#thanks vane for being here for the entire process <3

[superfruitland]

this is a 3-in-1 deal. no i don't take refunds.

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[old-long-john]

Jonathan Steinberg’s Fathoms Deep Interview

I’ve written up the whole of Jon’s interview here. It’s summarised, but I tried to keep the wording as close to what he actually said as I could where it made sense in this format. It’s loooong, so buckle up kids. 

Jon said he’s very proud of the show and he misses the people involved terribly. He thinks that if judged by the idea of in 6 or 7 years watching the show back and wondering whether they’d feel they did right by it, they would feel that way. This was the show they wanted to make, which not a lot of people get to feel.

Liz said a lot of the actors they’ve spoken to feel the same way, which Jon said makes him feel good, because the actors are in a very specific position with respect to the story (being both inside and outside of it), so their opinions are important to him as a section of the audience.

They talked about the long list of titles he has (co-creator, writer, producer, wrangler of pirates, ‘the grim reaper’ - for those ‘your character’s dead, sorry’ phonecalls) and how he’s now also a director after 4x10, and how that was for him?

He said it was a weird process to go from writer and showrunner to director. He talked about how there’s so much you’re trying to control from one point of view, but there’s so much that happens after the fact with all the visual effects, and he wasn’t sure how much he was ready for and how much he didn’t know he didn’t know. The speed and complexity was difficult, because the last week they spent shooting two simultaneous units for the ship battle, that even the more experienced people thought was a lot to juggle. Ultimately he felt it gave him a lot of control over making things either work or not work, throughout the entire process from conception to finished product, and he enjoyed it.

His favourite part to direct was the forest scene with Toby and Luke, because a lot of the technical mishigas falls away and it’s just storytelling and performance. It was great to work with the two of them in a scene that felt like it was working. He said they were both exhausted, but they were really willing to just go with it.

The first day they shot the final library scene with Schmitz, and JPK, and Harriet Walters, which was daunting, because Harriet Walters is a pretty big name to be the first person you’re trying to direct. He said it took him about 8 hours to film something that should probably only have taken 4, but everyone was very forgiving.

Then they talked about the Dragon Speech. They thanked him for it and said how much it’s meant to a lot of people, and that they’ve had a lot of correspondence about that.

Daphne said they’ve seen Flint go through a lot, and they asked Jon where he thought Flint was in season 4, because they thought he’d transformed to a point where all of his parts felt integrated, and while he wasn’t necessarily in a ‘good’ place, he was in a healthier one. 

Jon agreed, and said where he understood him to be was as a guy who had run all but the last 100 yards of a marathon and could see the finish line, and every step he took got exponentially harder, and it was just an onslaught of obstacles and traps and problems that were trying to prevent him for getting there. He could figure out a way to get through every one of them, but it was his best friend who would be the one he couldn’t get past, which felt right. That was the core of the story they were trying to tell, and so they felt like they could build the details from there and even if some of them missed, at least they were still telling the right story at its core.

He does think it’s very different from the first 3 seasons, because in a sense the big dramatic question isn’t Flint’s. It had been, but in season 4 the big dramatic question was Silver’s, which was always going to happen in some respect. He doesn’t think that backgrounds Flint, because if anything he’s finally the guy we’re fully rooting for, but there’s a clarity to it that makes it feel different.

On the idea of Flint being fully integrated with himself, they asked whether Jon feels like Silver truly sees Flint at the end, or is he seeing an older version of Flint. Because Flint gives that speech and then Silver brings it back to rage. Jon thinks this has always been two narratives interacting with each other, finding ways to embrace each other and appear as one story: one Silver’s, one Flint’s. In that moment they are in some respects as close as they’ve ever been, and in some the most opaque they’ve ever been to each other, depending on whose story you’re watching in that moment.

He talked about the classics and how a professor distilled The Odyssey and The Iliad into two ideas: that Achilles is a character for whom glory and glory seeking is the ultimate end, and Odysseus is a character who just wants to get home, and in the tension of that is in some respects all of drama. That’s always been buried into the show. What clarifies that conversation they’re having is that it is the most distilled version of that. There’s the guy who you can tell all you want to about government and cause and good, but he has a really good argument that he loves his wife and just wants to go home, and nothing you can say will make that not true. And the guy sitting across from him can see a coward and a guy who’s giving away the world, and nothing you could tell him would make that not true. For two people who are almost indistinguishable at this point, to have this space where they’re disconnected be the thing that separates them felt right, and like the story was resonating with itself in all the right ways.

He said in some ways the whole season was very deliberately working towards that scene, and at any points at which they were confused they were always looking forward to this place they were trying to get to and which they knew how they wanted to feel.

Talking about knowing the ending from early on, at the beginning they knew it was a story about a guy standing on a rock in the middle of the ocean and shaking his fist at civilisation, and eventually he started to make that mean something and terrify them and win, and that he would be undone by the least likely complication. A guy who could take on an empire and could change the world is undone by nobody. That’s why it was always important to him that they didn’t know where Silver came from, because it made him nobody, and not important. There’s no twist to how he’s connected to the story, he’s just a guy.

Daphne said that except he’s everybody for Flint, which Jon agreed with. There’s a strange catalytic reaction between them, but to us and the story he’s just a guy who was the undoing of a giant. And they felt like that was somehow baked into the story of Treasure Island too. And thinking about it that way made the forest scene feel right.

Daphne said she’d had a conversation with someone, that also connected back to Vane, that Flint could fight an empire and civilisation, but the one thing in the world that brought him down is something that we all have: this sense of ‘I want to protect my people’, and that was the thing that brings down the revolution, rather than the large scary things.

Jon said the conflict between Flint and Silver was extremely internal. We’re watching Silver become Flint, so that Flint can have a version of himself that he can have this conflict with and finally reach some conclusion with. That also felt right that ‘just a guy’ was also a human being and that in order for that conflict within Flint to be resolved all of the complications need to get stripped away until he’s staring at himself in a mirror, and the one thing that’s different is just this one awful traumatic event that isn’t there and it creates this massively different outcome. 

He said that if the mechanics of it are working properly then there should be a lot of different ways to look at it and hopefully it does have facets and is open to be interpreted.

Daphne said she thinks that’s true and they succeeded in that, because a lot of viewers have both analysed it intellectually, but have also on a personal level experienced that conversation in different ways.

Jon said he would argue that it is universal to feel disenfranchised to some extent, and there is no perfect citizen, and that that feeling, whether big or small or defining or not, is there and a component of being a human being. That’s something that he felt was an important aspect of telling the right story, when you can reduce it back to something that should be relatable to anyone. They wanted that last episode to be something of a closing statement to the argument, and they knew before they wrote it that that would be the meat of it, of trying to put a period at the end of the sentence.

Daphne said it feels like the launching pad for the torture Silver will have that we won’t see in BS, but is the beginning of an experience that might lead to him feeling compelled to go looking for the treasure in TI.

Jon said that the idea that the treasure was cursed in the book was something he’d forgotten and which snuck up on him, and in the process of constructing that scene became the clearest thing in the world, that that was Flint’s curse. The curse was ‘you think you’ve figured this thing out, but you haven’t, and at some point you will feel unfulfilled by shutting the world out and by choosing to make domesticity the only priority you will feel unfulfilled and then you will come back looking for this thing’. So Flint has the last word in that moment, and that curse is now meaningful; it isn’t ghosts and skeletons, it’s a different spin. On a show about domesticity, it is a bit dark, but also something that suggests what Silver’s story is going forward, which is that he’s happy until he’s not, and eventually he knows why he’s not happy and he’ll always remember the moment that he made that choice. And now the book is a different book.

Daphne then segued from that into a question about reusing terminology, and how much that’s specific and deliberate. Particularly ‘mattering’. When Flint talked about mattering she was immediately reminded of season 2 when Flint said ‘where else would you wake up in the morning and matter?’. And so we go into this scene already knowing that that’s important to Silver on some level, whether he understands it or not.

Jon said the hope and dream when creating this is that it was music, and that even if it’s not always thought through in that way it should feel right and sound right. And what that frequently means is repetition, and just a feeling of ‘I’ve heard this before but now it means something different’. Sometimes it’s very specifically intended to tie itself back to an earlier conversation, but sometimes it’s not.

He said that it’s so gratifying when people notice those things, because he often has that feeling of ‘you’re working too hard, nobody’s going to notice that’, so when they do and find other pieces he didn’t even know were there it’s very fun. As a way of understanding authorship, sometimes you’re aware of the things you’re authoring and sometimes you’re not, and sometimes it takes an audience or a reader to put it all together, which makes it a communal experience. He finds it fascinating the things your head will put together without you knowing it, and when people ask if it was on purpose he knows he wasn’t consciously aware of it, but he doesn’t know that it was an accident either, and he thinks it’s hard to write without that, without things just coming out of the ether. He thinks great writers are more aware of that though, and he sometimes feels like it’s scary because if you don’t know where it comes from then it’s hard to make it happen, and it’s hard to go through a process that you feel like at any point might just go away.

Daphne asked about categories of things that have been in the story from the beginning, that have many layers to them and season 4 brought new layers to. In particular, darkness. They brought up in the roundtable podcast the use of it in the dragons speech, and that it was interesting in a story that talks so much about the duality within people of darkness and light that they almost got flipped in the dragons speech. That when Flint says that in the darkness there is discovery and possibility and freedom, it felt like a reframing of the idea of darkness and how it relates to people (though it’s not always been dark is bad and light is good in this story before that point).

Jon said in the exercise of hindsight, of looking at what those last few episodes are, there are at least a couple of times where the same word is used in different contexts to mean very different things. He noticed it first in the ending where Rackham talked about ‘truth’, which at first felt like a mistake in post-production, because it sounded like ‘it doesn’t matter if the story’s true, but it matters if the story’s true in the end’. But after thinking about it he doesn’t think that was a mistake, because what Rackham’s talking about is that truth in storytelling in terms of historical verifiability is different from truth in art, and the use of the word in two different contexts is meaningful. 

When Flint is talking about ‘darkness’ in season 3 in general, he’s talking the thing that is a part of a person’s psyche that will force you to do things or tempt you to do things that your best self would not want to do, and that that is a danger inherent to the human condition. When he’s talking about darkness with Silver in the end he is talking about it in the artificial sense. Very specifically he’s talking about the casting of shadows, which is not darkness, it’s the absence of light. His very specific construction of it as a thing created by people to achieve an end and to create the appearance of something that is bad or something that is to be avoided, when in reality there should be light shining there, is different.

He said is is potentially confusing, but at this point he thinks they’ve hopefully earned the right a little bit to have some of those themes that are developing get complicated and to embrace the contradictions. He felt that early in the season as a storyteller he could feel these contradictions piling up, and he thought if you were Flint and you were aware of narrative, you would be aware of it too. The closer you get to destination, the more the contradictions pile up, and that’s how you know that the rhythm is building to something. Daphne pointed out that that’s exactly what Flint said to Silver.

Jon said that he thinks the definitions of ‘darkness’ is one of these things, and he thinks they’re distinguishable in a meaningful way, and in the distinction between them there is story and more content to what he’s saying.

Daphne said it felt to her like the difference between internal reality and the story that is told by someone. That internal darkness is a thing that you struggle with, and the casting of shadows is the not true story that civilisation is telling. Jon then said that, to clean it up a little bit, the absence of light is different from the obstruction of light. That there should be light there and there wants to be light there, but someone is standing in the way. That’s different than a place in which there never was light, and that’s partly the distinction Flint is trying to draw. That there are things that are not inherent to human nature that are portrayed as dark, but they don’t have to be.

Daphne said that one of her favourite things about season 4 is the way Flint arrived at a point where he managed to take his own pain and anger and generalise it in that way, where it encompassed even the people being told to be afraid of the dragons. That he had reached a stage where he had a generosity even to the people who are part of civilisation, who were also being controlled by the casting of shadows.

Jon said it’s the closest thing to an explicit acknowledgement that everyone there, despite their differences and different agendas and circumstances, shares some common experience, which is having felt like they were in that space, and that was a component of the full stop they were trying to create at the end of the argument.

Daphne then talked about backstories, and people coming to terms with their inciting traumas and their legends, and they way some characters build those legends and some decidedly don’t, and Silver’s a case where the legend is built for him. She asked how Jon felt that related to Silver and his lack of backstory.

Jon said that obviously he must have one, because everyone does, and that when he watches it the clear implication is that Silver’s is awful, and if the story’s going out of its way to suggest it’s unspeakable, considering the things we have spoken about, he as an audience member is willing to take Silver’s word for it. If you’re invested in that character and you understand where all the norms are set for the show, for someone to say ‘I can’t say it out loud’ suggests that it really is awful. They played with versions of what it could be, but the moment it’s named it becomes less scary, and there might be an instinct to explain it and rationalise it or suggest it was his fault or someone else’s fault or that ‘it could never happen to me’. It was the ‘it could never happen to me’ that’s the most destructive to the story. It had to feel like he was everyone, and that required him to be no-one at the same time. You can see in him what you need to.

He said that from the first frame of season 4 there is a point at which these two guys aren’t connected, and it’s clearly Flint’s concern, and on some level Silver’s awareness. Jon felt it was meta and interesting that the point at which they were not connected is how they feel about story and how they feel about their obligations to it, their place in it, the burden of it. They just don’t agree that there is some need to create stories to explain things, and that ultimately is the death of their relationship. Because they have that discontinuity between them, that is the thread that unravels the sweater. They felt like they were naming the thing you didn’t know you were looking for a name for, which was the space between them and not specifically who did what to Silver when he was a kid.

Daphne said that she’s said in podcasts before that if the show says ‘horror’ and ‘I’m not gonna tell you any more’ that she’s going to go to all sorts of dark horrible places in her imagination with that, especially if it’s a backstory so it possibly involves a childhood. It brings out all of her personal fears about what people can do to each other. Jon said that it almost has to be that, when you stare into it. If anything specific comes out of that it starts to diminish its impact, because then you can’t assign your own fears to it, which are always going to be scarier than anything he could create.

They then talked about the concept of introspection and how Silver of all people, who is so good at understanding others, is the only one who can’t do it. All the characters have their own way of relating to and telling their backstories, but he’s the only one who can’t do it. Jon said it suggests the horror from another direction. That whatever happened was so horrible that it broke his ability to exist within his story. There is something therapeutic about existing within a story, and something that is normal and part of the human condition to find a place within a story where you feel like you make sense, and whatever it was that happened to him that made him incapable of reconciling that, that is his trauma; his backstory was that he was removed from his own story. Then his curse is that he is stuck in someone else’s story, that he never wanted to be in, but can’t get out of.

Then they moved on to Max. Daphne said Jon had asked her a while ago if she was suggesting that Max is the secret protagonist of Black Sails, so she asked him the same question (mostly joking). Jon said there were a number of narratives, like they’d been talking about with Flint and Silver, and so to look for ‘a protagonist’ was maybe to miss a piece of the engineering. He said that when various people appear to be protagonists, it’s because they’re not following the same narrative within the show. To him, if there is another fully coherent narrative of a show he would watch that feels complete and meaningful, it’s Max’s.

He thinks she is the only one throughout who refused to allow violence to be an answer applied to an unsolvable problem. It’s been applied to her, but never by her. To have her be where she is by the end is meaningful in that sense, because there is a sense that she has in some way figured out an answer that no-one else can see. It’s baked into that ‘drowning the cat’ scene, that there’s a riddle being put to her, hiding inside what appears to be her being messed with, and she gets it right away. He thinks a lot of season 4 rests on that scene. To be put to a false choice of which part of a cycle are you, and for Max to  figure out that there is a secret protagonist in that story (Marion) and that a woman who was tired of seeing her son being abused did one awful thing to be able to break that chain, and it was too late and for nothing and awful, but he liked Max being able to see the secret protagonist. And there is something happening that is applicable in the bigger story, that she is the one who is able to essentially figure out the way to get the show to end and to get everybody out of there.

He said it’s a constant recurring theme from everyone that they’re in these situations they don’t want to be in and if everyone is in a situation they don’t want to be in, it requires someone to step out of it, almost to step off the stage and see all four corners of it, in order to find a solution.

Daphne then talked about rewatching since season 4 and how certain things feel different knowing the end. She said the scene in ep 2 where she’s begging Eleanor to leave with her and says ‘I will never ever leave you’ felt significant in relation to Max and the story as a whole, because she’s saying it to Eleanor, but Eleanor is Nassau in a lot of ways, and it was almost like it was quiet but Max had a commitment to Nassau that perhaps exceeded everyone.

Jon said she’s the only one who made that connection that the conversation that was running throughout season 4 was a bit of a fantasy, that question of ‘can you leave civilisation?’. It comes with you and is a part of you and to separate from it is temporary at best, and Max’s arc is a story about a woman who is abused by it, who thinks she can run away from it, who gets trapped in it to the point where it looks like it will be her end, but then learns how to tame it. She’s the only one really trying to tame it. Everyone else is trying to defeat it or kill it or separate from it. She’s the only one standing there with the chair and the whip, trying to figure out how to get it to do what she wants and acknowledging that it’s always going to be bigger and stronger than she is, but that it is manipulable.

Daphne talked about how Max parallels with so many characters, some that seem to be two sides of the same coin and some that don’t even seem to have a relationship to each other. She thinks the people that Max was textually most paralleled to were Vane, especially in the beginning and at the end where she talks about slavery with Grandma Guthrie in a similar way to how Vane did, and Silver obviously because they meet in the beginning and were both looking for angles. But she keeps thinking about Vane saying ‘give us your submission and we will give you the comfort you need’ and she thinks Max found the way between those two things, which seem like two ends of a spectrum. When she was telling Grandma Guthrie near the end of 4x10 the things she couldn’t give her but what she could offer instead, she found a way not to submit but also to get her way.

Jon said part of what feels like ‘Max’s Story’ is a series of compromises and that in season 3 she starts to suffocate under the weight of them. Everything feels like a compromise that just leads to a more unpleasant compromise behind it, but where she is able to break through is when she realises that there are certain things you plant flags around, and that in a story about a series of compromises it’s actually the moment she refuses to in which everything cinches for her. She refuses to create a situation that is exclusive of Anne and refuses to accede to every demand that is put upon her.

He also thinks that it makes sense to him as a kind of 3D shape, and that if you look at it in a certain light it looks like she harmonises with Vane and with Silver, but it doesn’t require turning the light very much for it to look like she is in Flint’s story; that she is abused and traumatised for who she is and what she is and has to figure out a way to shake her fist at civilisation, but come up with different answers about how to do it. And you don’t have to work that hard for her to look a lot like Anne, which is text in seasons 2 and 3. And it’s text in season 4 that she is literally in Eleanor’s story, just 8 episodes behind; living the same choose your own adventure story and trying to figure out a way to get to a different ending. Part of the reason therefore that she feels central for him is that she exists in the middle of a venn diagram in which there are meaningful pieces of everyone. And that’s part of the reason it felt right that she’s the one left standing.

Liz talked about a discussion in the round table podcast about the world of the immortal myths and legends and the mortals of Nassau, and how Max was one of the mortals whose story was very big on its own, but was also so much hers, as opposed to say Flint or Silver’s which impacted so many other people on such massive levels of civilisation and society. Hers was a small contained universe where she was very active and had a great deal of control, even though there were times there were crossovers, such as being involved in getting the Urca gold. She was so low in the hierarchy when we met her, but she worked her way right to the top.

Jon said that, with the Greek myth instagram filter on, there is a story happening where she is subject to Flint’s story. She is trying for three and a half seasons to make the best of a story which is the guys who hate England and want to kill it vs. the guys who are with England. There is a massive pivot in the argument scene with Jack in 4x06, which is possibly the first time we’ve heard her swear in anger, and it is a moment to him that is Max wrestling the story away from Flint. It’s the first time we’ve really seen her lose it. She is by sheer force of will starting her own version of the story in which she is not operating in accordance with the terms Flint and Rogers have set out, and she gets to the ending that way. She is able to find something that has eluded Flint and everyone else. The moment she applies her own terms, either she’s going to get killed for it or she’s going to make it work, and she makes it work.

Jon said he thinks Max is really the only one who ever saw the end of the story. There is an element to that kind of conflict where the participants will consciously or unconsciously keep it alive, but she is the one who has been saying since the beginning ‘I don’t want that ending’ and has been rational about trying to figure out where all these decisions lead to. That’s where he feels her frustration comes from, the idea of ‘where the fuck did you think this was going to end? We’ve been in this same story for thirty-some odd episodes and nothing is changing.’

Daphne said they’ve joked that Max is the only one who’s been watching the show. Jon agreed and said she is able to see that there are certain realities that you can do the things that make you feel good, and you can do the things that feel inevitable, but if you’re not trying to figure out where it’s going to lead to then you’re gonna be in season 3 of black sails forever and you’re never going to get to season 4. She circulates a little bit, and does these tasks to get to this ending, which is why Rackham at the end feels like witness (or chorus or narrator) to her story.

From there they went on to talk about Rackham’s truth speech. Jon said they actually wrote it on the set on the day, because it never felt right to him on the page. It came out as they were rehearsing and Jon wrote it down on the back of the script and handed it to Schmitz, who got it and later gave him shit for it. Daphne asked, shit for the process or for the speech? Jon said both. Schmitz was like ‘we’re really just going to talk about art at the end of this? We’re just gonna go for this and do this?’.

Daphne said it really worked for both of them, and Liz helpfully supplied that it doesn’t work for her with the ‘happy’ ending story, but with the ambiguity she loves it.

So then they talked about the ambiguous ending, and how it was a bold choice. Daphne asked what the process was that led them to choose to make an ending that could be read in different ways.

Jon said season to season and episode to episode they put a tonne of pressure on themselves to make sure that everything was better than what came before it and that it was developing in a way in which every episode, scene, and line of dialogue was meaningful in some way. The unavoidable result of that is that the ending has the pressure of a lot of narrative behind it, and how do you make all of that mass and momentum stop? Because you want it to stop; you don’t want to walk away from the story feeling like your head is spinning and you don’t know what the hell happened. Jon said he personally doesn’t appreciate story that way. At the same time it would be unfair to the narrative to suggest that it is reducible to something simple. Added to that is the complication that there is a wholly other narrative (Treasure Island), that is completely alien in some respects to their show, that they were trying to contextualise and marry this to, and make Captain Flint’s curse and the interim between show and book and what is Silver’s life after he decides he doesn’t want to be Long John Silver again, and what makes him put that name back on? It’s got to do all of those things too.

He said there aren’t a lot of great models for ends of shows that don’t feel like you’re just dragging yourself cross the finish line. They looked at a few and tried to pull out what it was that made them shows they went back to and what was it that made them feel right. The Sopranos was one, and whatever people think about its finale it said something and it forced you to engage with the material after the end of the narrative. They also went back and spent time with the Cheers finale. And there were others that you would expect, and some that you wouldn’t.

Their ending just ended up feeling right. Jon said that the ending doesn’t feel ambiguous to him, and when he watches it it is pretty clear what it feels like is happening. He is also fully aware that there are multiple interpretations of what it is, which is also by design. In a story about what your place in a story is, in a story that is fully self-aware about narrative, the audience or reader needs to have an opinion and there needs to be space within the story for that opinion to matter. It’s why, while it is clear to him what is happening, he doesn’t feel as though it is his place to impose that on anyone. The act of watching it and feeling an ending in that story is a personal one.

He has two different positions to stand in with respect to this story. He said if you ask him that question as the person who wrote it, the answer is he doesn’t want to talk about it. It is built the way it’s built and it’s for you to appreciate. But for him as audience, he feels like he watches it and he is seeing the story that feels right to him, and it feels clear. So if that story feels clear to you then you are watching the right story too.

[Honestly, bless Jon Steinberg for all of that.]

Daphne talked about how fascinating is is that throughout the show the story took us to places emotionally we didn’t expect and made us think about things we didn’t necessarily want to or it didn’t occur to us to think about, and the ending brought that to a new level. You really had to look inside yourself and what aspects of the story are important to you, and what aspects speak to you personally, and that helps you find the ending that is most meaningful to you.

Jon said he’s aware when making a show that has to appeal to a large number of people that a lot of people are watching different shows and are invested in and like different things and want different things, so part of where the burden of the ending comes in is that you have to make choices about what story you think you’re telling. So the challenge was ‘can we land this in a way that it is still interpretable even in its ending, in the way that it was half way through?’, which is difficult but doable.

[That fuckery about the Devil’s Theory is coming up here. I’ve included it just in case anyone wants to know exactly what it was, but I’ve crossed through it because I’m spiteful and it annoys me and it isn’t necessary to understand anything Jon said.] 

Liz agreed that it came down to your personal satisfaction and what speaks most to you, and that to her what always brought her back to BS was the conversation about light and darkness and shadows and obstruction, and she thinks there’s more room to explore that theme with the ending she prefers [i.e. if Flint is dead]. She thinks if it ends up an almost happily ever after then she loses some of the catharsis and what continues to make her think about these people and their choices and about herself and her choices.

Daphne said they really did succeed in creating an ending that allows us all to have different experiences, and thanked Jon for it.

Liz asked how Jon feels about the demise of Eleanor and her full arc, and said that there has been some dissension between the podcasters about it during the roundtable.

Jon said he was going to beef with Lauren Sarner a little. He doesn’t think Eleanor’s is a story about a woman who is Stockholmed. He thinks (with his audience hat on) that that isn’t fair to Eleanor, and he doesn’t know that it’s how he would read the text of it. He said that Rogers, for an episode [3x01?], which is just a scene and not even the entirety of it, he is fully in control of her, but it immediately gets turned upside down. In the second episode, in their second scene together she calls him on his bullshit and says he doesn’t have anything without her, and so they are fully partners. Rogers threatens to kill her straight after, which Jon says in the language of this show is always the resort of ‘I’ve run out of productive things to say’, and anybody can say it, but it doesn’t suggest he actually has the power in that relationship. It actually feels like a moment in which he’s losing power. So platformed that way, what the story felt like to him was two people who didn’t belong where they were from, and who were unusual and who had never met anybody like themselves before, and who did in an incredibly unlikely way. So it felt like a moment where Eleanor could start to have a relationship she’d never had before.

Jon said he doesn’t know that her relationship with Vane was based in ‘love’, depending on how you define that. He thinks they both think it is, and there are elements where that is true, but not really. They’re both trying to have a relationship that is fulfilling to themselves that the other person is screaming to them ‘this is not what I want’. In season 2 when she turns on him, Jon says that Vane has essentially told Eleanor that he is a dead-ender, who wants to drag her down with him and that there is nothing she’s going to say to change his mind. And she’s saying ‘I want to live a life and be happy and not have to kill what we eat’, and he’s saying ‘it makes me feel good to kill what I eat’, and Jon thinks it would have felt really fucked up for her to decide she was going to go down that drain with him.

So the relationship with Rogers was the first heterosexual romantic story in which both players are actually on an equal footing, and in which there is some meaningful commitment to each other, that ends tragically when there is that one space in which they’re not connected. He called it a cyclical tragedy she keeps finding herself in, that the only way to do what feels right is to do something that is patently wrong.

He says he knows there’s a way to watch it where there’s a lot of second guessing about what she’s up to, or what he’s up to, but he always watched it at face value, as two people who fell in love with each other because they could understand each other. They could understand being half and half: half of a pirate and half of somebody who wanted better than that.

The scene between the two of them in bed was one take from Hannah New. Jon said either Eleanor Guthrie the character is the greatest actress of her generation, or that is a real moment of a person expressing ‘I love you’ in a way that she’s not actually able to say.

Daphne mentioned her speech about ‘so many goddamn men’ and their references to introspection. Hannah had talked in her interview about Eleanor not being an introspective person, but the one commonality between Rogers and Vane is that each of them tells her who she is, and it’s not who she is, and that ends up being part of the problem with each of them. Vane’s constantly saying she’s like him, and in the end the problem with Rogers is that he brings Spain to bear when he thinks she’s not acting like herself, but it’s a herself that he defined as who she’s supposed to be.

Jon agreed and said the second half of the season doesn’t happen if Rogers is able to hear her. She’s making herself very clear and he just doesn’t want to hear it. There is tragedy in that, that in every direction she looks there is a man who is making it very difficult to figure her way out of this puzzle, in a way Max is able to. Eleanor is kind of the first one into the breach who is setting off all these landmines and creating a path through which Max is able to finally find a way out.

Daphne says Eleanor isn’t very good at defining herself, but she more than any character is subjected to definitions by other characters throughout. Not just romantic partners. Everyone seems to be defining who Eleanor Guthrie is, and maybe Flint’s the one who gets closest to who she really is, and then Max ultimately. Eleanor’s constantly subjected to judgements by the characters and also judgements by the fandom that often match them.

Jon said it’s an interesting thought experiment to think about the things she has done that become fan favourites to excoriate her for and either hold them up to things that men in the show have done or imagine them being done by men, and it’s very hard to suggest that those things would be judged in the same way. He thinks it’s more complicated than that, and it’s hard to compare two characters because they’re people and there’s different spins on it and things that come with it in terms of baggage, but even if it’s not an entirely true statement there is certainly some truth to it.

Also Eleanor was sort of written that way deliberately. She doesn’t know anything else. She was raised by not just men, but these men, and it’s the only thing she knows how to do. So it felt untrue to try to protect her from that and there is some nobility in it for her. She is trying, which is not necessarily something you can say of the characters people do love. She is trying to make this work, and failing at times and failing to see answers that maybe she should have, but her head and heart are in the right place.

Daphne called her ‘a messy person’, in the most sympathetic of ways. She came from a messy place. Though Max also came from a messy place and is Max.

Jon said they have different relationships to violence. In as much as things like civilisation are characters in the vocabulary of the show, violence is as well. Eleanor resorts to it in ways that define her. Strangely those are the things that people are least turned off by, but it does make her culpable in a way that the rest of them are, and in a way that Max largely keeps her hands clean of.

Daphne then talked about talking to other people about violence in the show, and how of course it’s there, because it’s a story about pirates. But then Jon said earlier that it was a story about domesticity, and she finds it fascinating, because what she kept saying to people was that this show, unlike almost every other tv show that has violence, doesn’t feel like there’s ever a place where violence doesn’t have consequences.

Jon said he thinks that’s true, and if it’s ever the case that the violence doesn’t have consequences then it wasn’t the intention. And in terms of the show being about domesticity, it’s actually a very short trip from piracy to civilisation, and is domesticity the end of civilisation or the means by which it perpetuates itself? He felt like that was something that was interesting about the show to them, because none of that had been explored before. It was always just Errol Flynn. When you scratch the surface and realise there’s this other thing underneath it, it had to be a story.