Our Flag Means Death Creator David Jenkins Reflects on the Season 2 Finale and Has Hope for Season 3

The second season of Our Flag Means Death gave its adoring fans a new Pirate Queen, a crew musical drag party, masochist lesbians innkeepers, a lot of battles, and plenty of gay pirate lovers—including Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Ed Teach / Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) figuring themselves out so they could reunite. The whole season was a love letter to the fandom that embraced Season 1 with such verve and then loudly demanded it return for Season 2. 

The season finale, Episode 8 titled “Mermen,” co-written by David Jenkins and John Mahone, had the fandom on pins and needles, worried that the series would somehow break fan-favorite Stede and Ed apart once more, or that the blasting apart the Republic of Pirates would kill off members of the beloved ensemble cast. Instead, the finale is one full of laughs, romance, and bittersweet endings and beginnings. 

Happy to unpack the finale, Our Flag Means Death creator David Jenkins got on a Zoom with Paste Magazine to explain the creative impact of the show’s Season 1 “bubble” status in creating Season 2, if the audience feedback changed how they wrote this season or the finale, and if there’s more story to tell on the gay high seas. 

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Paste Magazine: Going back to the fan reaction to Season 1, a second season seemed assured. But then major management and content shifts were happening at WBDiscovery and Max, which delayed the pick-up. When you finally did get the Season 2 order, did you fundamentally change your thoughts about the story you wanted to tell?

David Jenkins: No. I think they’ve been a dream to work with. Every time I’ve made something, there’s been major corporate upheaval and I am starting to think that every time anybody makes something, particularly now, there’s major corporate upheaval. The first season of this television show took place in one era. The second took place in still another era that has since ended. And if there was going to be a third season, it would take place in an entirely new era.Throughout it all, we’ve had the same execs. Suzanna Makkos has been with the show for both of those seasons and they’ve been nothing but supportive. 

In terms of us in the [writers’] room, we just try to mind our own business, and make sure we can pay for everything.

Paste: As the season has progressed, have you been surprised by the audience’s reaction to any particular story lines?

Jenkins: Well, I’m not trying not to be as plugged in as I was in the first season. I’m just trying to let it have its own life. But I love how excited everybody was about Izzy (Con O’Neill) singing. Everyone wants the full “La Vie en Rose” recording from Con, which is beautiful. 

I love that Ed and Stede getting together and having sex was not a titanic explosion. It was more like, “Of course they’re gonna have sex. They’re together, so that beat is gonna happen.” And I love the general acceptance of Buttons (Ewen Bremner) turning into a bird, which is the most ludicrous story point. 

Paste: Our Flag Means Death has such a passionate LGBTQ fandom and that audience has been burnt many times before with promised “ships” that have ended badly, or with the painful “bury your gays” trope. Going into “Mermen,” this fandom was sweating with anxiety, but you gifted them a love letter. Did their expectations feel especially weighty when writing the finale?

Jenkins: It felt like the opposite, and the wind was in our sails. We could fully go into these storylines with all of these different characters and [know] people are invested in all of these relationships. Doing things when we’re writing that excite us and guessing—most of the time, correctly—that fans will love it is a great feeling. The thing we’re trying to do, in the room, is [ask]: do we like it, does it surprise us, and does it feel exciting? And the room has a spectrum of sexualities, so it’s just making sure that, “Hey, we doin’ okay? Does everybody feel good about what we’re putting out there?”

When you have a show, you run the Deathstar, essentially. You’re shooting this beam out into the culture, that if you aren’t paying attention, you could do a lot of damage. I think particularly for this season, that “bury your gays” thing… I didn’t want to end on a downbeat for Ed and Stede. We did that in the first season. I like that there’s a lot of different flavors. It’s even a little melancholy because the Republic of Pirates got blown up. But there’s still more good things.

Paste: In the breaking of the season, how much changed while plotting out the season to the finale?

Jenkins: I wanted to start at the Republic of Pirates this season and end at the Republic of Pirates. And I knew I wanted the Republic of Pirates to be destroyed, ultimately. Within that, we are making a one-hour show on a half hour budget, on a half hour schedule. The questions then become: if we have a bar fight, and you have everyone fight, how big can we make it? And if we have everything blow up, how much can we blow up? Or if we have a fight, how big of a fight and what parts of the fight can you actually show? It’s about making something that felt like it had some heft and size to it. In the room, talking through it, as a showrunner I’m thinking, “Oh, man, we’re gonna put these department heads through hell. They’re gonna have to work so hard.” You already feel bad. 

Paste: That beach battle with Ed, Zheng, and Stede fighting in parallel with the moving cameras was impressive. 

Jenkins: It was the entire team working so well together when everybody’s fried by the end of the season. Like you hand the script to [costume designer] Gypsy Taylor and she sees that she has to come up with 200 English uniforms. She blanches, but then she nails it. And it’s an amazing team across the board. I think we all pull together because we like it. We want it to feel epic.

Paste: Was there much debate about any particular story line for the finale?

Jenkins: In terms of ending this season, it all felt right just in talking through it when we were in the room. It felt pretty intuitive. When you get to the third act of the story, things kind of settle in. There’s gonna be a funeral. We always knew we wanted a wedding at the end of the second season. And I knew that I wanted Stede and Ed to start an inn together. So once you have those beats, it’s kind of locked in. But I wasn’t prepared for the emotional weight that I feel when the crew sails off together and the parents are watching from the inn. It’s just lovely. 

Paste: Speaking of that funeral, Con O’Neill played Izzy’s journey across two seasons so beautifully. When did it come to you that his last words to Ed about just being himself were going to have such an impact?

Jenkins: It’s kind of a strange arc in that I knew we were going to put him through all these things, and I knew he would ultimately die. But I think him becoming a father figure to Ed in the last episode didn’t really dawn on us until we were breaking the last episode. Asking what would this man say to Ed at the end because they’ve been together through everything? He went from a troubled and downtrodden employee to a jilted lover to a discarded employee, to someone that is just trying to find his footing again—no pun intended—to actually becoming this guy’s parental figure on some level. And he’s one person who kind of raised Ed right, because Blackbeard usually kills his parental figures. So, it felt right and it felt like that’s how the mentor dies. The mentor in a story usually dies in the second act and then our hero has to go on and try to do it without them. It felt like the right journey for Izzy and a gratifying one for Condon.

Paste: OFMD doesn’t have a third season pick-up yet, so it’s a difficult feat for writers to thread the needle in a finale that gives audiences closure but also leaves enough story to continue. 

Jenkins: I don’t think it was a very hard thing to do. I think it was more that I felt a responsibility to leave Ed and Stede in a good place, at least for now. It’s not gonna go well. They’re not going to run a business well. Ed’s too much of a talker. Stede can’t focus. It’s gonna be challenging. 

Paste: So you have more stories to tell?

Jenkins: For a third season, I have a clear idea of the way through that so it will be good, big, and interesting. But not too big, Max. 

Our Flag Means Death Season 2 is now streaming in its entirety on Max. 

Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, Total Film, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios and The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen

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