Review: Our Flag Means Death, "Mermen" | Season 2, Episode 8
Love, loss, and a battle royale cap off a short yet heartfelt second season
“You don’t know the first thing about piracy, do you. It’s not about glory. It’s not about getting what you want. It’s about belonging to something when the world has told you you’re nothin.’ It’s about finding the family to kill for when yours are long dead. It’s about letting go of ego for something larger. The crew.”
Several times during my reviews of this second season of Our Flag Means Death, I’ve criticized Max’s decision to air the season in such a compressed way. As a thought experiment leading up to the finale, I asked myself if I’d be similarly critical of the season if Max had followed more of a Netflix approach and dropped the entire thing at once—which is realistically the way a lot of people are going to consume it, having saved up the episodes until the season wrapped. And now that we have the full season in front of us, I suspect this will play well for viewers in binge mode. All eight installments are consistent in tone, most lead neatly into the next episode with minimal delay between events, and there’s a clear narrative arc carried throughout.
What that approach won’t fix is my other main criticism from last week, which is that it doesn’t feel like cutting back the episode order worked in the show’s favor. While the core narrative of the season still functions as a whole—Stede and Ed finding their way back to each other and working their way through the heartbreak of the first season—it feels thinner than it should, jumping over some of their obstacles and advancing to a new stage of the relationship every episode. Additionally, the show has such a large cast, and David Jenkins and company clearly have such an affection for all of their characters that they don’t want to leave anyone out. While everyone managed to get individual moments over the course of the season, their individual narratives (with one glaring exception we’ll get to) felt thinned out in comparison.
But what thinness exists in the storytelling is more than made up for on the emotional front, and on balance those emotions are enough to make this season a success. Our Flag Means Death knows that it’s earned its devoted fanbase largely through its affection for its characters and its unapologetic pansexual approach toward their love and relationships, and season two doubled down on that without ever feeling like it was pandering in the process. It’s a show that holds being sincere and silly in equal measure, and it continued to execute both of them in a deeply satisfying fashion. Even if I would have liked more time spent on Jim/Olwande/Archie’s polycule situation, more material on the crew recovering from their separation, or a bit more time of Stede and Ed on the outs, what we got was still satisfyingly executed enough that I don’t feel we were cheated.