days. Not least because they’re never quite clearly one thing or the other:
Disingenuous pretenses at honor are unrealistically horrifying, but so is this Orwellian doublespeak — the mouth says one thing, the eyes say another. And here, as in the real world, what the eyes are saying is that women can’t be trusted to rule themselves, let alone the rest of us.
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So why is it that Victoria refuses to swap half of her ladies in waiting with Tory-approved replacements? Because in the war she is fighting, those ladies — and the Whig party, led by her best friend (and crush, at least for now and not historically), Lord Melbourne — are her only allies.
“I was not aware that you were fighting a war, ma’am,” Lord Wellington (Peter Bowles) remarks to Victoria, attempting to dissuade her from turning an impetuous social “inclination” into an impediment to the opposition party forming their own government.
“…Because you are not a young woman, Duke,” Victoria responds calmly, “and no one, I suspect, tells you what to do.”
In the story, the 123rd doll her mother made begins as correlative for the queen herself — a thirteen-year-old Victoria even sewed it a tiny crown, on the day she figured out her part in the lines of succession — and then becomes a symbol of her subjects: Subject to Victoria’s will, faceless and small. But after one imperious misstep (and it’s a baddie!) nearly destroys it all, including her own interest in rule, the doll changes narrative shape a third time, becoming a symbol of exactly what Victoria can’t afford to lose: Her own humanity, and her clear sight of everyone else’s. It’s a powerful thread.
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What is interesting in how “Victoria” presents this story of Queen Victoria’s first years on the throne is that the context — of both the political concerns and the correctness of the warring positions — are never even made clear, let alone made the focus. We’re sitting beside Victoria as they act, and she acts, with no knowledge of the future.
Is Victoria’s bullheaded refusal to take advice from anyone other than Melbourne and her former governess (Daniela Holtz) borne from the wisdom of experience — both as a girl and as a pawn of Conroy throughout her youth — or from teenaged rebellion against a dude who is just hella creepy?
Do Conroy and the Duchess of Kent truly have a vision of progress and sound governance for the country that has been years in the development, or are they simply hungry for power? What visions of the future are even at stake?
Aside from a brief act regarding abolition of slavery in the last of Britain’s few remaining slave-holding colonies — of which Victoria is horrified to learn, and of course Melbourne is on the correct side of history in arguing for — and a “Downstairs” B-story that shows the lower class’s side hustles being made obsolete by modern innovation, the social and political moment that Victoria steps into as queen is made as opaque as possible.
“Victoria” is not concerned, as yet, with interrogating that angle of history, or Victoria’s position relative to it. What matters in this presentation is the girl Alexandrina’s growth into the Queen Victoria — and the daily lessons in maturity, duty, and resolve that she must go through. Plus, lush costumes. Plus, the sharp planes of Rufus Sewell’s very good face, and Coleman’s luminous one. Plus, the existential question of how consistently Jenna Coleman can act her way past the unsettlingly inhuman contacts that were chosen to give her Victoria’s blue eyes (answer: more consistently than we anticipated from the trailer). And in all of that, it succeeds.
“Victoria” has two more episodes remaining in its first series, airing stateside Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on PBS. A second series has already been ordered by ITV, and we’re told it will follow the “Crown” — and “Downton” — model, advancing through the decades.
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