Television Review: Black Sails (Season 3, 2016)

At the beginning of the third season of Black Sails, Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), who was not long ago one of the more pragmatic and reasonable pirates in the Caribbean, does everything he can to become what he once wanted to eliminate – a bloodthirsty pirate whose name strikes fear and dread. The reason lies in recent traumatic experiences that, along with financial motives, have added an insatiable desire for revenge against his former homeland, England, against which he wages something akin to a terrorist jihad, attempting to thwart its efforts to bring peace and order. His bloodlust, however, causes increasing concern in his closest associate, the smooth-talking but recently crippled John Silver (Luke Arnold), who still dreams of exchanging the hard life of a pirate for the comfortable enjoyment of the recently plundered legendary treasure from a Spanish galleon. Meanwhile, Flint's main base, Nassau on the Bahamian island of New Providence, finds itself under threat from a British Royal Navy squadron led by the celebrated adventurer Woodes Rodgers (Luke Roberts), whose intention is to dismantle the self-proclaimed pirate republic peacefully, offering the pirates a generous amnesty if they swear allegiance to the new regime. By chance, the main battle between the pirates and the British will not take place in Nassau but on some unremarkable, remote island whose inhabitants have good reasons not to attract too much attention to themselves.

The third season of the series quite effectively suggests that it is backed by Starz, not only because of its insistence on "rich" content involving explicit violence, nudity, and sex, but also because of its narrative structure that resembles Spartacus, the then most famous production of that media house. Similar to the story of the famous gladiator, the series about pirates combines fiction with real historical figures and events, but the script is also strictly limited by both unchangeable historical circumstances and the template of Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, of which the series is a prequel. In the third season, the titular treasure island finally appears, just as the third season of Spartacus finally showed the famous Spartacus revolt. In terms of content, similar to the second season, there are no dramatic revelations or flashbacks; their weak, but not overly irritating, replacement is provided by Flint's visions of Death, or conversations with Mrs. Barlow (Louise Barnes), a character deceased in the previous season. New characters, although history remembers them as colourful, are not particularly impressive – including Rodgers, who is quite bland and uncharismatic, and is much easier to accept as an efficient but faceless bureaucrat than as a sort of alter ego of Flint in his younger days. The same can be said for the character of Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, the most famous of all historical pirates, for whom the performance of the otherwise good Ray Stevenson does not help much. However, despite all these shortcomings, Black Sails in the third season maintains the quality level necessary to keep viewers glued to their screens and meet the high expectations for the final season.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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