Retro Television Review: Black Sails (Season 2, 2015)
“So close, yet so far” are the words that best describe the beginning of the second season of the TV series Black Sails. At least from the perspective of one of its protagonists, the pirate captain Flint (Toby Stephens), who watches from the shore as the wreck of the Spanish galleon Urca de Lima lies beached. Its cargo—legendary amounts of gold and other treasures—is unloaded onto the beach. His dream of seizing it and securing his future, however, remains just a dream due to some practical details, primarily involving his own ship, heavily damaged in a skirmish with the Spanish, and his crew, whose surviving members have deposed him as captain and are more inclined to finish him off quickly than to engage in new battles. Fortunately for him, among the survivors is the smooth-talking cook John Silver (Luke Arnold), who sees Flint’s desperate plan as his own ticket back to civilisation. Meanwhile, Nassau, the city on the Bahamian island of New Providence and Flint’s home base, has come under the control of the pirate captain Charles Vane (Zach McGowan), which complicates his relationship with his former lover Eleanor Guthrie (Hannah New), a trader who, thanks to the resale of plundered goods and connections with the civilised world, functioned as the unofficial mayor. Vane’s former crew member John Rackham (Toby Schmitz) has been boycotted by his colleagues due to his inconvenient actions for pirates and is forced to earn a living as the owner of a local brothel, where Max (Jessica Parker Kennedy), the madam, begins to attract the unusual attention of Rackham's girlfriend Anne Bonny (Clara Paget). At the same time, everyone in Nassau starts to pay attention to the intentions of the British authorities to bring the pirate island back under legitimate rule, as well as a newly arrived pirate ship whose valuable cargo, depending on its fate, could lead to either peaceful or extremely bloody developments.
The creators of Black Sails in the second season did not try to reinvent the wheel. They provided the audience with mostly the same content that had been on the menu a year earlier—a mix of adventure, melodrama, political and business intrigue, all spiced up with explicit violence and sex. The series’ basic concept—that it is, in fact, a prequel to the classic adventure novel Treasure Island—still clearly suggests the ultimate fate of some characters to the more knowledgeable viewers, and the same goes for characters that the series’ creators Jonathan E. Steinberg and Robert Levine borrowed from historical books. Although they allowed the new season to be two episodes longer than the previous one, there are no new characters—at least none important enough to last more than a few episodes. Despite all this still boiling down to scheming, deception, brawls, betrayals, and “shocking” revelations about someone’s sexual orientations, Black Sails still looks fresh in its second season.
The most intelligent decision was to reserve the dramatic twists not for the present but for the past, with the most intriguing scenes in flashbacks that show Flint’s past as a promising officer in the Royal Navy, the role that the fatal Mrs. Barlow (played by Louise Barnes) played in the downfall of that career and his turn to piracy, and how romantic idealism and noble intentions clashed with reality in the worst possible way. The screenwriters also had the interesting opportunity to depict the microcosm of Nassau and the pirate world of the early 18th century from the perspective of an outside observer, but this opportunity, except for small hints in one episode, was not utilised. The disappointment is somewhat less in the season finale, which, with its mix of spectacular action and melodrama, somewhat too much resembles similar, not very convincing situations at the season finales of Spartacus. On the other hand, this finale also convincingly removed from the agenda one of the important details in the history of a certain character, but in a way that showed the authors having a sense of black humour. The cliffhanger at the end of the second season is less or, at worst, equally irritating as the one that ends the first. For series like Black Sails, that is more than enough for a thumbs up.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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