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selenak„We’re all stories, in the end“, says not just River Song on Doctor Who but Captain Jack Rackham in Black Sails‘ final episode. Black Sails works on so many levels; one of them is a very meta meditation on storytelling and storytellers.
The show’s cast of characters is a mixture of characters derived from a literary classic, Treasure Island, characters based on historical figures (with considerable liberties taken), and characters invented for this particular show. While there is no fourth wall breaking as such, many of the characters are very much aware they’re part of a narrative; trying to control said narrative and/or trying at least to use it to their advantage is very much on top of many a character’s agenda.
„Creating a story“ and „becoming a character of a story“: not the same thing, though several of the show’s ensemble try to do both. In the unfolding narrative, we first meet Captain Flint at a point where he seems to a an already established, clearly delineated character. He’s a feared pirate leader. He’s after a treasure. There’s some mystery about his relationship with Miranda Barlow, and some of his motivations, but even so, his function in the tale and where it is going seems to be clear, not least because Flint belongs to the part of the ensemble who hail from Treasure Island. This means, among other things, he’ll both have to survive long enough to collect the treasure in question and to hide it in a way that leaves a great many people dead, and that ultimately, he’s doomed to die alone. Black Sails subsequently makes it clear that Flint, including his name, was a deliberate creation not just on a Doylist but Watsonian level. British navy officer James McGraw created Flint, using a childhood story, both as a way of survival and as a way of revenge. He does and doesn’t think of Flint as himself; when he, in late season 2, imagines a peaceful retirement as McGraw, he speaks in loathing of his Flint persona and draws a line between them. But of course, we’re only in the middle of the story, and no such thing happens. Instead, Flint loses his seemingly one remaining tether to his McGraw past and reaffirms his Flint identity, vowing to become, once more and in a larger way, the villain of the British Empire’s narrative and use that very role to achieve if not victory for himself then at least defeat and devastation for his enemies. (This „I am determined to prove a villain“ moment is mirrored later by Woode Rogers, deciding to become the villain in the pirates‘ narrative and again, to achieve not so much victory for himself anymore but defeat and devastations of his enemies. I’ll get to how the narrative uses Rogers as a mirror of various other characters later on.)
There is, mid s2, a small moment that’s a big turning point of insight both on a Watsonian and Doylist level. It occurs when Flint asks Silver about how the inhabitants of Nassau see the conflict between Flint and Vane, and it visibly bothers him that a lot of them see him, not Vane, as the bad guy in said conflict. Since until then, Flint’s outward attitude had been utter indifference as to what anyone, ally or foe, thinks of him, Silver is amazed, not just in terms of the current situation but in what that says about Flint in general: that he does care about other people’s judgment. „The things you’ve done…“ Arguably this is when Silver realizes that „Flint“ isn’t the monolithic persona he’s gotten to know (or thought he did), that there’s something far more complicated going on. A great many subsequent developments on the show depend on that insight.
Silver himself, alone of all the main characters, does not have a backstory we find out about during the course of the show. He mentions one plausible sounding fact in early s2 (that he was in an orphanage as a boy; it’s plausible because the dynamics he observed there give him the idea of how to start winning the Walrus crew around, who until that point despises him), but then, a great many of Silver’s stories which the audience knows to be false (for example, the one he tells the crew just before the arrival in Charleston in late s2, which Billy Bones observes he’s heard from someone else before) sound entirely plausible when he tells them. His name might not even be John Silver (any more than Flint’s was originally Flint); it could be one he adopted when the ship he was on was captured by the Walrus in the pilot episode. On one level, the lack of backstory for Silver is because this story, Black Sails, is his backstory, if you see the entire series as a prequel of Treasure Island, a book which has Silver as its main antagonist. How the Silver from the Black Sails pilot who is good at lying and improvising but at little else becomes the character from Treasure Island is one of the stories Black Sails tells. However, Silver‘s lack of a backstory – which disturbs Flint in s4, at a point where they’ve grown as close as arguably either of them can be to another person – on another level is also necessary because it goes hand in hand with his capacity of reinvention that allows him to survive. He is so persuasive as a storyteller because he can fit into any narrative. Most of the main characters have to change or at least adapt in order to survive, though it’s not as simple as „change = survival“ as the always correct solution. Max discovering there’s a limit to the degree she’s willing to change who she is works ultimately to her advantage. Eleanor changing from who she is at the start, trying to become part of a different narrative, arguably dooms her in the end. (Though it’s hard not to argue that Eleanor would have died a lot sooner if she hadn’t embarked on that particular course.) Even within all those changes around him, though, how Silver goes about it is particularly radical, and it can be especially because he owes no allegiance or loyalties to any preceding narrative. This, however, is simultanously his weakness.
Silver can fashion himself into someone who understands Flint, who is Flint’s partner, into someone who lives up to the terrifying figure of Long John Silver whom Billy has invented, into someone whom Madi can love, into someone who doesn’t merely pretend to have the crew’s interest at heart but actually does care about the men. He doesn’t do that via lying, he does it via adapting or giving into the traits that allow him to become that person. But whereas Flint is committed to the overall story of bringing down the British Empire (or die trying), and Madi is comitted to the story of liberation for her people (or die trying), and Billy wants to create a story where Silver is the rival/hero to overthrow Flint, Silver, when it comes down to it, isn’t emotionally invested in any of these goals. He can slip into and out of these stories, he can understand them, he can certainly use them, but they are not his stories. And so he can ultimately reject them in favour of trying to extract individual characters from them. When Silver tells Madi in the show finale that he knows she hates him now but even if she will continue to hate him forever „I’m still glad you’re alive to do so“, it sums up the difference between the kind of stories they each think they’re in. Silver cares about Madi’s survival. Whether or not her cause suceeds is optional and of lesser importance. Madi thought she was in a story of a war of liberation; whether or not she as an individual survived was option, the important thing was for the cause to succeed, and one of the most stunning blows to her in the finale is the realisation that this was never the story Silver was in.
It’s a bit more complicated with that other cause believer, Flint. Both because he has already reinvented himself in the past, and because he is more flexible than Madi (who of all the main characters changes the least, and never changes what she wants). I would say Flint when we first meet him is mainly motivated by a) revenge, and b) somehow achieving what Thomas Hamilton originally had wanted to do. There is some struggle as to which of these two have priority, but in later s2 when he believes it should be possible for Thomas‘ original plan to be achieved after all, he is willing to abandon the revenge and rage that got him going for a decade. He even sees himself in need of atonment. When events then bring him on the revenge path once more, it is, for a while, a pureley nihilistic one. The Flint of the first few episodes of season 3 doesn’t appear to believe it’s possible to achieve anything constructive anymore, he just wants to burn the world down. It’s also Flint at a point where we see him kill indiscriminately. (Case in point: the scene where he kills the hapless woman he projects dead Miranda onto.) Not surprisingly, when the pirates are captured by the maroons and he’s forced to stand still instead of moving forward in permanent rage, he’s gotten to a point where he’s as suicidal as Flint ever gets in the story, wondering whether he wants to continue at all. After all, news from Nassau is that the new governor showed up with those amnesties Thomas Hamilton proposed a long time ago. And everyone originally guilty of the fates of both Hamiltons is dead. Basically, Flint’s revenge story appears to be played out. Why continue?
This is when Flint’s cause alters. Not just because Silver, who is with him and has no intention of dying in a cage, re-inspires his will to live, but because allying with the maroons becomes more than a means of survival (to Flint). There is absolutely no indication that either the Hamiltons and their friend James McGraw nor later Captain Flint, scourge of the British navy, were in any way anti-slavery. Yes, Flint used a slave on a ship uprising to his advantage in the early seasons, but afterwards he and his crew didn’t free the slaves but sold them upon their arrival in Nassau. But having allies who either are escaped slaves or the descendants of escaped slaves means taking their goals into account. From later s3 onwards, Flint’s goal isn’t just destructive anymore, it’s also constructive, in that he envisions some future state far more radical than what Thomas Hamilton had dreamed of (which was simply a benignly led colonial Nassau, plantations etc. intact). The role he envisions for himself in this particular narrative isn’t leader anymowere (this is a far cry from s1 Flint yelling at Billy „I am your king!“), it’s enabler of a future utopia, to be led by Madi and Silver.
Now I don’t doubt Flint sincerely wanted to achieve this utopia, and would have, if necessary, died to do so (if he believed his death would then galvanize events leading to it). Otoh it was something that had not been part of his original tale, it was something he’d learned and made himself into adapting. Which is one reason why I can believe the eventual resolution the narrative and Silver as its agent find for him. Dying to achieve an Utopia (or dying to achieve more revenge, for that matter) was, in the finale, not an option for Flint anymore. The choice was between dying, full stop (with no purpose achieved), or ending the story of Captain Flint – with an reunion with the newly revealed to be alive Thomas Hamilton as the future. Earlier in the season, after having deduced from a remark of Max‘ that there’s a chance Thomas Hamilton was still alive, Silver asked Flint whether, if he had the choice between the cause or Thomas Hamilton, he’d pick Thomas or the cause, and Flint was unable to answer, not least because he doesn’t believe this to be possible. In the finale, he does have that choice, and it’s also the overall story asking Flint/McGraw whether he wants to live the type of story Madi (and also he himself) thought they were in, or the type of story Silver is able to tell (where the individual gets a happy ending but not the cause). Or, in terms of genre: does he want to be the hero of an epic tragedy, or is he, in fact, Don Quixotte, who in the end stops fighting windmills and returns to being Don Alonso again (much to the regret of readers) for his final days? Don Quixotte is of course one of the books the narrative points out to us; Miranda gives it to James so he can understand her husband better, and a decade later, Flint picks up another Cervantes novel from a captured ship and uses it as a reconciliation gift for Miranda. A novel is is a different type of narrative than a theatre play, especially a novel like Don Quixotte which is itself a response to a lot of genre tales. At the end, unless you believe Silver is lying, Flint chooses the novel over the tragedy, anonymous survival over a blazing death.
I do believe Silver in that instance, not just because it fits the show (and because we see Oglethorpe earlier in the part of the episode that’s not narrated by Silver), but because Silver isn’t the last narrator in the finale. Jack is, a fictionalized historical character, who with his concluding narrative also returns Silver himself (or at least „Long John Silver“) to the realm of fiction, while speaking to a part of his and Anne’s future history. The show offers us a lot of avid readers, Jack among them, and some storytellers (notably, but not exclusively Silver). It offers us non-readers who are nonetheless very aware of the power of storytelling (Charles Vane, who knows both that an executed Flint in Charleston would bode evil for the rest of the pirates and that his own public execution in Nassau a year later is just the opposite, a powerful propaganda tool that with galvanize the wavering population into opposing British rule). It offers us the creation and then the loss of control over a story, which is what happens to Billy, who thinks he can create both a revolution on Nassau and a reckoning for Flint with the same story and ends up first cast as an impediment of the revolution and then destroyed by the very narrative he’s set into motion (Silver as Long John Silver and the Black Spot as a punishment, an announced death by pirates to their own; Billy Bones in Treasure Island literally dies of fear from both after having destroyed himself with drink before that). And, not so coincidentally, it offers us as the final antagonist of our anti heroes an author (who, like Billy, thinks he can control the narrative but ultimately can’t) who becomes a character in someone else’s story. Or stories.
The first two seasons have no clear cut overall arc antagonist to be defeated, other than the looming British Empire’s intent to re-take control of Nassau, not least because the pirates themselves provide all the struggle. It’s Flint versus his crew (notably, but not exclusively voiced by Gates and Billy, and then Dufresne) in s1, Flint versus Vane in s2, and while Peter Ashe certainly has the role of revealed villain in the final two episodes of season 2, he never has arch nemesis status. Other storylines, notably the one for Jack, Anne and Max, do without a villain altogether. Eleanor’s story intersects with both Flint’s and Vane’s, but the only time there’s a villain targeting her spefically, he’s dispatched within three episodes.
Seasons 3 and 4, otoh, still have inner pirate struggles (all is not love and peace even if Vane, Jack and Flint have come to terms over the treasure between seasons 2 and 3) and of course the British Empire itself, but they also have a new season spanning individual antagonist in the form of Woode Rogers. As with the other historically based characters (i.e. Jack, Anne, Charles Vane, Blackbeard, Hornigold, Lowry), the show for its version picked some details from the original, left out others and created new ones to fashion a character fulfilling all the functions they needed him to. What they picked for their Rogers to use from the precedent: used to be a privateer, wrote a book about his travels that was very successful, had a wife from whom he was later at the very least estranged, was appointed governor of the Bahamas, defeated pirates, had trouble with debts leading to bankruptcy and even imprisonment for debts. Leaving out Rogers‘ return from prison and second stint as governor of the Bahamas (during which he died, and not in battle) and while including some of his backstory with the Spanish (i.e that he fought against them) while adding the major invention of a Spanish invasion threatening in the present (depending on Rogers‘ success or lack of same) together with Rogers‘ debts in England allowed the Black Sails writers to put Rogers on a time table and under the pressure to deliver while also letting him exit the story not dead but in defeat without this resulting in an independent Nassau.
It also allowed them to let Woode Rogers reflect various of the characters, past and present, and mirror or contrast their story functions. And, like several of our antiheroes, he’s very conscious of being both part of a story and a storyteller. The kind of story he thinks he’s in changes for him as much as for the others, of course. When he enters the narrative, he’s a man of social privilege thinking he’s got the solution for pirate caused bloody anarchy in Nassau; reestablishing order via a combination of general amnesty for the pirates and force for those who won’t accept (or thereafter adher). Being aware he has no local knowledge (other than in theory) and needs an advisor, he seeks out somone to help him with this, and this person becomes his partner and eventual lover, much to the scandal of the people around them. See also: Thomas Hamilton and James McGraw. Unlike Thomas, however, Rogers‘ is a former navy man (during the war with the Spanish) and then privateer, which echoes James McGraw and the other pirates. Both Thomas turning the relationship with James into a romance and Eleanor’s decision to do this with her relationship to Rogers happen after the respective relationships have already caused public debate/embarassment/discussion, but the Thomas/James kiss is played as a moment of liberation/revelation whereas the corresponding Eleanor/ Woode as a moment of sealing them into the roles gossip has already assigned to them.
Eleanor’s previous prioritizing of her success in Nassau over her personal relationships (with Vane and Max alike, though for different reasons) has led to her isolation even before she was kidnapped and brought to Britain as a prisoner is partly what causes her to try a different approach with Woode Rogers. But it’s also that he embodies for her what she’s been trying to achieve for several seasons, Lawful Nassau, and that he listens to her through season 3 in a way that the various other men in her life have not. (Seriously, if you compare Rogers adopting Eleanor’s various suggestions with the hell of a time she has getting Vane and Flint to do anything in s2…) This leads her to cast him as the romantic hero to her heroine („I never cared what anyone thought of me, but I care what you think of me“, she tells him when he’s unconscious, which is a surefire script way of signalling to the audience this is what a character truly believes), which is a fatal misjudgment though the show doesn’t let Rogers betray her in the conventional way. He doesn’t throw her to the dogs by blaming her for Vane’s execution during his illness in order to salvage his own reputation with the population of Nassau the way a lot of fans expected him to between episodes. Nor does he betray her the way she might have expected when he uses his wife’s name during his delirium, i.e. by denying their sexual relationship or refusing it legitimacy. Between seasons 3 and 4, departing from history (where there is no Eleanor Guthrie), he marries her, which incidentally furthers his financial difficulties, committing himself to her thoroughly.
No, the way Woode Rogers ends up betraying Eleanor is different altogether, and it’s directly connected to being the other part in a romance she entered. When, due to various factors (Jack’s ego, Rogers‘ debts, Mrs. Hudson lying about just what the Spanish demand, Vane’s capture and execution), the peaceful era of Lawful Nassau has failed (again), turned into quickly escalating repression, which in turn fuels more and more uprisings, Rogers rather than accepting defeat and retreat has his own „I am determined to prove a villain“ moment (see earlier about Flint doing it; the two of them even utter almost identical phrases about it a season apart), deciding to play that role to the hilt and, echoeing Jack’s s3 declaration of not caring if Nassau gets razed to the ground by a Spanish Invasion as long as Jack gets what he wants out of it, actually invites a Spanish invasion of Nassau, declaring during the negotiation with the Spanish governor in a phrasing that, again, echoes Jack’s (provided the Spanish keep Eleanor safe „I don’t care if you raze it to the ground“). Oh, and Rogers‘ being repeatedly haunted via a silent image of Eleanor in late s4, for the last time in a scene where even Mrs. Hudson’s confession that she lied about the Spanish having demanded Jack Rackham, a lie without which a great deal of the ensuing disasters might not have happened since Rogers at that point had zero interest in Jack Rackham, elicits no more than an apathetic shrug, parallels Flint’s being haunted by the silent image of Miranda (she does not speak to him until her final appearance in 3.05. when he gets galvanized back into wanting to live again).
What I’m trying to get at here: Woode Rogers is an excellent final antagonist not because he’s so much worse than anyone who came before (he’s not; everything he does, including the brutal treatment of Blackbeard, is something our regulars have done before, if not literally, then figuratively, unless you want to argue crucifying a man is more humane than keel-hauling?) but because he reflects our (anti)heroes‘ specific failings and collects them like a prism. Putting your rage and wish to defeat your enemies ahead of the welfare of everyone else: true for both Jack and Flint (not always, of course, certainly not anymore by s4, but I defy you to tell me Flint’s indiscriminate slaughter phase of early s3 had anything to do with the public good). Thinking that as long as you ensure the safety of your beloved, destroying all she wanted to achieve is okay: step forward, John Silver.
During one of their early chats, Woode Rogers tells Jack Rackham that if Jack wants to be thought of as a hero, he should write a book. Rogers‘ own book – which Jack disses in the same conversation, but has read, and which is also present in Madi’s library an island away – is from history, and made his original reputation, which is something the Black Sails writers use, though they never allude to one of the most famous incidents in it, Rogers rescueing Selkirk who became the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Otoh, the other book which the historical Rogers was a key source for, the anonymous „General History of the Pyrates" in the show’s narrative is disconnected from him and by virtue of association given to Jack who ha staken over as the finale narrator of the finale at the point where we see it (when Mrs. Hudson reads it to her children). Show!Rogers punishment is the destruction of his reputation via imprisonment for debts; he’s lost any control of the narrative he’s ever had, as well as losing all he set out to achieve, with his role defined by another narrator. But then, he, too, is someone else's story. As are they all.
The Other Days
The show’s cast of characters is a mixture of characters derived from a literary classic, Treasure Island, characters based on historical figures (with considerable liberties taken), and characters invented for this particular show. While there is no fourth wall breaking as such, many of the characters are very much aware they’re part of a narrative; trying to control said narrative and/or trying at least to use it to their advantage is very much on top of many a character’s agenda.
„Creating a story“ and „becoming a character of a story“: not the same thing, though several of the show’s ensemble try to do both. In the unfolding narrative, we first meet Captain Flint at a point where he seems to a an already established, clearly delineated character. He’s a feared pirate leader. He’s after a treasure. There’s some mystery about his relationship with Miranda Barlow, and some of his motivations, but even so, his function in the tale and where it is going seems to be clear, not least because Flint belongs to the part of the ensemble who hail from Treasure Island. This means, among other things, he’ll both have to survive long enough to collect the treasure in question and to hide it in a way that leaves a great many people dead, and that ultimately, he’s doomed to die alone. Black Sails subsequently makes it clear that Flint, including his name, was a deliberate creation not just on a Doylist but Watsonian level. British navy officer James McGraw created Flint, using a childhood story, both as a way of survival and as a way of revenge. He does and doesn’t think of Flint as himself; when he, in late season 2, imagines a peaceful retirement as McGraw, he speaks in loathing of his Flint persona and draws a line between them. But of course, we’re only in the middle of the story, and no such thing happens. Instead, Flint loses his seemingly one remaining tether to his McGraw past and reaffirms his Flint identity, vowing to become, once more and in a larger way, the villain of the British Empire’s narrative and use that very role to achieve if not victory for himself then at least defeat and devastation for his enemies. (This „I am determined to prove a villain“ moment is mirrored later by Woode Rogers, deciding to become the villain in the pirates‘ narrative and again, to achieve not so much victory for himself anymore but defeat and devastations of his enemies. I’ll get to how the narrative uses Rogers as a mirror of various other characters later on.)
There is, mid s2, a small moment that’s a big turning point of insight both on a Watsonian and Doylist level. It occurs when Flint asks Silver about how the inhabitants of Nassau see the conflict between Flint and Vane, and it visibly bothers him that a lot of them see him, not Vane, as the bad guy in said conflict. Since until then, Flint’s outward attitude had been utter indifference as to what anyone, ally or foe, thinks of him, Silver is amazed, not just in terms of the current situation but in what that says about Flint in general: that he does care about other people’s judgment. „The things you’ve done…“ Arguably this is when Silver realizes that „Flint“ isn’t the monolithic persona he’s gotten to know (or thought he did), that there’s something far more complicated going on. A great many subsequent developments on the show depend on that insight.
Silver himself, alone of all the main characters, does not have a backstory we find out about during the course of the show. He mentions one plausible sounding fact in early s2 (that he was in an orphanage as a boy; it’s plausible because the dynamics he observed there give him the idea of how to start winning the Walrus crew around, who until that point despises him), but then, a great many of Silver’s stories which the audience knows to be false (for example, the one he tells the crew just before the arrival in Charleston in late s2, which Billy Bones observes he’s heard from someone else before) sound entirely plausible when he tells them. His name might not even be John Silver (any more than Flint’s was originally Flint); it could be one he adopted when the ship he was on was captured by the Walrus in the pilot episode. On one level, the lack of backstory for Silver is because this story, Black Sails, is his backstory, if you see the entire series as a prequel of Treasure Island, a book which has Silver as its main antagonist. How the Silver from the Black Sails pilot who is good at lying and improvising but at little else becomes the character from Treasure Island is one of the stories Black Sails tells. However, Silver‘s lack of a backstory – which disturbs Flint in s4, at a point where they’ve grown as close as arguably either of them can be to another person – on another level is also necessary because it goes hand in hand with his capacity of reinvention that allows him to survive. He is so persuasive as a storyteller because he can fit into any narrative. Most of the main characters have to change or at least adapt in order to survive, though it’s not as simple as „change = survival“ as the always correct solution. Max discovering there’s a limit to the degree she’s willing to change who she is works ultimately to her advantage. Eleanor changing from who she is at the start, trying to become part of a different narrative, arguably dooms her in the end. (Though it’s hard not to argue that Eleanor would have died a lot sooner if she hadn’t embarked on that particular course.) Even within all those changes around him, though, how Silver goes about it is particularly radical, and it can be especially because he owes no allegiance or loyalties to any preceding narrative. This, however, is simultanously his weakness.
Silver can fashion himself into someone who understands Flint, who is Flint’s partner, into someone who lives up to the terrifying figure of Long John Silver whom Billy has invented, into someone whom Madi can love, into someone who doesn’t merely pretend to have the crew’s interest at heart but actually does care about the men. He doesn’t do that via lying, he does it via adapting or giving into the traits that allow him to become that person. But whereas Flint is committed to the overall story of bringing down the British Empire (or die trying), and Madi is comitted to the story of liberation for her people (or die trying), and Billy wants to create a story where Silver is the rival/hero to overthrow Flint, Silver, when it comes down to it, isn’t emotionally invested in any of these goals. He can slip into and out of these stories, he can understand them, he can certainly use them, but they are not his stories. And so he can ultimately reject them in favour of trying to extract individual characters from them. When Silver tells Madi in the show finale that he knows she hates him now but even if she will continue to hate him forever „I’m still glad you’re alive to do so“, it sums up the difference between the kind of stories they each think they’re in. Silver cares about Madi’s survival. Whether or not her cause suceeds is optional and of lesser importance. Madi thought she was in a story of a war of liberation; whether or not she as an individual survived was option, the important thing was for the cause to succeed, and one of the most stunning blows to her in the finale is the realisation that this was never the story Silver was in.
It’s a bit more complicated with that other cause believer, Flint. Both because he has already reinvented himself in the past, and because he is more flexible than Madi (who of all the main characters changes the least, and never changes what she wants). I would say Flint when we first meet him is mainly motivated by a) revenge, and b) somehow achieving what Thomas Hamilton originally had wanted to do. There is some struggle as to which of these two have priority, but in later s2 when he believes it should be possible for Thomas‘ original plan to be achieved after all, he is willing to abandon the revenge and rage that got him going for a decade. He even sees himself in need of atonment. When events then bring him on the revenge path once more, it is, for a while, a pureley nihilistic one. The Flint of the first few episodes of season 3 doesn’t appear to believe it’s possible to achieve anything constructive anymore, he just wants to burn the world down. It’s also Flint at a point where we see him kill indiscriminately. (Case in point: the scene where he kills the hapless woman he projects dead Miranda onto.) Not surprisingly, when the pirates are captured by the maroons and he’s forced to stand still instead of moving forward in permanent rage, he’s gotten to a point where he’s as suicidal as Flint ever gets in the story, wondering whether he wants to continue at all. After all, news from Nassau is that the new governor showed up with those amnesties Thomas Hamilton proposed a long time ago. And everyone originally guilty of the fates of both Hamiltons is dead. Basically, Flint’s revenge story appears to be played out. Why continue?
This is when Flint’s cause alters. Not just because Silver, who is with him and has no intention of dying in a cage, re-inspires his will to live, but because allying with the maroons becomes more than a means of survival (to Flint). There is absolutely no indication that either the Hamiltons and their friend James McGraw nor later Captain Flint, scourge of the British navy, were in any way anti-slavery. Yes, Flint used a slave on a ship uprising to his advantage in the early seasons, but afterwards he and his crew didn’t free the slaves but sold them upon their arrival in Nassau. But having allies who either are escaped slaves or the descendants of escaped slaves means taking their goals into account. From later s3 onwards, Flint’s goal isn’t just destructive anymore, it’s also constructive, in that he envisions some future state far more radical than what Thomas Hamilton had dreamed of (which was simply a benignly led colonial Nassau, plantations etc. intact). The role he envisions for himself in this particular narrative isn’t leader anymowere (this is a far cry from s1 Flint yelling at Billy „I am your king!“), it’s enabler of a future utopia, to be led by Madi and Silver.
Now I don’t doubt Flint sincerely wanted to achieve this utopia, and would have, if necessary, died to do so (if he believed his death would then galvanize events leading to it). Otoh it was something that had not been part of his original tale, it was something he’d learned and made himself into adapting. Which is one reason why I can believe the eventual resolution the narrative and Silver as its agent find for him. Dying to achieve an Utopia (or dying to achieve more revenge, for that matter) was, in the finale, not an option for Flint anymore. The choice was between dying, full stop (with no purpose achieved), or ending the story of Captain Flint – with an reunion with the newly revealed to be alive Thomas Hamilton as the future. Earlier in the season, after having deduced from a remark of Max‘ that there’s a chance Thomas Hamilton was still alive, Silver asked Flint whether, if he had the choice between the cause or Thomas Hamilton, he’d pick Thomas or the cause, and Flint was unable to answer, not least because he doesn’t believe this to be possible. In the finale, he does have that choice, and it’s also the overall story asking Flint/McGraw whether he wants to live the type of story Madi (and also he himself) thought they were in, or the type of story Silver is able to tell (where the individual gets a happy ending but not the cause). Or, in terms of genre: does he want to be the hero of an epic tragedy, or is he, in fact, Don Quixotte, who in the end stops fighting windmills and returns to being Don Alonso again (much to the regret of readers) for his final days? Don Quixotte is of course one of the books the narrative points out to us; Miranda gives it to James so he can understand her husband better, and a decade later, Flint picks up another Cervantes novel from a captured ship and uses it as a reconciliation gift for Miranda. A novel is is a different type of narrative than a theatre play, especially a novel like Don Quixotte which is itself a response to a lot of genre tales. At the end, unless you believe Silver is lying, Flint chooses the novel over the tragedy, anonymous survival over a blazing death.
I do believe Silver in that instance, not just because it fits the show (and because we see Oglethorpe earlier in the part of the episode that’s not narrated by Silver), but because Silver isn’t the last narrator in the finale. Jack is, a fictionalized historical character, who with his concluding narrative also returns Silver himself (or at least „Long John Silver“) to the realm of fiction, while speaking to a part of his and Anne’s future history. The show offers us a lot of avid readers, Jack among them, and some storytellers (notably, but not exclusively Silver). It offers us non-readers who are nonetheless very aware of the power of storytelling (Charles Vane, who knows both that an executed Flint in Charleston would bode evil for the rest of the pirates and that his own public execution in Nassau a year later is just the opposite, a powerful propaganda tool that with galvanize the wavering population into opposing British rule). It offers us the creation and then the loss of control over a story, which is what happens to Billy, who thinks he can create both a revolution on Nassau and a reckoning for Flint with the same story and ends up first cast as an impediment of the revolution and then destroyed by the very narrative he’s set into motion (Silver as Long John Silver and the Black Spot as a punishment, an announced death by pirates to their own; Billy Bones in Treasure Island literally dies of fear from both after having destroyed himself with drink before that). And, not so coincidentally, it offers us as the final antagonist of our anti heroes an author (who, like Billy, thinks he can control the narrative but ultimately can’t) who becomes a character in someone else’s story. Or stories.
The first two seasons have no clear cut overall arc antagonist to be defeated, other than the looming British Empire’s intent to re-take control of Nassau, not least because the pirates themselves provide all the struggle. It’s Flint versus his crew (notably, but not exclusively voiced by Gates and Billy, and then Dufresne) in s1, Flint versus Vane in s2, and while Peter Ashe certainly has the role of revealed villain in the final two episodes of season 2, he never has arch nemesis status. Other storylines, notably the one for Jack, Anne and Max, do without a villain altogether. Eleanor’s story intersects with both Flint’s and Vane’s, but the only time there’s a villain targeting her spefically, he’s dispatched within three episodes.
Seasons 3 and 4, otoh, still have inner pirate struggles (all is not love and peace even if Vane, Jack and Flint have come to terms over the treasure between seasons 2 and 3) and of course the British Empire itself, but they also have a new season spanning individual antagonist in the form of Woode Rogers. As with the other historically based characters (i.e. Jack, Anne, Charles Vane, Blackbeard, Hornigold, Lowry), the show for its version picked some details from the original, left out others and created new ones to fashion a character fulfilling all the functions they needed him to. What they picked for their Rogers to use from the precedent: used to be a privateer, wrote a book about his travels that was very successful, had a wife from whom he was later at the very least estranged, was appointed governor of the Bahamas, defeated pirates, had trouble with debts leading to bankruptcy and even imprisonment for debts. Leaving out Rogers‘ return from prison and second stint as governor of the Bahamas (during which he died, and not in battle) and while including some of his backstory with the Spanish (i.e that he fought against them) while adding the major invention of a Spanish invasion threatening in the present (depending on Rogers‘ success or lack of same) together with Rogers‘ debts in England allowed the Black Sails writers to put Rogers on a time table and under the pressure to deliver while also letting him exit the story not dead but in defeat without this resulting in an independent Nassau.
It also allowed them to let Woode Rogers reflect various of the characters, past and present, and mirror or contrast their story functions. And, like several of our antiheroes, he’s very conscious of being both part of a story and a storyteller. The kind of story he thinks he’s in changes for him as much as for the others, of course. When he enters the narrative, he’s a man of social privilege thinking he’s got the solution for pirate caused bloody anarchy in Nassau; reestablishing order via a combination of general amnesty for the pirates and force for those who won’t accept (or thereafter adher). Being aware he has no local knowledge (other than in theory) and needs an advisor, he seeks out somone to help him with this, and this person becomes his partner and eventual lover, much to the scandal of the people around them. See also: Thomas Hamilton and James McGraw. Unlike Thomas, however, Rogers‘ is a former navy man (during the war with the Spanish) and then privateer, which echoes James McGraw and the other pirates. Both Thomas turning the relationship with James into a romance and Eleanor’s decision to do this with her relationship to Rogers happen after the respective relationships have already caused public debate/embarassment/discussion, but the Thomas/James kiss is played as a moment of liberation/revelation whereas the corresponding Eleanor/ Woode as a moment of sealing them into the roles gossip has already assigned to them.
Eleanor’s previous prioritizing of her success in Nassau over her personal relationships (with Vane and Max alike, though for different reasons) has led to her isolation even before she was kidnapped and brought to Britain as a prisoner is partly what causes her to try a different approach with Woode Rogers. But it’s also that he embodies for her what she’s been trying to achieve for several seasons, Lawful Nassau, and that he listens to her through season 3 in a way that the various other men in her life have not. (Seriously, if you compare Rogers adopting Eleanor’s various suggestions with the hell of a time she has getting Vane and Flint to do anything in s2…) This leads her to cast him as the romantic hero to her heroine („I never cared what anyone thought of me, but I care what you think of me“, she tells him when he’s unconscious, which is a surefire script way of signalling to the audience this is what a character truly believes), which is a fatal misjudgment though the show doesn’t let Rogers betray her in the conventional way. He doesn’t throw her to the dogs by blaming her for Vane’s execution during his illness in order to salvage his own reputation with the population of Nassau the way a lot of fans expected him to between episodes. Nor does he betray her the way she might have expected when he uses his wife’s name during his delirium, i.e. by denying their sexual relationship or refusing it legitimacy. Between seasons 3 and 4, departing from history (where there is no Eleanor Guthrie), he marries her, which incidentally furthers his financial difficulties, committing himself to her thoroughly.
No, the way Woode Rogers ends up betraying Eleanor is different altogether, and it’s directly connected to being the other part in a romance she entered. When, due to various factors (Jack’s ego, Rogers‘ debts, Mrs. Hudson lying about just what the Spanish demand, Vane’s capture and execution), the peaceful era of Lawful Nassau has failed (again), turned into quickly escalating repression, which in turn fuels more and more uprisings, Rogers rather than accepting defeat and retreat has his own „I am determined to prove a villain“ moment (see earlier about Flint doing it; the two of them even utter almost identical phrases about it a season apart), deciding to play that role to the hilt and, echoeing Jack’s s3 declaration of not caring if Nassau gets razed to the ground by a Spanish Invasion as long as Jack gets what he wants out of it, actually invites a Spanish invasion of Nassau, declaring during the negotiation with the Spanish governor in a phrasing that, again, echoes Jack’s (provided the Spanish keep Eleanor safe „I don’t care if you raze it to the ground“). Oh, and Rogers‘ being repeatedly haunted via a silent image of Eleanor in late s4, for the last time in a scene where even Mrs. Hudson’s confession that she lied about the Spanish having demanded Jack Rackham, a lie without which a great deal of the ensuing disasters might not have happened since Rogers at that point had zero interest in Jack Rackham, elicits no more than an apathetic shrug, parallels Flint’s being haunted by the silent image of Miranda (she does not speak to him until her final appearance in 3.05. when he gets galvanized back into wanting to live again).
What I’m trying to get at here: Woode Rogers is an excellent final antagonist not because he’s so much worse than anyone who came before (he’s not; everything he does, including the brutal treatment of Blackbeard, is something our regulars have done before, if not literally, then figuratively, unless you want to argue crucifying a man is more humane than keel-hauling?) but because he reflects our (anti)heroes‘ specific failings and collects them like a prism. Putting your rage and wish to defeat your enemies ahead of the welfare of everyone else: true for both Jack and Flint (not always, of course, certainly not anymore by s4, but I defy you to tell me Flint’s indiscriminate slaughter phase of early s3 had anything to do with the public good). Thinking that as long as you ensure the safety of your beloved, destroying all she wanted to achieve is okay: step forward, John Silver.
During one of their early chats, Woode Rogers tells Jack Rackham that if Jack wants to be thought of as a hero, he should write a book. Rogers‘ own book – which Jack disses in the same conversation, but has read, and which is also present in Madi’s library an island away – is from history, and made his original reputation, which is something the Black Sails writers use, though they never allude to one of the most famous incidents in it, Rogers rescueing Selkirk who became the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Otoh, the other book which the historical Rogers was a key source for, the anonymous „General History of the Pyrates" in the show’s narrative is disconnected from him and by virtue of association given to Jack who ha staken over as the finale narrator of the finale at the point where we see it (when Mrs. Hudson reads it to her children). Show!Rogers punishment is the destruction of his reputation via imprisonment for debts; he’s lost any control of the narrative he’s ever had, as well as losing all he set out to achieve, with his role defined by another narrator. But then, he, too, is someone else's story. As are they all.
The Other Days
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Date: 2018-01-27 05:11 pm (UTC)AFTER the 32nd chapter of TREASURE ISLAND, two of the puppets strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open place not far from the story.
http://www.authorama.com/fables-1.html
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Date: 2018-01-27 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-28 02:52 am (UTC)Silver's explicit refusal to tell a true backstory is so deliciously metafictional.
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Date: 2018-01-28 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-30 08:02 am (UTC)I feel as though I haven't fully unraveled for myself all the threads in Black Sails on the overlap and resistance between the themes of storytelling and books/readers -- and especially how that relates to how history is told/written (a theme which, of course, many of the characters are intimately aware). So your section on Woodes Rogers was particularly interesting to me; Rogers as a prism of other characters in the show is a really interesting exploration of him as a story/storyteller/author/historical figure.
I also agree with how perfect it is for Silver to never reveal his pre-Black Sails backstory.
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Date: 2018-01-30 09:56 am (UTC)Re: Rogers, yes, basically all I've seen in other posts re: him is "he's the evil patriarchy/colonialism", and as with other Black Sails characters, it seems to me how the show uses him is more complicated and thus interesting than that. :)