Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Seas of freedom May 12, 2020

To begin with some tortured mixed metaphors, I’m generally late to every party, but when it comes to Black Sails I was so late that the bandwagon didn’t so much as pass me by as vanish into the distance. However, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to force you to make a serious dent in the Netflix (or in this case, Prime) backlog — and Black Sails has definitely been the highlight of my isolation binge-watching so far.

Set in the final days of the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy,’ Black Sails is intended as something of a prequel to Treasure Island, following both the various pirate crews on their raids and adventures around the Caribbean, and the stories of the communities back on land of which they are a part. Although the show initially starts out with the sort of formulaic sexposition and gore common to historical TV series wanting to establish themselves as properly ‘gritty,’ this soon makes way for an intelligent exploration of power, the persuasiveness of storytelling, and the iniquities of empire. The show sprinkles heavily fictionalised versions of real-world historical figures (including a number of then-notorious pirates) with characters from Stevenson’s novel and others created specifically for the show.

While the narrative of the show is engaging enough — a mixture of treasure hunts and violent raids interspersed with the intense political machinations at sea and on land to establish a community free from the interference of the British (or indeed any other) Empire, where the show really shines is in its characters, and their relationships. A show in which most characters are either pirates or members of the flourishing black market of land-dwelling traders who work with them might be forgiven for revelling nihilistically in the violence and harshness of such characters’ lives — and yet at every stage instead it emphasises their care for, connection with, and interdepency on one another. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the colonising forces they oppose. The pirate characters are at their most vulnerable when they forget their need for each other, and tend to make their most foolish mistakes in moments of selfishness or disconnection from their peers and community. A recurring theme of the show is the futility of the different pirate crews and other major players competing with, and double crossing each other — that were they to pool their resources, combine their diverse skills and make common cause they would be formidable and unstoppable. Of course, the volatility of the personalities involves makes this impossible, and the show instead is a fast-paced journey of constantly shifting, unstable alliances, as impermanent and dangerous as the treacherous seas on which they sail.

The show is very much concerned with the dispossessed and outcast. Freed and/or escaped slaves feature heavily, at some points allying with the pirates, in other instances recognising that doing so would put them in situations of terrible vulnerability. There are disaffected exiled Jacobites, religious and political dissenters, women who are clearly more competent than the men around them but who must exercise their authority slantwise without those men realising it’s happening. And, as viewers discover partway through the series, the spark that lit the particular powder keg and caused the action of the entire show to unfold was an illicit, polyamorous, queer relationship that the powers-that-be judged intolerable.*

Inevitably, my favourite character was Max, the sex-worker-turned brothel madam-turned power behind the throne, closely followed by her sometime lovers, sometime antagonists Jack Rackham and Anne Bonny. I’m less interested in obvious heroes or tragic revolutionaries: give me those whose every inch is focused on survival, compromising, bargaining, and blustering all the way. It was characters like these who tempered the nihilistic, burn-it-all-down fervour of their fellow outlaws, reminding them — and viewers — that victory alone is insufficient without a sustainable community to return to and fight for.

Black Sails reminded me in some ways of the TV series Spartacus, which also aired, as the former did originally, on the US cable channel Starz. Both are ridiculous, over-the-top, filled with nudity and stylised violence, and yet they grapple with meaty, serious questions. Should dispossessed people continue a futile fight against the overwhelming might of empire, and is it worth the cost? What does it take to build a genuinely equitable community? At what point does the clarity and purity of a single-minded war against tyranny become unsustainable? Will a pretty story be a greater recruiter to the cause than the messy truth? These are not easy questions, and Black Sails offers no easy answers — just carries its audience forward along the restless sea.

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*For those worried that Black Sails follows the tedious pattern of queer relationships that end in tragedy, rest assured that although it may appear that way at first, it subverts this trope in the most astonishing way.