Review: Our Flag Means Death, "The Gentleman Pirate" & "Discomfort in a Married State" | Season 1, Episodes 3 & 4
Taika Waititi's Blackbeard makes his first appearance as the stakes rise for Stede's hapless crew
When Our Flag Means Death was first announced, the detail that put me on board 100 percent was the fact that Taika Waititi had been cast to play Edward “Blackbeard” Teach. As good as Waititi is as a writer and director, one of his core strengths is that he’s incapable of being boring when he’s front of the camera. We can never forget Jojo Rabbit, where he elected to portray a young boy’s bumbling imaginary friend who happened to also be Adolf Hitler, and did so without a modicum of dignity or restraint. His performance as Viago in What We Do In The Shadows went a long way to establish the tone of the subsequent show, and his antagonist role as an obnoxious tech millionaire in Free Guy was a performance where he didn’t have to try nearly as hard as he did.
After being teased in the first two episodes, Waititi finally makes his appearance at the end of Our Flag Means Death’s third installment. It doesn’t take him long to become a central part of the series—and in the process once again upend the expectations of what the show is. And more importantly, it’s a process that also shows OFMD consistently getting better, more confident in its world, voice, and characters. Both “The Gentleman Pirate” and “Discomfort in a Married State” are solid episodes that set the show in a good place after the all-important four-episode mark, both leaving you excited about what course the action will take next.