The First Photos from Part 1 of 'The Crown's Final Season Bring Us Full Circle

Writer Peter Morgan's major career breakthrough came in 2006 with The Queen, the Helen Mirren tour-de-force, where she played the then-living Queen Elizabeth II, based on the real-life events in the aftermath of Princess Diana's sudden death in a car crash in a tunnel in Paris on a hot August night in 1997. Before that, he'd made a small name with a UK-only TV miniseries, The Deal, dramatizing the power-sharing deal between Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, where Michael Sheen played the former.

Sheen reprised his role as Blair in The Queen and then in The Special Relationship, while Mirren reprised Elizabeth in Morgan's Broadway play, The Audience. So when Morgan proposed The Crown to Netflix, a six-season drama taking Queen Elizabeth's story back to its beginnings in the late 1940s, the running joke was the final two seasons would star Mirren. However, that did not happen; instead, the TV version stars Imelda Staunton as the now-late monarch, who did not live to see the final iteration of her reign in Seasons 5 and 6.

However, as the top image from Part 1 of the final season shows, the footfalls from that long-ago film that put Morgan on the map still echo down the years as The Crown comes full circle to that exact moment in history.