Spoiler warning: This review contains information regarding seasons one and two of “Our Flag Means Death.”

Nearly five months after the premiere of Season Two of “Our Flag Means Death,” I finally gathered up the courage to watch it. I had watched season one of “Our Flag Means Death” the year prior, and it was absolutely flawless. As sequels tend to have the reputation of being worse than the first season, I held off on watching the second season, not wanting to ruin season one for myself. Unfortunately, season two fulfilled the prophecy; it was disappointingly subpar, falling despairingly short of the sky-high standard that season one had set.  

The first season of “Our Flag Means Death” starts off with a wealthy English gentleman, Stede Bonnet, who abandoned his comfortable life (and his wife and kids) to become a pirate, earning him the title “The Gentleman Pirate.” His path crosses the infamous Blackbeard, whose real name is Edward Teach, and his first-mate Izzy Hands and they end up starting a joint crew to take on the pirating world together. Their journey only gets more chaotic as Bonnet and Teach fall in love, although both of them are stuck in denial over it. Teach becomes “soft,” in the words of his first mate, and loses the feared Blackbeard stereotype. The season ends on a cliffhanger as Bonnet and Teach are captured by the British army and held captive. Consequently, they make plans to escape together to rejoin, but their plans fall short due to extenuating circumstances. Bonnet ends up returning to his wife and children, and Teach, heartbroken, returns to his pirate crew, under the impression that Bonnet had betrayed him. 

Season two is mostly about the journey Teach and Bonnet undertook to find each other again. Bonnet leaves his wife and children after discovering his wife was cheating on him and embarks on a journey to find Teach and the rest of his crew. Unbeknownst to him, Teach had undergone a “villain arc”—he becomes depressed over his heartbreak and betrayal, horrifically abuses and mistreats his crew (and abandons some of them on an island, as well as cutting off the toes of another), and reverts to his infamous Blackbeard stereotype. The season follows Bonnet’s journey to return to Teach and the rekindling of their love, along with a bunch of other side plots related to pirating atrocities. 

The journey that Bonnet takes to return to Teach is exactly where season two falls short. The show sets up an incredibly tense narrative that involves a lot of angst, showing scenes of Teach crying alone in his room, trashing Bonnet’s possessions and taking away anything that remotely reminded him of Bonnet and dumping it into the ocean. He even shoots anyone who dares speak his name, including his loyal first mate, Izzy. You would think the reunion of Teach and Stede would have immeasurable amounts of angst, maybe even with Teach killing Bonnet on sight, or at least some near fatalities, pirate-style. Instead, the reunion was incredibly anti-climatic; they run into each other at an antique shop and they just end up having a nice little chat with some of their new friends and end up confessing their feelings for each other under the moonlight on the ship. You would think that if Teach was killing people and severing limbs for saying Bonnet’s name, the confrontation would hold a lot more emotion, but even though the past few episodes were basically dedicated to exhibiting how upset Teach was over Bonnet’s betrayal, there was absolutely no sign of the inner turmoil that Teach had gone through the past few episodes and was just incredibly underwhelming for such an important event for the series overall. 

The other biggest flaw with season two is that it caves too much into the “happy endings” narrative. There were at least three characters that had died and then magically came back to life. The death of those characters had caused some degree of heartache, and it was a pleasant surprise to find out that Lucius was, in fact, alive and somehow did not die when he was stranded on an island alone for a season and a half, but by the end of the sudden revival of the third character, it gets a bit old. Not to mention, one of them was literally Edward Teach himself. Due to his horrific abuse of his crew, the crew mutinied and smashed his head in with a cannonball. Teach, obviously, dies. Then Teach is transported to the top of a cliff in his dreams and talks to his old captain, and somehow is revived just because Bonnet, who had just found the ship and had been sitting next to Teach’s corpse for days, shed a few tears and touched his face (maybe that’s why there wasn’t a fight to the death at the reunion). If the revival of Teach was a standalone event, it may have been heartwarming and elicited a few tears, but after a revival of two characters in literally the episode prior, it made the entire event incredibly underwhelming and, frankly, a little ridiculous. 

Overall, the second season of “Our Flag Means Death” was subpar, especially when compared to the groundbreaking first season. The producers should have prioritized the scenes that really mattered, like the reunion of Bonnet and Teach. Instead, the scene where one of the crewmates turns into a seagull probably held more angst and inner turmoil than Bonnet and Teach’s reunion. As a diehard fan of “Our Flag Means Death” and the superb production of season one, season two was, arguably, a flop.

On this blog, members of the Carmel High School chapter of the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society for High School Journalists (and the occasional guest writer) produce curations of all facets of popular culture, from TV shows to music to novels to technology. We hope our readers always leave with something new to muse over. Click here to read more from MUSE.