‘Our Flag Means Death’ Season 2 review: It’s love over plunder — but how much history can a pirate comedy ignore?

There’s a song Jackson Browne wrote 40 years ago called “Lawyers in Love” and it comes to mind whenever I think of “Our Flag Means Death,” the pirate workplace comedy — ship-place comedy? — about two captains who fall head over heels for each other amid the high seas and dangers of their chosen occupation. Pirates in love!

Browne was writing a satire of geopolitics — “Eating from TV trays, tuned into to ‘Happy Days’/ Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves to the mating calls of lawyers in love” — and “Our Flag Means Death” (on Max) has satirical and lightly political intentions as well, putting a queer romance front and center in a genre where it has rarely been treated with such tenderness.

Based on real people who existed in the 18th century, the show centers around the guileless naif Stede Bonnet, known as the Gentleman Pirate (Rhys Darby), and the notorious hell-raiser Blackbeard, born Edward Teach (Taika Waititi). It’s an effervescent premise, of opposites attracting and pirates making goo-goo eyes across a ship’s deck. A boatmance for the ages.

But relationships are complicated.

The pair begin Season 2 estranged, and deeply saddened by this turn of events. A depressed Blackbeard is a dangerous Blackbeard, and if there were a pint of ice cream to be devoured between all his brute force plundering, well, you get the idea. Instead, he steals some wedding cake toppers and gives the bride a very Blackbeard makeover, longing for a relationship now in tatters. Bonnet pines as well, but with more hope, sending his beloved Ed mash notes in a bottle that he tosses into the sea. Their reunion is a foregone conclusion, but also a complicated one.

Thanks to its combo platter of broad comedy and romantic sincerity, the show has drawn a devoted audience. But it’s worth thinking through creator David Jenkins’ initial impulse. My problems with the show lie with his decision to build a story around these two historical figures. The real Bonnet owned slaves and his wealth was derived from a sugar plantation he inherited in Barbados. Teach came from a slave-owning family as well, with plantations in Jamaica that he also inherited.

“Our Flag Means Death” makes no mention of these facts, transforming the men into cuddly teddy bears at their core. This leaves such a sour taste. It doesn’t feel like a win for queer storytelling. Presumably Jenkins wanted the frisson of history — sticking with their actual names and the rough outlines of their pirating careers and then asking “What if they fell in love?” — with no intention of engaging with this other aspect of their lives.

As the writer Jendayi Omowale points out for the website Doing History in Public, at times pirates were complicit in perpetuating the slave trade by selling the very African people they captured and “the two pirates at the heart of ‘Our Flag Means Death’ were directly involved in such action.”

This is in direct contrast with the show’s pleasures, so much of which rely on Darby’s endearing, earnestly ridiculous performance. Every scene he shares with Waititi offers considerable payoff, now that Ed has dropped his swashbuckling facade in favor of heartbroken anger, and then, finally, vulnerability. For a while, it looks like these two might just make it. When Stede decides to organize all of Ed’s stolen treasure into one area of the ship, he tells him it was getting in the way, you see, people were tripping on it ...

But Ed is glum. “Excellent. A reminder of my guilt. A guilt room.” It’s interesting where the show places his guilt (nowhere near his participation in slavery). It’s not so much that a rom-com can’t or shouldn’t be built around these two men, but that it so clearly prefers to look away from their inconvenient truths. The show’s initial outing at least offered a few comedic jabs in the direction of colonialism, but it was only willing to go so far. The new season doesn’t even bother.

Instead, “Our Flag Means Death” erases this moral atrocity altogether. What does it mean when an audience is asked to shrug that off? Casting Black actors in supporting roles doesn’t negate the issues. The musical “Hamilton” has provoked similar critiques, but even that stops short of turning its slave owners into adorable comedic inventions. Bonnet is particularly squeamish about violence and frequently described as “soft” and “fragile,” but the hypocrisy is just too much; profiting from enslaved labor is the very definition of violence in action.

Apparently Jenkins was inspired to create the show after first learning about Bonnet, who underwent a spectacular midlife crisis that saw him abandon his wife and children to take up piracy. I wonder what he thought when he got to the part about Bonnet’s participation in slavery — and why he still thought it made sense to turn him into an endearing romantic lead.

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'OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH'

2 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: On Max Thursday

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