Our Flag Means Death season two wrapped up last Thursday night. Since then, I’ve been mulling and rewatching and listening to Kate Bush and giggling a lot. I thought I’d quickly round up a few stray thoughts about the season, and invite any of you other piracy enthusiasts to talk about the moments that have stuck out for you.
Obviously, here be spoilers (and mermaids, and unicorns)—proceed with caution, crew.
Ed and Stede were folded into the story
Where Season One was largely “Will Ed and Stede Get It Together”, Season Two felt to me more like their drama was just one relationship among many. We get the throuple of Olu, Jim, and Archie, we get Olu and Zheng, we get the large hint that there might be some permeable borders between those two relationships, we get The Swede and Spanish Jackie, and we get Lucius and Black Pete. But I will say I wish we’d gotten a bit more time with Olu and Jim and Lucius and Pete—assuming we get a third season, could we maybe have 10 episodes? Or 12! Or… 22?
The Swede’s Glow-Up
Not much to say about this, I’m just pleased that The Swede seems happy, that Jackie appreciates him, and that he’s found a calling as a mixologist.
Zheng and Auntie
Just, everything about them.
Ed and Stede’s second reunion
Ed slaughtering his way through British seamen to get to Stede, Ed reading Stede’s note, Zheng sending Stede out to meet Ed, the two of them running over the beach and collapsing into each other’s arms, “I love you/I know”, Zheng having to scream at them to snap them out of their twitterpation as she’s swarmed by men.
A perfect terrible joke
But everything that happens in that entry above is delayed because Stede has his sword stuck in a different seaman.
The Gravy Basket
I love the Gravy Basket! I love purgatory stories. They might be my favorite thing? I love it when Dante does it! I love the long slog through the Grey Marshes in The Lord of the Rings! I love Beetlejuice! I love ghost stories that lean into the in-between-ness! My favorite thing in fiction is when a character has to reckon with themself and harrow up their soul and reconsider every decision they’ve ever made in order to go on.
And here it’s perfect. I’m guessing most audience members clocked that Ed was hallucinating and/or dead pretty quick, but of course Ed “the-least-self-reflective-person-who-ever-lived” Teach doesn’t get it. The unfolding realization that he’s in Purgatory and that Hornigold is just another part of himself is so beautifully done. The way his mind goes back to inn-keeping.
The Use of “This Woman’s Work”
I had the great joy of speaking with Music Supervisor Maggie Phillips a few weeks ago, and she mentioned the use of Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” as a highlight of the season. The longer I sit with it, I think it might be my favorite music cue of the whole show so far, in a show that’s included multiple instances of Nina Simone, Moondog, and of course Gnossiene. But this! Diving into the deep pop weirdness of Kate Bush and using her to underscore Ed’s near-death experience, and his vision of Stede as a merperson? Forget the Gravy Basket, I think we’re in some sort of paradise.
Innkeeping
All Ed wants, really, is to create a safe space. For him piracy was a safe space, once he was a Captain, because he terrorized everyone else. But now, in this post-Stede universe, he’s begun to think about how to create a real safe space. A way to be stable, but also to be travel-adjacent. A way to create a home for himself, and a home away from home for others. But like the Gravy Basket, an inn is a liminal space, an in-between place, and I worry it won’t be quite the haven Ed wants it to be. But I’m hoping like hell we get a third season to find out.
The Fact that Calypso’s Birthday is interrupted
I hate this and I love this. On the one hand I really wanted this explosion of queer joy to get its own complete episode. I wanted to see Ed and Stede dance while Izzy sang. I wanted more time with Wee John, with his perfect dramatic Face.
At the same time, of course it gets interrupted. Of course the regular world breaks into their celebration, mocks it, upends it, steamrolls right over it. This is queerness in microcosm, in a sense: the straight world has usually wanted to police our joy. But! The fun thing even here is that as much as Ned Low is a dick, he’s also a pirate. This isn’t exactly the straight world. And because of that, Stede, so often seen as a failure, is able to use his actual skill of accepting people as they are, and noticing their talents and enthusiasms. He notices when the person torturing him isn’t getting the kind of emotional support she needs from her boss, and he takes her side. And sure, it’s a way for him to undermine Low and save his crew, but he also means it. Where in some shows Stede’s sympathy would just be manipulation, our Stede genuinely wants the other crew to be happy. He wants them to love piracy as much as he does. As soon as Low’s crew have turned on him and released the Revenge Family, all’s forgiven, they’re allowed to go back to their ship and leave, no harm no foul. You can imagine him even trying to win Ned Low over if the man hadn’t committed the classic blunder of insulting Ed.
Rather than Lucius and Pete storming onto the deck with all the pointy things they can carry and saving the day, Stede uses language and compassion to free everyone. Because the thing about Stede is that he’s a Good Nerd. He doesn’t gatekeep people’s love, or demand that if they like Piracy so much they need to name their Top Five Pirates. When he hears about Calypso’s Birthday, he accepts it and encourages the crew to throw a party. When he learns that it’s kind of a scam, he accepts that and thinks a party is a great idea. He thinks of a way to combine the crew’s desire for a rager, and Ed’s need to turn poison into positivity. If Stede says, “Wait, you haven’t seen Black Sails???!!!” it’s because he’s excited that you get to experience it for the fist time. He wants you to love it, to join the fandom, to be part of his groupchat.
Ned Low, meanwhile, is a Bad Nerd. Is he a pirate? Yeah! But he’s obsessed with performing piracy, with showing off, keeping his record, turning everything into a competition. Rather than just try to set a new raiding record, he lashes out at the man who topped his score. Rather than holding off and at least letting the crew finish their party, he strikes when they’re distracted. If Ned Low ever says, “What do you mean you haven’t seen Black Sails???” it’s with scorn, with a hefty scoop of “I’m cooler than you because I saw Black Sails years ago.”
And Finally…
I’m glad Izzy’s dead.
Hang on, hang on, lemme explain.
Izzy had the best arc this season. He got the hero’s arc: he walked the fine Game of Thrones-esque line of abuse and love to try to keep Blackbeard in check; he cared for the crew and did his best to protect them; he got the dramatic stand-off/suicide pact with Ed; he got the Grievous Bodily Harm; he got Rock Bottom. And after all that he spent a nebulous amount of time drunk out of his gourd.
But then what happened? He got the closest thing to a real apology Ed was capable of giving anyone. He got a new leg, loving carved from a unicorn, but more than that, he got a practical, physical, thoughtful expression of the crew’s love and appreciation for him, after all the months of being hated and feared. And they even knew how to give him the gift: bang on his door, leave it with a note, run away, never mention it to him.
He relearned how to fight with his new mobility device. He and Stede started respecting each other, a little. And then he got the confrontation with Prince Ricky Banes.
And I mean that HE got that, not anyone else.
It could have been Stede, asserting the value of his still-new life, or Ed, lashing out for a brutal childhood and the life he chose to escape it, or Spanish Jackie, celebrating outsider status. Instead, it was Izzy.
You don’t know the first thing about piracy do you? It’s not about glory, it’s not about getting what you want. It’s about belonging to something when the world has told you you’re nothing. It’s about finding the family to kill for when yours are long dead. It’s about letting go of ego for something larger: the crew.
You’re not a pirate, lad. You’re a spoiled entitled bunch of twats, dressed in puffy blue nighties. Kill me. kill us all. Our spirit will last throughout your entire fucking empire because we’re good and you are a rancid syphilitic cunt.
When Izzy thinks about pirate crews as a found family, it’s not life with Blackbeard in the Before Times he thinks about—it’s the crew of the Revenge sitting around shooting the shit, Stede in his full foppy fine fabrics, Ed leaning against him, everyone chill and comfortable in a way that was impossible before Stede. And Izzy…isn’t in this image. He’s watching, in his mind’s eye, but he isn’t part of this family he’s talking about.
And then he died. After all that, that little nothing twat Banes is the one who killed him. You can see in his eyes that when the shot hits him he knows he’s fucked; he only comes back to the boat with them because he knows Ed won’t leave him.
In the end Izzy dies for his family. He takes the bullet so the others can go on to this new life, with Zheng, Auntie, and Spanish Jackie part of the crew, with Ed and Stede staying behind to build their inn. The reason the Princeling shoots him, specifically, is the speech. It’s because this low class outcast of a man told Banes, right into his face, that he was nothing, and that is the thing Ricky Banes fears most. Straight society was built around the idea that Banes was important—until the little Prince met Spanish Jackie, every interaction he’d ever had in life bore that out. Anything he ever wanted, he took with no consequence. (Can you imagine that life? Moving through a world designed for you? I don’t even know where to start.) And now here was someone—a pirate!—telling him there was a thing he couldn’t have. What other outcome could there be, than to crush the thing that told you “No”?
Well, therein lies the rub: of course there’s another outcome.
I trust David Jenkins and his crew. They buried Izzy on land, seemingly—an odd choice, but also a choice that kept him close to Ed and Stede, and allowed Buttons to land on his grave marker. This season has been about transformation. Anne and Mary became antique shop owners, then went back to the sea. Lucius and Black Pete got engaged and then married. Olu became part of a throuple with Jim and Archie, then started a relationship with Zheng. The Swede got hot. Ed died, came back, became a fisherman, and now is embarking on a life as an innkeeper. Stede became a murderer.
Izzy meanwhile became a Chimaera.
And I know, there are some people with disabilities who would maybe bristle at that, because his new leg is a mobility device, a thing that should be nbd and available to anyone who needs it. But it’s also a UNICORN LEG, not just a regular human-shaped leg, and for me, personally, the fact that Izzy is now part mythical creature makes me absurdly happy. No one made any effort to make it look human, and Izzy happy throws his hoof up on tables when he sits down. The crew even calls him the New Unicorn. And my assumption, from the way this show has gone, is that Izzy is coming back in a new form, just as Buttons did. If he doesn’t? He died a heroic death, helping to save the family he loves from the forces of hatred, intolerance, and oppression. But how cool would it be if Izzy’s evolving into a some new, even more beautiful form?
