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https://notthatcomplicated.net/2020/04/black-sails-season-1-episode-3-recap

Black Sails S1 Ep 3
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Black Sails Season 1, Episode 3 Recap

Louise Barnes as Miranda Barlow. Photo courtesy of Starz.

Recap by Elizabeth Wright

This episode contains explicit language, rape, violence, and nudity.

Episode three opens with our last (major) character introduction – Miranda Barlow.

While the intros in the first episode were designed to give answers quickly (Silver is clever, Eleanor is driven, Gates is done with everyone’s drama), Mrs. Barlow’s is structured differently – it raises questions.

She knows Flint – but how, and from where? She’s surrounded by faded gentility, separated from her neighbors and the pirates both – but why? And she’s clearly known about Flint’s grander plans from the beginning – but what are her reasons for supporting them?

After she dresses Flint’s wounds, they discuss what comes next, and we see that while Miranda knows about the plans, she may not be completely on board. She’s even less thrilled when Flint asks a favor… in the form of an unconscious Mr. Guthrie.

Back at the port, Silver’s facing down problems of his own: Eleanor’s learned that Max left, and she’s furious – and, though she won’t admit it, scared. She snaps at him that he’d “better be worth it” before getting back to the task at hand: his memorized schedule.

He writes down the first half, but he’s read the mood in the room. If he gives them everything he knows, he’s a dead man. If he rejoins Flint’s crew, however, he can deliver the schedule piecemeal and come home with a share of the treasure. Whether he’ll survive long enough to enjoy it is a separate question, but as he posits to Flint, “We might be friends by then.”

The Walrus isn’t a match for the Urca on her own. Flint asks Eleanor for new and bigger guns (which she promises him over Scott’s objections that there are none on the island), and sends Gates off to negotiate for a consort: a second ship, sailing under his command.

Gates’ quest introduces us to something which will play a major role later on: the fort above the harbor. It’s not well armed enough to keep out a fleet, but it does command the entrance to Nassau, and gives whoever owns it a major card to play. The current resident is Benjamin Hornigold, another historical pirate, though Black Sails’ portrayal of him as a middle-aged, disillusioned Jacobite bears little resemblance to the actual man. 

It does, however, set him up as a foil to Flint. Like Flint, Hornigold has greater aims. He’s told his men that they’re something more than pirates: they’re the unofficial navy of the rightful king, and someday they’ll go home in glory. With the Jacobite cause in tatters, however, Hornigold, like Flint, is losing the support of his men. Unlike Flint, he’s resigned to it, and unwilling to risk the power he holds by leaving the fort. He is willing to lend Gates his ship – even if they are all “just thieves awaiting a noose.”

Rackham’s situation isn’t great either. His crew isn’t thrilled that he’s lost the pearls, and they’re threatening to elect a new quartermaster. Like Silver, though, Jack’s a planner: he corners Gates, and begins to sow the seeds of doubt.

He knows better than to try to make Gates doubt Flint, but there’s another target: making Gates doubt himself. He’s old, Jack points out, and he’s never captained a ship before. The men may respect him now, but against the Urca, they don’t need a friend: they need a fighter.

They need the Ranger.

They need Charles Vane.

Billy, meanwhile, is trying to deal with the crew. Singleton might be dead, but plenty of his supporters still hate Flint, “No matter how much gold you dangle in front of them.” 

It’s apparent that Gates is training him up as a successor, and Billy is trying his best. He might not buy into everything Flint is selling, but he cares about the crew, and he does trust Gates – even if it means he’s stuck babysitting a thief.

Billy foists Silver – who he’s trying to keep away from the crew – off on Randall, and heads off to canvas the men. We see quickly, as his efforts come up empty, that he doesn’t have Gates’ gifts with people. Silver, though, does. He quickly charms Randall into telling him which men are still loyal to Singleton, and then charms them into telling him why.

It’s up in the air – particularly as he immediately turns back around and tells Billy what he’s learned – just which side Silver’s on. Right now, he’s hedging his bets, building up as much goodwill with as many people as he can.

At the tavern, Scott warns Eleanor that the warehouses are nearly empty, and, with her father disgraced, the next merchant ship will be their last – particularly if Eleanor insists upon stealing Captain Bryson’s guns to give to Flint.

Eleanor has only one option: her father.

She goes to meet with him at Miranda’s house, but the meeting doesn’t go well. When her first strategy – dressing his wounds, speaking softly, and asking for his help as a dutiful daughter – doesn’t bear fruit, she tries a second. The mask drops, and she swears at him, telling him he has no choice. He can either help her keep Nassau afloat, or flee with his tail between his legs to their relatives in Boston, who “might save you from the gallows, but they won’t spare you their scorn.” He would have been nothing without her mother, she tells him, and he’ll be nothing again if he doesn’t help her now.

Her father, after all, will always choose “profits over daughters.”

With Eleanor gone, her father has questions for Mrs. Barlow.

One of Singleton’s men had told Silver his own theories on Flint: that he was undead, his every move controlled by a witch living on the island. Miranda’s neighbors don’t trust her either, reporting her every move to the preacher or simply throwing rocks at her from her garden edge. Guthrie demands to know who she is to Flint, and Miranda only smiles, giving him a book: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. 

This copy of the Meditations will turn out to be one of the most significant items in the show, but Guthrie isn’t satisfied by Roman philosophy as an answer. With his guard asleep, he sneaks out to search the house. He finds an old, hidden portrait of Miranda, labeled as the wife of “Thomas Hamilton.”

Outside, Miranda shares tea with the preacher. Her critique of his sermon ends with a long quote from the Song of Solomon. “Love,” she says, “shouldn’t require suffering.” But when he demands to know if Flint is “keeping her here,” she picks up her cup and walks inside.

Something is keeping her here. But whether it’s Flint or her own pride remains to be seen.

In the meantime, Gates offers up Jack’s suggestion to Flint, who laughs it off before realizing in horror that Gates is serious. Gates is also persuasive, and manages to arrange a meeting. Jack has nearly as tough a time convincing Vane (“Fuck you, Jack”) as he did Gates, but he brings his crew around with the offer of gold, and his captain around with the offer of Eleanor Guthrie’s goodwill.

Flint interrupts Jack’s opening speech with a demand that Vane apologize for Mosiah’s murder in the first episode. Gates bustles him outside for a short, hilarious half-dressing-down, half-motivational-speech. 

“That was my fault.  When I said we would need to keep our tempers in check to make this meeting happen, I should have specified we’d need to do so for the duration of the meeting as well.”

With “clarity and a unity of vision,” they return, and eventually hash out a deal. Jack wants Eleanor’s father to sign off on it – or, at least, for Eleanor and Flint to tell him where Richard Guthrie is – but Vane cuts him off. 

“Her word’s good enough for me.”

Vane comes out of the meeting happy, but Jack warns him there’s still a mess to clean up, “before everything you’ve achieved here goes up in smoke.” He’s not talking about the deal with Flint – he’s talking about Vane and Eleanor, and we’re suddenly and forcefully jerked into season one’s worst-handled plotline.

Max is huddled, naked, chained to the wall of a shed. Vane has been letting his crew rape her as “punishment” for never getting the schedule – and possibly, his earlier behavior suggests, for taking his place in Eleanor’s affections.

“I had no choice,” he claims, unchaining her, and the goodwill he’d built up over the last scenes evaporates. Vane had every choice, and that this is the penalty he chose for Max speaks volumes.

He does have one question: why Max left Eleanor’s protection. Finally, she speaks, meeting his eyes. “You really have to ask? How did it feel, when she threw you aside?” Vane tells Jack to put her on a boat and get her off the island. 

Max’s suffering is juxtaposed against Vane’s next scene. Eleanor comes to his tent, smiles, and takes off her blouse. The afterglow, though, is interrupted by the sound of screams – screams Eleanor recognizes. She runs from the tent to find a Ranger crewman assaulting Max in public, and runs to her rescue, bludgeoning him with a stick before turning on Vane.

“You are – all of you, this whole crew – as of right now, finished!” They’ll have no dealings with Eleanor’s Nassau unless they elect a new captain – Captain Flint, who now gets the Ranger as a consort without the baggage attached. Most of Vane’s crew deserts him immediately – even Anne Bonny makes a brief motion to leave before being pulled back.

But Max is done with Eleanor’s apologies: “He didn’t do this to me,” she says, right or wrong.  “You did.” She turns, and walks back to Vane, putting herself back into sexual slavery “until the debt is paid.”

It’s a rough moment, and what makes it worse is that it’s Max’s last real moment of agency this season. She’ll come into her own in season two, but until then, her story isn’t hers any more. It’s Eleanor’s, and, later, Anne and Jack’s – and the racial implications there don’t help.

Black Sails is a show about pirates, and as such it’s going to deal with dark themes. It’s a show that doesn’t shy away from its setting in the colonial Caribbean, and it will grapple with slavery, war, and the darkest side of humanity over its run. I have no objections to dark themes. I love dark themes. I do have objections to Max, who is set up as a major character and will later genuinely become one, turning into a suffering prop for the rest of the season.

The episode ends with a callback to the beginning, and the questions raised by Miranda Barlow’s introduction.

Billy confronts one of Singleton’s men, and finds himself having to lie once again about Singleton and the page. “I may be wrong about Singleton, but I’m not wrong about Flint,” Morley says. He thinks that Flint’s using his men for his own purposes, and if Billy doesn’t believe him, “that’s because you don’t know about Mrs. Barlow.”

We close with a montage set to Marcus Aurelius, and an episode that raised more questions than answers.