Our Flag Means Death Season-Finale Recap: A Damn Fine Pirate
A pirate’s reputation is all they have. Well, ideally there’s also a fair amount of plundered treasure and a seafaring vessel involved, but how does a pirate acquire said bounty? By being scary as hell, that’s how. The real Blackbeard wove strips of hemp attached to lit fuses into the whiskers that gave him his name, giving him the aura of a demon smoldering with hellfire. The TV version of Blackbeard has mellowed out over the course of two seasons, but the pirates of Our Flag Means Death are still concerned with legends and legacy.
The theme takes a meta turn in the season-two finale, “Mermen,” as Prince Richard (a.k.a. the sniveling, contemptible Ricky Baines) tells the crew of the Revenge that once he’s hung them all by the neck (not the thumbs) until they are dead, the world will forget that they ever existed. This is obviously not true, as we’re watching a TV show featuring fictionalized versions of real figures. Clearly, history remembers them, though the Revenge crew doesn’t have the foresight to know what a Max Original Series is.
Reputation is one reason to become a pirate. But although piracy is something you choose at first, after a while it chooses you. This is the dilemma in which Ed/Eddie/Blackbeard finds himself after discovering that there’s more to being a fisherman than hanging out next to a lake admiring the natural beauty of fish scales. Turns out it’s stinky, hard work, and Blackbeard isn’t good at hard work. What he is good at are pratfalls — as Ed, Taika Waititi has given us some great slapstick this season, including dropping the fisherman’s dinner into the fire — and, of course, killing people.
Ed returns to the Republic of Pirates to find Zheng’s fleet practically in ashes, their charred husks barely afloat on the water. He also finds the island occupied by the British Navy, who are entitled, boorish, and just so annoying. Seriously, these guys are the frat bros of the sea. (They even share a thing for corporal punishment with modern-day fraternities.) And Ricky is their nepo-baby leader, with his stupid posh accent and his ’80s-movie villain hair — he’d shut down the rec center, if the Republic of Pirates had one. Luckily, Stede Bonnet has a plan. He always does.
One character who doesn’t have to worry about her reputation is Spanish Jackie, whose dusty bottle of poison brandy is responsible for wiping out a good chunk of Ricky’s douche brigade. The connection between poison and pirates goes back to the 19th century, when the skull and crossbones — a symbol associated with death, thus its inclusion on pirate flags designed to intimidate and terrify foes — began to be used as a warning symbol on poisonous substances. But poison is also a woman’s weapon, commonly used to dispatch abusive husbands and other inconvenient men in the days before no-fault divorce.
That’s not Jackie’s problem: She loves the Swede, enough to not only “poison train” him by sneaking minuscule amounts into his food and drink so “the good stuff” doesn’t kill him, but to leave the rest of her husbands and run away with him aboard the ship that the pirates steal from the British Navy at the end of this week’s episode. (Sucks to suck, fellas!) By the end of the episode Zheng, ever practical, sees an opportunity to consolidate power by joining up with the crew of the Revenge, which has the added benefit of bringing the cast together for more adventures in season three.
That is, except for Stede and Ed, who are living the gay dream of retiring to the country to fix up an old house (okay, maybe shack is a better word) together — however long that lasts.
Our Flag Means Death has yet to receive an official season-three pickup, but creator David Jenkins says that he has a definitive conclusion in mind for the end of season three. And with one more batch of episodes to go, Stede, Ed, or both getting restless seems inevitable, if only for narrative purposes.
We’ve talked about the tension between Our Flag Means Death’s kind heart and bloody subject matter in these recaps, and how the show’s sweetness can sometimes come at the expense of its dramatic tension. We see that here with Zheng’s grief over the death of Auntie — who obviously isn’t really dead, because she’s a recurring cast member, and recurring cast members don’t just die quietly off screen. The show acknowledges this when Auntie inevitably reappears in Jackie’s pirate dungeon: “Of course I’m alive,” she snaps, a meta moment just like the one where Ricky taunts Izzy Hands about his legacy.
Izzy needn’t worry about that. Re-introduced under dramatic beams of light through the bars of a prison cell, Izzy isn’t afraid of “rancid syphilitic cunt” Ricky — and why should he be? He’s killed braver, better men by mistake. Izzy’s death isn’t a throwaway moment, or a cliffhanger. He gets a dramatic farewell, a funeral, a gravestone, and tears from the shipmates who once feared him (and still kind of did, right up until his death). The sadistic, fearsome Izzy Hands is no more. Despite himself, he died a hero. And it looks as if he will be staying dead — unless Our Flag Means Death takes a turn into zombie fiction in season three. Now that would be a plot twist.
Davy Jones’s Locker
• The scenes where Ed was communing with nature by the lake had the gauzy aura of a pharmaceutical commercial, which added to the comedy. Ed’s arrival on the Republic of Pirates was quite cinematic as well!
• Spanish Jackie’s nose jar reminded me of the famous Sourtoe Cocktail Club of Dawson City, Yukon, a pseudo-cannibalistic ritual in which visitors to the Sourdough Saloon are invited to slurp down a drink with a mummified human toe in it. You’re not supposed to actually swallow the toe, just touch it to your lips; nevertheless, several people have ingested it, by accident and on purpose. The bar is now on its seventh toe.
• Not to be pedantic or anything, but how did Blackbeard get his leathers back?! He dumped them into the sea in last week’s batch of episodes.
• That sure was a bare ass, in closeup, draped over a barrel at Spanish Jackie’s place in the scene where the pirates change into the Navy uniforms.
• “Men have cost her too much. But you’re not a man. You’re soft.”
• A hale and hearty congratulations to Lucius and Black Pete, who celebrated their matey-dom with a kiss at the end of the season finale.
• And a tip of the pirate’s hat to the real MVPs of Our Flag Means Death season two: the stunt coordinators, who successfully staged the biggest battles the show has seen yet multiple times over the course of the season.