Black Sails
Episode 2.05 (“XIII”) 10 Year Anniversary
Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine
Available streaming on Starz

by Carmen Paddock, Staff Writer

This piece contains spoilers for Black Sails up through the second season.

Ten years ago, Black Sails aired “XIII,” and the show—and its fans—was never quite the same.

The pirate television series had a cult following during its four-season run (from 2014-2017), and it continues to grow a devoted following today—thanks most recently to its release on Netflix in 2024. But the show never became the cultural phenomenon of Game of Thrones or its Starz cousin Outlander, and while chock-full of excellent performances, impressive visual effects, and a terrific score by Bear McCreary (using largely period-appropriate instruments), it never found acclaim on the awards circuit. Perhaps it slipped through the streaming cracks.

The premise, conceived by Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine, sets up a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, ostensibly following how Captain Flint (Toby Stephens) finds and buries the gold fortune for which Jim Hawkins will eventually go hunting. Some real pirates—Blackbeard (Ray Stevenson), Charles Vane (Zach McGowan), Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz), and Anne Bonny (Clara Paget)—are added in to anchor Stevenson’s fiction in historical reality. In Black Sails’ second season, that treasure is located but not yet obtained or moved, and John Silver (Luke Arnold) has not yet lost a leg or gained his famous moniker.

But Steinberg and Levine were not content to merely set up Treasure Island via the most logical—or even most swashbuckling—route. While remaining very much a fictional narrative and playing fast and loose with timelines and historical facts, Black Sails continually pokes at the British Empire’s very real historical injustices and abuses at home and in its colonies, where its worst violence was carried out against those who did not choose to be there—transported convicts, enslaved populations, and anyone not white or straight. (Notably, Black Sails does not directly address crimes against indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, but that may have been beyond the scope of a show that remains, at its heart, entertainment.)

In this cruel world, some pirate characters are opportunists, taking advantage of the relative lawlessness and impermanent allegiances to forge their own fortunes—indeed, “XIII” (the fifth episode of Season 2) is set around Flint’s attack on Nassau’s fort to oust Charles Vane from his control. But in the process, it is first made explicit that Captain Flint’s quest in piracy has an ideological, and far more personal, basis.

A backstory for Flint had been teased throughout the first season—notably by the presence of Miranda Barlow (Louise Barnes), a woman he keeps in a house away from the town and with whom he was rumoured to have had an affair. The second season opens with a five-episode arc, told in intermittent flashbacks, exploring Flint’s backstory as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, where he worked alongside Lord Thomas Hamilton (Rupert Penry-Jones) and his wife, Miranda, on a plan to secure peace in Nassau by pardoning the pirates. But the affair Flint is rumoured to have had was with Thomas, not Miranda, and their radical plan earns enemies in the government who happily expose their relationship. Thomas was sent away to a mental hospital—Flint presumes to his death—and a disgraced Flint and Mrs. Hamilton are given the night to flee London.

Across two timelines, ten years apart, a dialogue plays out between Flint and Miranda. The heartbreak, fear, humiliation, and rage of 1705—a rage Miranda asserts as an equal force and experience—has morphed into a constant state of regret, moral injury, and violence by 1715. At the moment Flint seems ready to be lost, fighting for the sake of fighting, Miranda pulls him back by reminding him that his fight has purpose and focus. They cannot undo the past, but any shame about his lost love is not only counterproductive but deeply untrue.

MIRANDA BARLOW: You were told that it was shameful. And part of you believed it. Thomas was my husband. I loved him, and he loved me. But, what he shared with you...it was entirely something else. It's time you allowed yourself to accept that.

Flint, in character, does not immediately admit Miranda is right, responding that his only shame is over listening to her and fleeing London instead of fighting to save Thomas. But when she leaves the room, she leaves a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations behind. In it, Thomas had written a dedication to Flint: “My dearest love, know no shame.” Suddenly, the abstract becomes deeply personal.

Flint’s queerness is never given a label beyond his love for Thomas, though language around sexuality was different in the 18th century. It never subverts his portrayal as a ferocious, ruthless, masculine hero—indeed, many early fans being taken by surprise at this reveal, some expecting a more “traditional” hero feeling let down by the show (to those, good riddance). Black Sails has no shortage of queer characters, all with fully rounded personalities and fleshed-out plot developments; Flint is therefore neither a token character nor defined only by his queerness, but by giving him high stakes in his fight, Black Sails solidifies its mission statement.

On a plot level, the implications are greater: The choices Flint and Miranda make following this conversation set in motion the second half of Season Two, which ultimately shifts the fight from inter-pirate to pirate vs. British Empire across the third and fourth seasons. Treasure Island, in retrospect, thus becomes the legacy of anti-imperial rebellion—far more than just some swashbuckling high seas tale.

In this, Black Sails subverts the quasi-Romantic narratives inherited from gritty eighteenth-century realities and romantic nineteenth-century adventures to uncover their social reality, mirroring situations playing out in modern times. Pirates have always been innately anti-establishment, but alternate pasts blending fact and fiction provide some of the most fertile ground for the great "what ifs" in the margins of colonial expansion in the Americas. At the same time, they point to alternate futures free of oppression and marginalization by capitalist, imperial, and colonial forces. (But where do these forces not go hand in hand?) Flint even points this out himself in the fourth season:

FLINT: If no one remembers a time before there was an England, then no one can imagine a time after it. The empire survives in part because we believe its survival to be inevitable. But it isn't. And they know that. That's why they're so terrified of you and I...

By envisioning and fighting for this real world—regardless of Flint’s or his comrades’ ability to bring it about—Black Sails is unambiguous: History is written by the victors, but the stories of resistance in the margins can never be erased.

Black Sails remains a modern classic for its queer, anti-imperial blend of fact and fiction. It is acutely aware of its own place in the pirate canon, and while Flint’s and Silver’s journeys have ended, there remains tremendous scope for future reinventions within the pirate fiction genre. Other shows have played on the discovery and freedom (to paraphrase Captain Flint’s monologue in the show’s final episode) of radical piracy. More recently, Our Flag Means Death (2022-2023)—a joyous fictionalization of real-life pirates operating in a more modern storytelling framework than Black Sails’ high drama, bridging the gap between the then and the now—and even the “space pirates” of Serenity and Andor find themselves set against imperialist/capitalist empires that they must subvert or dismantle. Such fictions help us imagine a freer, more equal future.

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