Singing the Body Electric

I've been saving up my thoughts, telling myself that I'll eventually do some episode-by-episode posts about season 2 of Our Flag Means Death when I'm ready for a re-watch. But my notes on the finale are already a novella in and of themselves, so they're probably best dropped as they arise, and the video I recced earlier today has me particularly thinking about the speech Izzy makes in 2x08.

Izzy:You don't know the first thing about piracy, do you? It's not about glory. It's not about getting what you want. It's about belonging to something when the world has told you you're nothing. It's about finding the family to kill for when yours are long dead. It's about letting go of ego for something larger: the crew.

Ricky: I destroyed the Republic of Pirates, and that makes me the ultimate pirate.

Izzy:You're not a pirate, lad. You're a spoiled, entitled bunch of twats dressed in puffy blue nighties. Kill me. Kill us all. Our spirit will last throughout your entire fucking empire because...we're good. And you are a rancid, syphilitic cunt.

According to Con O'Neill, there was significant editing of this speech that re-contextualized it in some way. I'm hugely interested in how and why so, but regardless, the oddness of "because we're good" aside, it's a strong one. It tells us something about piracy. It tells us even more about Izzy. It hints about his past losses. It confirms or clarifies his attachment to Blackbeard and also what it meant to shoot him to save the crew. It gives him a win that stands in contrast to his previous losses, showing how his acceptance by the crew lets something he previously failed at (insulting people without embarrassing himself) reach its full potential.

The thing is...that speech should have been Stede's.

Not as-is, obviously, but I can't imagine there wasn't some earlier draft where the man on the opposite side of the table telling Ricky he had the wrong idea about piracy was Stede. Because Ricky is clearly a foil for Stede. He's the actual version of "God's perfect little rich boy" who ran away to be a pirate, full of overconfidence and hung up on whimsical calling cards. Only, unlike Stede, he can't deal with failure (and isn't intriguing enough to quickly catch the interest of a powerful ally like Blackbeard). Not only does he run home after his first failure and try to pretend it never happened, but he makes that failure everyone else's problem. Stede says: "What if I could make piracy better?" Ricky says: "If I can't be a pirate, then no one can."

Stede is the one who inspired Ricky to be a pirate. Stede is the one who did what Ricky couldn't. Stede is the one who wisely left the scene of their shared crime in time to avoid Ricky's maiming fate and had his luck continue through a timely rescue by Zheng. Stede is the one who Ricky should want to gloat at while they share a drink like gentlemen. Izzy and Ricky just met today.

It would have been a great payoff for all the ways Stede grew into being a pirate captain, to have him be the one to tell Ricky: You and I are not the same. You don't understand what piracy is really about. After all, Stede should now know that it's not about ego, fame, power, or bending others to your will. He should know, after everything he's gone through, that it's really about freedom and community, taking risks and growing from failure, finding yourself, finding what makes you happy.

Except...we then hit the problem of Stede not really ending the season in that place. The problem is two-fold. Or two-and-a-half-fold.

1. The writers know that Stede isn't going to stay a pirate, even if we the audience don't at this point. So, even though a not-insignificant part of season 2 is devoted to Stede wanting his crew to respect him and stay with him, and then to a penultimate episode where his success at traditional piracy causes problems for him, his feelings about piracy fall by the wayside at the climax because the episode is going to end with him giving it up.

2. The above isn't an insurmountable problem, but the season never really explicitly commits to Stede's conflict between being with Ed and being a good captain to his crew. It starts off promisingly on that front, with Stede rescuing the Feral Five even when he thought they had killed Ed, and reluctantly supporting the crew's decision to banish Ed at first. Episode 5 then seems like it's going to escalate this to the point of being addressed: Stede overrides the crew's wishes in bringing Ed back, shushes them when they try to talk about their trauma or ask questions, and then spends the episode learning from Izzy that he needs to listen to and to some extent indulge the crew when they're afraid of something he loves (the cursed suit / Ed), even when he doesn't believe it will harm them.

But that never hits a breaking point. The crew don't push on the topic of Ed the way they do on the suit. Jim, Oluwande and Archie are ready to leave Stede, but they never mention what Ed did to Jim and Archie as a factor in this. Ed leaves Stede because he can't deal with being a pirate right now, but Stede doesn't try to go after him or consider giving up piracy. It's fine that he ultimately chooses Ed, it's even in line with both previous moments where he's talked about being happy just to be with Ed and with the existing theme of "We only have one life." But we never see him weighing that decision, and the narrative doesn't force him to even when all the pieces of a conflict are in place. It just sort of happens, like the characters know it's as predetermined as the writers do.

We never really get an answer to what Stede would do if Ed hurt someone on the crew again. We don't necessarily have to believe that Ed would, but I do think we should have ended the season with at least some sense of what action Stede would take if he could conceive of possibilities beyond what the writers had already decided. What would he do if the crew had issued an ultimatum of either Ed leaving or all of them? We know Stede doesn't choose the crew when they believe Ed is a threat, but would he choose them if he believed Ed was a threat? And would choosing them mean saying goodbye to Ed, or would it mean giving up his captaincy to leave with Ed and know the crew was safe?

The show never makes him decide or seemingly even think about it after their reunion beyond the joke of the cat bell. Instead, it tries to have its cake and eat it too by positioning everyone as one happy but separated family at the end.

It was unexpectedly wonderful that we learned what Izzy's answer was to this conflict. A man who loved Ed and had built his life around him for decades dragged himself up one-legged from his deathbed to disarm him when he was trying to commit a murder-suicide with the crew. But Stede is our main character, the man who wanted to reinvent being a pirate captain, who called the crew his new family and read them stories at night, and it really feels like part of his journey this season should have been facing that hard choice between loyalty to someone you love and a duty to the crew who depends on you.

2½. Stede's lack of making a choice and therefore lack of commitment to his crew is what stops him from fully inhabiting the role of captain before giving it up, and that's a shame. We could have seen him resolve that unaddressed conflict in a speech to Ricky, but it would have required changes to the script past that as well. If we're meant to see Stede as having come into his own as captain, we'd expect him to take point in the subsequent escape attempt. He's in the best position to pass himself off as an officer, and it was established in 2x05 that he has every reason to believe he'd be safe doing so because his body just sort of takes over when he's in danger—twice stopping an enemy before Izzy could finish drawing his sword on his behalf. (And in retrospect, how messed up is it to have Stede pretty smugly describe his own invulnerability to a man who will shortly after die from the sort of injury Stede has twice walked off?)

We can't have Stede giving a speech about the crew being the most important thing and then hanging back while a subordinate with a notable prosthesis who can't run puts himself in the line of fire, so Stede doesn't give the speech. Izzy does, and in doing so, the closest thing we have to a commanding officer who expresses a commitment to the crew dies. Meanwhile, Zheng loses her entire fleet and her and Auntie's closing lesson is about being okay with failure.

I don't think it's wrong per se to have the captains end up where they do. But in light of the speech, and in a season that introduced the idea that mutiny is a capital crime that other captains will kill even a victimized crew for, it's just kind of odd to end with all three captains being at peace with not having lived up to the commitment of the position while the one person who grew into expressing and embodying that ideal died. I don't think this was at all an intended message, but rather a problem the show had with the concept of importance. It feels like some writers saw Ed and Stede's rank and protagonist status as one and the same. As though Ed and Stede being the most important people on the ship is what made them the most important characters, and so we're meant to care about how being in power makes them feel as protagonists (stressed by the responsibility, fulfilled or not by their crew's regard, bored or stimulated, successful or not) but not how them being in power makes the less 'important' characters feel. Some writers obviously did care very much about the question of power for those who don't have it. But at some point it seems to have been decided that a statement like "[People in power]...just get away with [hurting the rest of us], and we move on" would be resolved by the people in power throwing the crew a pizza party.

So the speech had to be Izzy's instead of Stede's, as much as I wish otherwise. Now I'm going to talk more briefly (I promise) about why it should have been Ed's.

This isn't to say that I think Ed should have made the speech to Ricky. But Con O'Neill has more than once referred to the speech as Izzy's eulogy. Izzy has to deliver his own eulogy. That's depressing in and of itself, but when combined with the fact that the goodbye between him and Ed is also his own monologue, it means that Ed never ends up having a voice in the end.

Imagine seeing how much Ed has grown through this experience by how he eulogizes Izzy. He could have had the opportunity to talk about what he regretted about his past and what he wanted to do differently in the future. We could have seen how funerals bring families together, as David Jenkins put it, through Ed and the crew connecting through that speech. Not Ed looking for an admiring audience like he did with them before, or parroting a corporate apology that Stede fed him, but being honest and vulnerable with them on the subject of a loss they were sharing.

Is Ed just saying "Well, that's that then" and calling the man he tortured, maimed and tried to kill "a fucking nightmare" the last words Izzy would have wanted? Well...yeah, probably. But that's not who Ed wants to be. Letting him put some self-reflection into words after losing someone he spent so much of his old life with—and with him, losing the chance to ever fully set things right—could have shown us a changed Ed.

Instead, it's Izzy who comes into his own and Izzy who dies. And while we have the sense that the crew will be fine because of how we saw them come together for Izzy, it's jarring to be told there's been reconciliation and yet feel like they're probably better off without Ed and Stede on the ship right now. As much as I love Izzy getting such a good scene, it feels like that time really should have gone to the leads.

Why not let Izzy bestow one of his nods of approval to Stede after Stede delivers that verbal slam to Ricky, then let Izzy insist on taking point so that Stede stays with Ed or watches the crew's backs?

Why not let us find out about Izzy's lost family and desire to belong through Ed delivering his eulogy, revealing that he did know him better than anyone else and can now answer the question of what Izzy was to him?

(Or, you know, why not let Izzy live and have Stede's arc pay off as a captain who's earned the loyalty of his first enemy and Ed's arc pay off by him willingly letting go of his unhealthy patterns with Izzy?)

This is one of those areas of the finale script where I really wish I was privy to all the options discussed, because I'm really interested in what else might have been on the table and what swayed things in this direction.