MovieChat Forums > Black Sails (2014) Discussion > so what was Flints vision?

so what was Flints vision?


We want to live free!
a free Nassau!
Fight the English!
Fight those guys over there!
Start the war!

but what exactly was the goal?
cos it sounded to me like they wanted the English (and Spanish) to piss off so they could continue stealing and murdering

reply

You're right, mate. The characters seemed to have completely different goals and motivations each season, and it wasn't just because circumstances changed. It felt like the showrunners were randomly making it up as they went along with no cohesion.

I'm being generous, but maybe that's because Flint was stabbing blindly in the dark trying to find his purpose after his life was destroyed. He's a strong character, but he was lost. Again, being generous here.

They were drawing inspiration from three or four different novels, so of course the end result is going to be convoluted.

reply

which novels were they exactly? Apart from Treasure Island?

reply

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Porto Bello Gold by A. D. Howden Smith
Pirate Passions: A Gay Erotic by Robert Bringston lol j/k

Plus whatever historical events and people the showrunners wanted to throw in there. Very convoluted, indeed.

On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers and the video game Assassin's Creed Black Flag also includes most of the same characters.

This is unrelated, but this 1990 Romance novel called Pirate's Passion sounds like Eleanor.

Vowing revenge after she watches pirates murder her shipping magnate father on the high seas, Frances Martin becomes the notorious "Lady Pirate", a formidable but lonely woman who longs to share her turbulent life with an unresponsive ship's officer.

Unresponsive? Flint wasn't into women. 😂

reply

Aha, thank you.

I think they change history a lot. Edward's Low story was rather different, for example.

reply

I hate it when they do that! This show really looked promising, but kind of turned out to be crap. Charles Vane, Woodes Rogers, and Blackbeard also had different stories in the show than what we know from history. If writers are going to dream up something that is loosely inspired by Woodes Rogers and Blackbeard then they should give their characters different names.

They even mashed several historical individuals together. The Guthrie clan were a real group of people, but they didn't do business with pirates. That plot line was based on a historical figure named Adam Baldridge, and his life is portrayed by Eleanor and Richard Guthrie and Captain Flint in seasons 1 and 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Baldridge

reply

I think Flint wanted to make Nassau a legitimate, legal trading town that paid its taxes and reformed all the pirates. But what do you do with a bunch of people who don't really want to be reformed?

reply

An earlier version of the independent USA. An island formed on democratic principles governing itself and not beholden to any king, open to all who wanted to move there.

reply

without the piracy then?

reply

I believe so, for that was his original intention when he first arrived in the New World. In addition, ceasing piracy would probably give a better chance of survival as the world empires would not need to come gunning for it.

But there would probably be problems with this, which the show didn't really examine:
1. A lot of them love the pirate life and wouldn't want to give it up.
2. The island economy doesn't have that much going on. There might not be enough economic activity to sustain much of a town in those pre-tourism days.

reply

yep , those are the 2 big issues . thats kinda what i was geting at in my OP- it didnt sound sustainable,
also his main goal seemed to veer off that quite a bit when other stuff came up ...

reply

Yeah, it's position beside the Spanish shipping lane is really nice for piracy. Same goes for Tortuga.

reply