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Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Our Flag Means Death.
Was there ever any doubt that Our Flag Means Death Season 2 wouldn’t end in thrilling fashion after taking all of us on a rollercoaster of emotions? Probably not, but show creator David Jenkins and writer John Mahone, who teamed up on the script for the finale episode, seemed distinctly driven to squeeze as many tears out of us watching as possible. With the dynamic between Stede (Rhys Darby) and Ed (Taika Waititi) seemingly fractured as of the season’s penultimate installment, it was unclear how — or if — the two men might eventually reconcile, but a new threat to the Republic of Pirates, alongside Ed’s realization that maybe he isn’t meant to be a fisherman after all, sends the two back into each other’s arms, literally.
While some characters are afforded something resembling a happy ending, with Stede and Ed deciding to try their hand at being innkeepers as they watch the Revenge sail off into the sunset under Frenchie’s (Joel Fry) command, not every single crew member emerges from the finale battle unscathed, chief among them Ed’s first mate and formerly ruthless right-hand Izzy Hands (Con O’Neill), whose parting words to Ed may be the very thing that the former Blackbeard needs to hear in order to fully come to terms with accepting the man inside him all along.
Ahead of the Season 2 finale premiering on Max, Collider had the opportunity to reconnect with Jenkins to discuss some of the episode’s biggest moments. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Jenkins explains why Izzy’s speech is both a eulogy for the character and a statement about the show itself, how the Season 2 premiere and finale bookend each other with those beach scenes, and why he wanted to use that Nina Simone needle drop in particular. He also discusses why the season concludes with a wedding at sea, what the finale sets up for Season 3, and more.
COLLIDER: I feel like my first question, in a completely non-serious way, is: how dare you, and my immediate follow-up is: what gives you the right?
DAVID JENKINS: I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Also, I am God to these creatures! But it was hard. It was a hard decision.
The episode kicks off with a somewhat more lighthearted moment, which is Ed realizing he’s not cut out for the fishing life after all. On the heels of Stede and Ed’s big fight in the episode prior, why did it feel important to have Ed humorously have the revelation of, “This isn’t what I really want after all?”
JENKINS: Well, I like the idea that Season 1 is about Stede’s midlife crisis, and Season 2 is about Ed’s midlife crisis. I like that he had a little prima donna moment where he thought he could go and be a simple man, and then it’s revealed that he really isn’t a simple man; he’s a complicated, fussy, moody guy. No, he’s not gonna be able to catch fish for a living. For him to be told that, “At your heart, you’re a pirate. You have to go back and do it,” he doesn’t want that to be true, but it was true.
Speaking of characters that have a revelation about themselves, Izzy’s speech about piracy, about belonging to something and finding family, feels like the thesis statement of this show. Was that the intention behind it?
JENKINS: When I wrote that, I wanted to give Izzy a proper eulogy for himself. He gives a eulogy for himself, but it felt true writing it. Yeah, this is how he sees piracy, and also that’s not how he would have viewed piracy in the first season. He would have viewed it as, “I’m here to dominate you, so you work for the boss.” By the end of his journey in the second season, he sees that they built him a unicorn leg, he learned to whittle, and he mentored Stede. He’s learned that, actually, a pirate crew works differently than what he thought and that they are all in it together, and they do this for each other. So it felt right for Izzy’s arc, and it is kind of an overall statement about the show.
It’s interesting that you call it a eulogy, because, by the time we get to the scene where we know Izzy’s not going to make it, it feels like he’s using his last moments for Ed more than himself. He has those final words to Ed of, “They love you for who you are. Just be Ed.” Is that the kind of the thing that Ed needs to hear in the moment — even as he’s losing, arguably, someone he’s known even longer than Stede and is just as close to on an emotional level?
JENKINS: Well, I like that Izzy gives that to him, and then Izzy also apologizes to him because he says that he fed his darkness and that they were both Blackbeard together — that Blackbeard wasn’t just Ed, that they did it together. In a way, it’s very much for Ed, that speech. The “we were Blackbeard” is claiming that he is also Blackbeard, that Blackbeard is not just Ed’s creation, and I like that for him, too, because he’s worked so hard for that — and then just to say, “You can give it up.” There can never be a Blackbeard again as far as Izzy’s concerned because he’s dying, and they did that together.
I wanted to ask you about the Stede/Ed reunion. We get Ed finding Stede’s love letter that was written all the way at the beginning, and then also the beach fight/reunion. It’s definitely a callback to the dream, but was that always the way that you wanted to bookend the season? Here’s the dream and the fantasy, and then this is the real moment that we get to have?
JENKINS: It was nice. I knew that I wanted to have the Republic of Pirates at the beginning and end up with the Republic of Pirates. I think the reunion of it was a nice surprise, but it felt right. And finding the letter in a bottle — if you have a letter in a bottle, it’s thrown out somewhere, it has to pop up somewhere, you have to see one of them at some point. But yeah, there’s a circular nature to it, and that’s why I thought it would be good to use Nina Simone at the beginning and at the end as a callback. This dream in this way did come true, and they made it come true.
When I talked to you at the beginning of the season, you mentioned the Nina Simone needle drop, but couldn’t say anything about the significance of it at the time. I talked to [music supervisor] Maggie [Phillips], as well, about the needle drops throughout Season 2, and she said you always had a very clear vision for what song you wanted there. A lot of people know the original, but why did you pick Nina’s cover? It strikes a different tone; there’s a hopefulness to it in a lot of ways.
JENKINS: Yeah, it’s wistful. There’s a lovely part that sounds like church bells, which is great for the wedding part of it, and then it’s just moving. I love her interpretation of it. It’s wistful, positive, and it felt like the end of the show to me. There’s a size to it that, up against these images, I just was like, “Yeah, this would be really good. I want this to be in the show.”
I did want to ask you about the wedding because on the heels of Izzy’s death, it’s bittersweet, but also, it’s a sign this crew has become a family, and they can still find happy moments and reasons to celebrate. We’ve seen Black Pete and Lucius reconnect, but also reconcile and navigate through Lucius’s problems and have their own, almost parallel trajectory journey as a couple alongside Stede and Ed in a way. Was that something that you always wanted to close the season on, the two of them getting hitched?
JENKINS: Yeah. We knew we wanted a matelotage in the season, which is the real term they had for marrying crew members. And yeah, they’ve always been in relief to Stede and Ed, and they’re a little bit ahead of Stede and Ed in how much they can talk about things. So to have a bunch of family things in the season, like a funeral and a wedding, and have the parents kind of watch the kids sail away, felt right, and all of those things seem to work well together and build on each other.
Speaking of Ed and Stede watching everybody sail off, that was an outcome that was somewhat surprising, I think because where they are, you think maybe they’re going to end up sailing off with everybody else.” But no, instead, it’s just this sweet, lovely note of them getting to play house for a little while. What inspired that turn for them?
JENKINS: I think that they’ve come to the point in the relationship where they say, “Yeah, we’re gonna give this a try,” and that’s where the story really gets interesting. That will-they-or-won’t-they is interesting to a point, but the real meat of it is always like, “Can they make the relationship, and can they do better than Anne and Mary?” That’s the question that we all ask ourselves when we end up in a serious relationship is: can we make this work, and can we get through the hard times? Then they’re both very damaged, and it’s gonna be a challenge for them, and that’s where the story gets interesting.
I’m not sure you can really tease much for a Season 3, but we talked before about how you have your vision for where you want to take this, and based on what we see at the end of Season 2, the implication is that we’re going to have Stede and Ed off together, but is the plan to also continue with the other characters as well in their own places?
JENKINS: Yeah. Frenchie’s in charge of the Revenge, and I think Frenchie’s Revenge would be an interesting place to work and an interesting ship to be raided by. Then I think that the Revenge means a lot to Stede, and it would be very hard for him to give it up, and he hasn’t had a great track record of that. So I think the odds of them all finding each other again are quite high.
All episodes of Our Flag Means Death Season 2 are available to stream on Max.
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