Let me subtweet Game of Thrones for a moment here by talking about the version of it that’s better and more subversive and takes place at sea and the theme song has a hurdy-gurdy. For all its faults,1 Black Sails is a master class in depicting shifting allegiances in a way that actually makes some goddamn sense. The reason is that Black Sails, unlike some, has a very clear idea of what its characters want, and is (mostly) very good at aligning their actions and choices with those wants.
I’m going to take Max as an example, partly because I love Max and her dresses and how she does her hair, but also because her motives don’t change much over the run of the show, which makes it relatively simple to talk about her without getting into major spoilers. I will talk about the show’s trajectory in broad strokes, so if you absolutely can’t abide any spoilers whatsoever, just take my word for it that you want to watch Black Sails and that it’s better than Game of Thrones.
In the first season of Black Sails, Max has this fucking awful rapey plotline that I don’t even want to think about and really fuck this show for trying to be Game of Thrones when it should just have been its excellent gay piratey self. But the one tiny glimmer of a silver lining is that it provides Max with a really consistent motive throughout the rest of the series. She never wants to be currency again; she wants it to be impossible to dispose of her; she wants to have the power and run the table. That’s what is going to drive her.
The first thing Max does after she’s finished with the extremely dudes-wrote-this rape plotline (it wraps up circa episode six) is gain access to the levers of power in her immediate sphere, the brothel where she works. Her only resources right now are information, so that’s what she uses. Rather than displaying loyalty to her fellow sex workers when she sees them cheating on their payments, she shops them to the new brothel owner. At the same time, she’s working to undermine him, not enough to destabilize the whole enterprise, but enough to give herself an edge on him. Then something changes: It turns out the new brothel owner is not a dingbat like most of the men Max has had to deal with in the past; he is Captain Jack Rackham.
There’s this absolutely phenomenal scene where you think Jack is going to tell Max he’s wise to her tricks and they’re not going to work; but actually what he says (because he, too, has consistent motivations!) is “We should work together.” And because Max actually wants the thing she wants more than the writers care about contriving dramatic moments, Max agrees to work with him — creating, in the process, a fuck-ton of really dramatic and exciting and emotionally engaging plot. As it turns out, plot can arise out of characters — which is one of the things that makes Black Sails so great.
Now something else has changed. On Max’s mental map to get herself from the position she’s in to the position she wants to be in, Jack Rackham has shifted to actual ally. They will be allies, though uneasy ones, for the course of a full season — as long as their interests continue to align. (If this is making Jack Rackham sound like a sucker, I promise you that he is not. He is my treasure; he is incapable of giving a bad line read; everyone in this show is my dearest, best treasure.) But their partnership allows Max to accrue more resources, and she, because she is also my dearest treasure, uses them to best advantage: When things go to shit on Nassau at the end of Season 2, and everyone else is dashing about and panicking, Max is buying real estate. Because she doesn’t know who’s going to end up in charge when the dust settles, but she knows they’re going to need somewhere to sleep and drink and have sex.
Early in Season 3, Max and Jack’s interests fall abruptly out of alignment. What Jack wants — and again, this is consistent throughout the series! — is to be famous, infamous, a pirate captain whose story is known and told again and again. Max wants access to the levers of power. And at the start of Season 3, her access changes, because England comes to Nassau. Again, Max quickly moves to align herself with the most powerful person in the room, using the resources she has available to her. Money, property, sway over public opinion. She makes deals. She shows England what it needs from her.
But although she can, and does, make herself indispensable to the English, she can’t do that and maintain her partnership with the very pirates the English are trying to put a stop to. She’s ferociously defensive of her own agency, which means the partnership with Jack has to go. You see it coming over the course of several episodes, and it still hits you like a ton of bricks. The character work makes it painful; but the character work also makes it inevitable.
(There’s like four other reasons that I can think of right now why this particular split is so painful, but they’re kind of involved and more significantly spoilery. You will just have to trust me that this split has been seeded in ways that make it a cornucopia of emotional parallelism and sadness.)
Not to belabor a point, but the key to all this is that nothing changes about Max’s wants or Jack’s wants. Max doesn’t suddenly decide she wants to save a sister she’s spent seven seasons hating for excellent reason. She doesn’t go to a besieged city intending to kill a bitch and then abruptly decide it’s too scary and she’d better head out. The only change is the circumstance. Three seasons of building Max’s character make it impossible that she would do anything other than abandon her partnership with her pirate pals (even if we, personally, want everyone to stay friends). That’s why it works; that’s why it hurts.
A Final Note
I have chosen this one tiny element of the show to highlight. There are so many more things like this, all clicking together like the finest machineries. I’ve told this story from Max’s side, but there’s another version of it to be told from Jack’s side. If we wanted to get into the spoiler weeds, there’s a lot more to be said from the perspective of Jack Rackham’s really-real-from-real-history partner, Anne Bonny. And that’s just this plotline! One among many! Most of the time it’s not even the A plot.
Here’s the other thing: None of these characters are in my top five favorite characters on this show. That’s because this is the greatest show on earth. Nobody in the entire show has ever done anything wrong, not once, not ever.2 Please watch Black Sails and please talk to me about it.