The maritime tactics are fascinating, too, showing us how one ship can run down and overpower another, despite its apparently superiority. There’s some amazing ship-on-ship action, with one episode devoted to a siege onboard a slave carrier that is as nightmarish as it is strikingly original. But the measured set-ups eventually reap dividends, many of them spectacular, as the show finds its sea-legs. Things can move slowly here and there – and many viewers did bail early as the show seemed to be lubbing the land too much. Sometimes it feels more like a long film than a series of episodes. It’s worth watching just to see this expertly constructed story build towards a bombshell that, for once, really does change everything. For the entire first season, however, we get no insight into Flint’s motivation: he’s ruthless and driven, but why? It’s not until midway through season two that we find out his secret. John Silver (two-legged, sans parrot and not yet Long) is the only person who knows the route the Urca is taking, so he uses this leverage to work his way up the pirate ranks. Flint’s obsession has driven his crew to the verge of mutiny. This was a real ship, wrecked in 1715, though here it is repurposed as the carrier of the titular treasure from Treasure Island. And leading us through this morally bankrupt morass of characters is Captain Flint, played by Toby Stephens, finally given a decent role to sink his teeth into.įlint is probably the best pirate here, a man obsessed with a gold-laden galleon called the Urca de Lima. Instead, what we get is a wretched collection of thieves and murderers, backstabbers and brawlers, every one of them hugely entertaining. These are not like the Johnny Depp films, all giddy jokers on some supernatural odyssey. The show, made for the Starz cable channel and launched last year, makes great efforts to reclaim the bad reputation of pirates, though. They’ll be watching for adventures on the high seas, swashbuckling quests for treasure and gory battles to the death. But no one will be watching Black Sails to revise for an exam. To be fair, though, the characters based on reality may as well be fictional too, given how sketchy records were at the time, and how inflated their daring exploits became with each retelling over the past 300 years. Ostensibly a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, it throws the novel’s fictional scurvy knaves – including John Silver, Captain Flint and Billy Bones – in with plenty of real-life buccaneers, from Calico Jack to Charles Vane. Black Sails is a lot smarter and classier than it at first appears.
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