r/BlackSails

I love this show already and I have to force myself not binge it as i'm doing an episode a night so as to have something fun after work.

Love:

• Jack Rackham
• Charles Vane
• Capt. Flint

Really thought Gates would stick around longer though. Didnt expect that from Flint lol

I've tried for years to persuade her to watch it, sat through all of stranger things in the hopes she would play fair and watch this but no 😂 we rewatch Banshee and GOT nearly annually and enjoyed vikings and the boys but she insists she doesn't like pirates. I'm not a huge pirate fan but I don't believe that's the main draw of this show, any recommendations for a way to convince my better half that it's worth a go

Black Sails has been my Number 1 show since I first watched it, and it seems a lot of people in this group are in the same ship 😜

So does anyone have any strong recommendations, shows that may be under the radar like this masterpiece?

Also I would recommend:

Banshee

Moving (Kdrama)

The Americans

Mouse (Kdrama)

Good quality, english subtitles etc.

I wasn't prepared to the death of >!Blackbeard!<.

I knew that he was going to die but what happened really shocked me. I'm watching the show now for the first time and I'm surprised that it isn't so hyped like others such as Peaky Blinders.

I can't say if it was >!Vane's death or Blackbeard!< that surprised me the most.

Oh now I hate Woodes Rogers and Eleanor!

Let me start by saying that I love the show overall. But I wanted to do a deep dive into what I personally consider the weakest part of it: Max and Anne Bonny as characters.

Now, me disliking characters does not automatically mean they are badly written. A character can be unpleasant and still be well-executed. But with Max and Anne, I think there are several writing issues that either weaken the characters themselves or outright break the internal logic of the show.

For example, Max placing herself in Charles Vane’s crew as an act of spite against Eleanor feels strange to me. Whenever a character deliberately puts themselves in extreme danger for emotional reasons, it becomes harder to sympathize with them no matter how badly things later turn out. The reasoning behind the decision feels weak considering the eventual consequences of that relationship.

Then we get Anne freeing Max, which initially feels like a strong redeeming moment for Anne’s character. At first, it seems motivated by basic morality — “this isn’t right.” But the show later implies, mostly through Jack’s comments and Max’s lack of denial, that Anne’s motivation was primarily romantic or sexual attraction.

That really damages Anne as a character for me. She ends up doing something reckless and dangerous against both her own interests and Jack’s interests simply because she is attracted to a woman who only ended up in that position because of her own retaliation-driven choices in the first place.

This pattern continues afterward. Jack has to deal with the consequences, and when he chooses Max over Anne before his voyage as captain, Anne responds by abandoning him, killing a pirate from the Walrus crew, spiraling emotionally, and disappearing for a while.

And honestly, what was the deal with the scene where Max tried to essentially pimp out Anne? I genuinely do not understand how that fit either character’s established personality.

My biggest issue overall is that the writers seem unwilling to truly punish Max or Anne for their decisions. From that point onward, Max repeatedly puts Anne and Jack in dangerous situations for the sake of legitimacy and political power, yet things still largely work out for her because the narrative treats her intentions sympathetically.

What’s unfortunate is that I actually really like Jack Rackham as a character, but the Max/Anne storyline ends up damaging him as well because so much of his arc becomes tied to cleaning up the fallout from their actions.

Anyway that's just my thoughts.