TELEVISION
HOW
OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH
IS REBUILDING THE TRUST OF QUEER VIEWERS
The HBO pirate comedy tells stories of swashbuckling and love on the high seas By Rowan O’Brien
While scrolling on Instagram in mid-February, I noticed promos for a new pirate show popping up on my timeline, mostly from my favourite director/all-around-creator Taika Waititi and Vico Ortiz, a drag performer I had been thirst-following for a few years. Though I had seen little other promotion for Our Flag Means Death (I’m looking at you, HBO Max), I knew that if these two were involved, it was bound to be a good time. Fast-forward three months, and I am just finishing my fifth rewatch, have acquired a new wardrobe of florals and frills, and redecorated my room with some of the innovative fan art pouring out of the OFMD community. AVAST, YE MATEYS! SPOILERS FOR OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH AHEAD! Our Flag Means Death is a historical workplace rom-com about the flamboyant nobleman turned incompetent pirate captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and his crew of delightful misfits. At the end of the third episode, the infamous Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) finally catches up with Stede, and a tender bond is soon established between these two quirky captains. This meet-cute spirals into wild adventures, heart-warming moments and belly laughs as the relationship between Stede and Blackbeard (or Ed, as he prefers to be called) builds into a profession of love and an on-screen kiss.
JULY / AUGUST 2022
That’s right! A queer on-screen kiss between the two main characters of a sitcom on a mainstream platform! You can see why queer fans – who were hooked from the moment we saw the nonbinary pirate Jim (Vico Ortiz), or Black Pete and Lucius’s giggly hook-up, or, let’s be honest, Stede’s struggle to descend the ship’s wobbly ladder – exploded with glee (which would quickly turn to bittersweet frustration with the last episode of the series). I had the exciting experience of watching the show as it was being released weekly (yes, I am bragging). As a queer viewer, I immediately recognized the underlying homoeroticism, and hoped against hope that the show would openly explore the love between Ed and Stede. However, having been misled before, I couldn’t actually allow myself to believe that a mainstream TV show would allow an explicit queer romance between the two main characters. Even after the undeniable on-screen chemistry, even after creator David Jenkins tweeted, “Historical pirate rom-com. That’s it. That’s
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IN MAGAZINE
the pitch,” even after Waititi wished Darby (his “onscreen crush”) a happy birthday with a photo of the iconic toe-touch, even after we found out that Blackbeard had had a sexual relationship with his old buddy Calico Jack, and EVEN AFTER an episode literally titled “This Is Happening!,” I couldn’t get my hopes up. A couple of days before the finale, I texted a friend and asked if he thought they would actually establish a romance between Ed and Stede by the end of the season. Both of us agreed that we couldn’t really count on the show to fully commit to the relationship. “On one hand, I have hope but on the other hand, I’ve been burned too many times before,” I complained. We then worried about another possible trajectory, and perhaps an even worse fate: if they admitted their love and then one of them immediately died. (*cough* Supernatural. *cough*) No matter how obvious it seemed to me, I couldn’t let myself completely trust Jenkins and the Our Flag Means Death writers’ room until Stede and Blackbeard kissed in the penultimate episode, at which point I audibly gasped. Our brains are designed to recognize pattern and story, so what happened in my queer little brain that caused the divide between my intuition and my faith in the show? The most likely culprit is queerbaiting, a marketing tactic most common in television and film, where a media entity entices LGBTQ+ viewers with the implication of queer content while never actually delivering.
Ed Teach (Taika Waititi) and Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) - Photo courtesy of HBO Max
Even though I had been ranting to my friends about how the characters’ love was undeniable, queerbaiting in TV and film has
