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When the writers room for the second season of Our Flag Means Death met for the first time, coproducer Zayre Ferrer looked at the Zoom screen and had a realization: They were working on a show with four nonbinary writers of color. It was a first for them—by a longshot. Even as shows like Billions and Star Trek: Discovery have begun to give nonbinary characters more substantial roles, they’re far from the norm, and Ferrer was looking at a room prepared to bring their stories to the small screen—as pirates.
Seeing the writers represented on the Zoom wasn’t just an occasion worthy of a screenshot (though they all enthusiastically captured one); it was also an opportunity to get more perspectives on the stories they were writing. “It's so comforting,” explains Ferrer. Because “you might be wrong. Every nonbinary person's experience is unique, so it's great to have multiple perspectives, always.”
While Our Flag Means Death has always been a series focused on queer relationships, including the friends-to-lovers arc of Jim (Vico Ortiz) and Oluwande (Samson Kayo) and the enemies-to-lovers story of Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi) and Stede “Gentleman Pirate” Bonnet (Rhys Darby), season two introduces even more. There’s Mary Read (Rachel House) and Anne Bonny (Minnie Driver), who were lovers in real life but get a far more, um, involved story onscreen. There’s also Archie (Madeleine Sami), Jim’s new love interest, and a deepening of the story of Izzy Hands (Con O’Neill) as he tries to make peace with his … complicated romantic feelings for Blackbeard.
Not every new character or storyline is based on a specific person or event, but all are rooted in the experiences of people who know what it’s like to be written out of history. Our Flag Means Death has always been historical fiction in the loosest sense, but for many of the writers on the show, the point isn’t to tell a story that’s historically accurate. It’s to tell one about the people whose stories never got recorded in the first place. Because, as Ferrer notes, records of swashbuckler life are often “anti-pirate propaganda, written by the colonizers being dispossessed of their stolen goods.”
Our Flag Means Death’s second season, then, might be akin to what writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman calls a “critical fabulation,” a narrative that explores “what might have been” and tells a story that just didn’t get recorded. Max’s workplace comedy about pirates may not do this with the depth that Hartman does, but the intent is similar: to share stories Ferrer describes as begging to be put on screen.
This manifests in real and imagined characters, but also in the themes and ideas of the show. Most people think of pirates and pirating as a chaotic endeavor with every swashbuckler in it for themselves. But Ferrer points out that that notion is just another example of the powerful trying to vilify those on the margins.
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Pirate ships were actually quite democratic and egalitarian compared to the world surrounding them. The rules applied to everyone. As such, Stede’s catchphrase involves him encouraging everyone to “work things through as a crew.”
While the real Stede Bonnet ran a plantation, Ferrer notes the historic record shows that the pirating world was also “a place where enslaved people could go to be free,” and was a refuge for queer people who were either thrown out or tortured by the British Navy.
If Ferrer’s comments make it seem like they spent a lot of time studying pirates, they did. That’s part of the reason why the OFMD writers room knew the stories they were telling were at least somewhat based in reality. “All pirate research is queer pirate research,” Ferrer says. “Even though we're focusing on the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean, we've looked at all of the pirates all over the globe at different periods of time and in depth.”
One of the most clear examples of this research in season two is the introduction of Zheng Yi Sao. The real “Pirate Queen” never conquered China (as the show indicates), and her reign was nearly a century after Blackbeard’s death, but the massive pirate confederation she led was so powerful that she was able to essentially ransom it back to the government in exchange for a fortune. OFMD writer Jes Tom’s take on the TV Sao is that she is hyper-competent, “but nobody takes her seriously. And she's in this room full of idiots, and everybody thinks all of these idiots are on equal par with her … That's something I identify with,” Tom adds.
Our Flag Means Death also expanded on tales of Mary “Mark” Read and Anne Bonny, two infamous pirates of the period. The real Bonny and Read were lovers and met while passing as men. Bonny and Read’s scenes on the show include some over-the-top erotic stabbings and poisonings. “It's a fun dynamic that I certainly haven't seen,” says writer Nat Torres, who associates the couple’s antics with the Folsom Street Fair, the famous queer leather festival.
This season of the show, which wrapped today, ends with a marriage ceremony between two of the male pirates. Rather than pronouncing the couple “married,” the pirate officiating pronounces them “mateys,” in a clear reference to the pirate term matelotage. Matelotage was a legally binding partnership between sailors that was practiced between male pirates of the 1620s to 1670s. Given what we know of the erasure of queer histories, the writers’ interpretation of matelotage this way feels emotionally true.
Ultimately, OFMD’s second season was crafted as a balance between unearthing queer history and sharing authentic queer experiences—in a pirate playground of the writers’ own making. “When you try to do a modern, current-day queer story, there’s external pressure for things to be ‘accurate’ for the sake of accuracy,” explains Tom. In a “pirate comedy-fantasy, you get to let go of all of that because they don’t live our lives.”
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“Kill me … Our spirit will last throughout your entire fucking empire,” Izzy Hands says in the season two finale, challenging his captor, the fictional Prince Ricky Banes (Erroll Shand). Banes embodies the sort of privileged men who got to write the stories that become formalized as history. The real Israel Hands didn’t say those words and probably wasn’t a queer man with a unicorn hoof prosthesis, but OFMD proves a deeper truth about which stories speak to us.
