Black Sails 3x01-3x05
May. 27th, 2018 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schneefinkHave more Black Sails thoughts – only a few because I should go to bed soon, but we'll watch more episodes tomorrow and I might forget what I wanted to note about these ones. Not that my thoughts are particularly ordered or deep, but DD is already sleeping.
People who told me that I would start liking John Silver: yes, you were right, I mostly like him now. And all it took was him caring about other people. I love how much he cares for the crew, and I love his relationship with Flint. How he made Flint finally have to acknowledge him as, if not an equal, then someone he has to pay attention to, by telling him about how he stole his gold; but then he admits he gave up his share to stay with the crew. And they bonded over killing sharks!
Sidenote, it's funny how the "alliances" went from Flint&Billy vs. Silver early on, to Billy&Silver vs. Flint while Flint is, uh, extra and kind of losing it, and then Silver&Flint vs. Billy. So many good scenes. Like Billy telling Silver he has to make Flint see him as an equal, kind of acknowledging that Flint will never see Billy as an equal the way he saw Mr. Gates, or Flint telling Billy to "make it so" during the storm, or Billy telling Silver to get through to Flint or Billy will do something next time he kills a potentially innocent crewmember.
Mr. Scott being connected to the maroon camp is fantastic. It also reminded me of how in season one he's asked why he did what he did (going along with Richard Guthrie's plot instead of Eleanor's) and he said "out of love," by which I assumed he meant Eleanor, but now I'm convinced the whole time he was looking for the best way to keep his position to keep supporting his family and their settlement.
I loved Flint's conflict over the pardons in Nassau: isn't this everything that he and Miranda and Thomas wanted, all those years ago? Nassau under colonial rule again, an honest governor, and the former pirates as part of it? And then it's the place where he is, the camp full of escaped slaves, that shows him what back then they "forgot", or didn't consider, about "civilization": how much what England, and Spain, think of as civilization rests upon the oppression of others. I'm not sure how clearly he's thinking this through and how much was more spur-of-the-moment inspiration and talk to get them out of there, but what he's proposing they build now is a place without the trappings of "civilization" but instead not founded on oppression. I love it.
I expected to dislike Teach, mostly because he's the main bad guy in One Piece tbh, but I actually really like him so far, and I really like his relationship with Vane. It's going to be really interesting when they encounter Flint: Flint wants a stable base, Teach anything but that, and I'm really curious which way Vane goes.
I also didn't expect not to dislike the new governor of Nassau, but he seems a decent fellow so far. And he's fine with not exactly conventional means and knows good advice when it's given (though starting something sexual/romantic with Eleanor seems like a monumentally bad idea.)
Jack, on the other hand, has no idea what to do with good advice *sigh* Just leave, dude. Ah well.
People who told me that I would start liking John Silver: yes, you were right, I mostly like him now. And all it took was him caring about other people. I love how much he cares for the crew, and I love his relationship with Flint. How he made Flint finally have to acknowledge him as, if not an equal, then someone he has to pay attention to, by telling him about how he stole his gold; but then he admits he gave up his share to stay with the crew. And they bonded over killing sharks!
Sidenote, it's funny how the "alliances" went from Flint&Billy vs. Silver early on, to Billy&Silver vs. Flint while Flint is, uh, extra and kind of losing it, and then Silver&Flint vs. Billy. So many good scenes. Like Billy telling Silver he has to make Flint see him as an equal, kind of acknowledging that Flint will never see Billy as an equal the way he saw Mr. Gates, or Flint telling Billy to "make it so" during the storm, or Billy telling Silver to get through to Flint or Billy will do something next time he kills a potentially innocent crewmember.
Mr. Scott being connected to the maroon camp is fantastic. It also reminded me of how in season one he's asked why he did what he did (going along with Richard Guthrie's plot instead of Eleanor's) and he said "out of love," by which I assumed he meant Eleanor, but now I'm convinced the whole time he was looking for the best way to keep his position to keep supporting his family and their settlement.
I loved Flint's conflict over the pardons in Nassau: isn't this everything that he and Miranda and Thomas wanted, all those years ago? Nassau under colonial rule again, an honest governor, and the former pirates as part of it? And then it's the place where he is, the camp full of escaped slaves, that shows him what back then they "forgot", or didn't consider, about "civilization": how much what England, and Spain, think of as civilization rests upon the oppression of others. I'm not sure how clearly he's thinking this through and how much was more spur-of-the-moment inspiration and talk to get them out of there, but what he's proposing they build now is a place without the trappings of "civilization" but instead not founded on oppression. I love it.
I expected to dislike Teach, mostly because he's the main bad guy in One Piece tbh, but I actually really like him so far, and I really like his relationship with Vane. It's going to be really interesting when they encounter Flint: Flint wants a stable base, Teach anything but that, and I'm really curious which way Vane goes.
I also didn't expect not to dislike the new governor of Nassau, but he seems a decent fellow so far. And he's fine with not exactly conventional means and knows good advice when it's given (though starting something sexual/romantic with Eleanor seems like a monumentally bad idea.)
Jack, on the other hand, has no idea what to do with good advice *sigh* Just leave, dude. Ah well.
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Date: 2018-05-27 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-27 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-27 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2018-05-27 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-28 08:46 pm (UTC)So many of us have been on that journey. *g*
I love how much he cares for the crew, and I love his relationship with Flint. How he made Flint finally have to acknowledge him as, if not an equal, then someone he has to pay attention to, by telling him about how he stole his gold; but then he admits he gave up his share to stay with the crew. And they bonded over killing sharks!
SUCH A GREAT EP. And I love the way the tension visibly drains out of Flint; it's such a relief to him to have someone else there forcing him to take account of them as a person, compared to the solipsistic hellspace inside his head he's been occupying. Suddenly he's not on his own any more.
Sidenote, it's funny how the "alliances" went from Flint&Billy vs. Silver early on, to Billy&Silver vs. Flint while Flint is, uh, extra and kind of losing it, and then Silver&Flint vs. Billy.
Yeah, Black Sails has so many great three-person dynamics (both the overtly poly ones and the non-sexual ones); for some reason it's something they're really good at, playing with the shifting alliances and arrangements between three people.
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Date: 2018-05-28 10:37 pm (UTC)I'll have to watch the episode with the sharks again. (I still think Flint sort-of knew that it had been Silver, but hadn't acknowledged it out loud or even to himself because he knew he couldn't afford to, so it took Silver's acknowledgment of what had happened to actually create an effect.)
Three people are a good number to play with shifting allegiances/arrangements: more combinations possible than with two, clearer and more focused than with four, and if you shift the triangles around and overlap them you can still include more people, include pairs too etc. They do a great job with that.