unapproachable terrifying intelligent captains who are viewed as gods of the sea and who bribe their crew with the promise of spanish gold to achieve a years-in-the-making revenge scheme they're utterly obsessed with to the point of madness
Odysseus, on his journey home to Ithaca, was visited by a ghost. The ghost tells him that once he reaches his home, once he slays all his enemies and sets his house in order, he must do one last thing before he can rest. The ghost tells him to pick up an oar and walk inland. And keep walking until somebody mistakes that oar for a shovel. For that would be the place that no man had ever been troubled by the sea. And that's where he'd find peace.
In the end, that’s all I want. To walk away from the sea and find some peace.
Youngstown by Bruce Springsteen / Black Sails (2014-2017)
They really went to Toby Stephens and said, “We’re imagining the saddest man—completely regret ridden, absolutely terrified of his own passions, but also weirdly “dark nautical” in theme.
And Toby Stephens went, “That’s actually kind of my specialty.”
If we were able to take Nassau, if we are able to expose the illusion that England is not inevitable, if we are able to incite a revolt that spreads across the New World...then yeah, I imagine people are gonna notice.
i am once AGAIN thinking about the scene in black sails where flint has just been forced by miranda to confront his overwhelming grief over losing thomas, which has been fueling his unholy rage for the past two seasons. flint is sitting there, having a flashback, drowning in the tragedy and injustice of his gay lover’s death… then vane bursts into the room like a roided-up kool-aid man and immediately tries to kill him. 10/10, flawless tonal whiplash, one of the funniest moments in the entire show.
Ask a historian, “What was mankind’s greatest invention?” Fire? The wheel? The sword? I would argue it’s history itself. History isn’t fact. It’s narrative, one carefully curated and shaped. Under the pen strokes of the right scribe, a villain becomes a hero, a lie becomes the truth.