Editor’s note: The below article contains references to sexual assault that some readers may find triggering.
The Big Picture
Black Sails
initially portrayed more gratuitous violence against women, including sexual assault, but later diversified its cast of characters.
Max’s assault scene in Season 1 was unnecessary and followed a trend in entertainment for shock value.
The show learned from criticism and focused on diverse characters, leading to a more successful and inclusive storyline.
When the final episode of Black Sails aired on Starz, all the way back in April 2017, fans were in awe at what they had just watched. With a blend of historical fiction and fantasy, the Robert Levine and Jonathan E. Steinberg-created series had just delivered its fourth season with a story that managed to be, at the same time, exciting, realistic, and inclusive. Instead of looking at history and choosing to focus only on straight, white men, Black Sails diversifies its way of presenting its universe by placing a myriad of characters that aren’t usually the ones that get their stories told at its center. This means that, in lieu of going with the traditional swashbuckling approach and giving us all-male pirates and the occasional damsel-in-distress, all of them ethnically homogeneous, the show presents us with the points of views of maroons, sex workers, female pirates, and women in positions of power. It was magnificent to behold, and, nowadays, it is pretty safe to say that Black Sails walked so that Our Flag Means Death could run — at least as far as it was allowed to go.
But Black Sails wasn’t always like that. Well, okay, it kind of was, but the way it portrayed its cast of characters changed quite a bit from Season 1 to Season 4. Heck, it changed quite a bit from Season 1 to Season 2! Sure, from the moment the show started, it had quite some room for people of color, women, and queer characters, particularly considering what television looked like in 2014. However, the series was very much more aligned with a kind of Game of Thrones sensibility early on that saw brutality as an end in itself and more often than not reserved it for characters belonging to disenfranchised groups. This was all done under the guise of realism: since women would’ve been subjected to violence in those times, it is only a matter of cohesive worldbuilding to depict their suffering.
This line of thinking led Black Sails to a pitfall that could’ve spelled a very different course for the show. We’re talking, of course, about Max’s (Jessica Parker Kennedy) rape at the hands of Hamund (Neels Clasen) and other members of Captain Vane’s (Zach McGowan) crew right at the beginning of Season 1. It is a shocking scene, followed by a disgusting plotline that lasts for about four long episodes. It is an event that many critics and viewers turn their noses up at. However, thankfully, it is also an event that the showrunners allowed themselves to learn from, turning the series into something completely different.
Black Sails
Follows Captain Flint and his pirates twenty years prior to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel “Treasure Island.”
Release Date January 25, 2014
Seasons 4
Studio Starz
What Happens to Max in Season 1 of ‘Black Sails’
Here’s how the whole thing plays out: Max, a sex worker in the pirate hideout of Nassau, hatches up a plan with would-be cook John Silver (Luke Arnold) to sell the schedule of the Urca de Lima, a fabled storeship that is supposedly carrying a massive amount of treasure, to Jack Rackham (Toby Schmitz), Captain Vane’s quartermaster. However, Captain Flint (Toby Stephens), having realized that Silver has the information, intercepts the meeting. Amid the fighting that follows, Rackham falls into the ocean and loses the pearls that he was supposed to have traded for the information — pearls that, by all accounts, belong to the crew of the Ranger, Captain Vane’s flagship. Feeling that they have been duped and that the wrath of his crew will certainly fall upon Max, Vane tries to help her escape Nassau. This is Episode 3 that we’re talking about, and this is specifically the point where everything goes wrong.
As she’s trying to get away, something that she has always dreamed of doing, Max is captured by Vane’s men, who proceed to sexually assault her. The scene isn’t as graphic as it could’ve been, but it is still enough for more sensitive fans to share trigger warnings and timestamps online so that others can skip it. The assault is stopped by Eleanor (Hannah New), the de facto ruler of Nassau with whom Max has a romantic relationship. However, there is a catch: since Eleanor is instrumental in foiling Max and Silver’s plan, the two aren’t exactly on good terms. So when Eleanor tries to protect her lover and get back at Vane by banishing him from doing business on the island, Max makes an honestly baffling decision: she chooses to turn herself in to Vane and allow herself to be violated repeatedly by his men until her debt is paid, all because she doesn’t want Eleanor’s help.
Related Before ‘Percy Jackson,’ Jessica Parker Kennedy Ruled All in ‘Black Sails’ Jessica Parker Kennedy’s Max is easily one of the best parts of ‘Black Sails’.
From then on, things get a lot worse before they start getting better. For episodes on end, we are forced to witness Max getting back on her feet, only to be knocked down again. And we mean that literally: when she tries to turn her, um… relationship with Vane’s men into something resembling consensual intercourse, she is punched by Hamund and thrown to the ground. Her humiliation seems to be endless, until the only woman in Vane’s crew, Anne Bonny (Clara Paget), decides that she’s had enough. Bonny goes up to Eleanor and the two concoct a plan to kill Hamund and the others and make it seem like they have left the island. It is only then that Max is released from captivity and taken back to the brothel, which is now being run by none other than Jack Rackham.
Max’s Assault Is an Unnecessary Plot Point in ‘Black Sails’
We could start questioning how much Max is really free if she is returned to the very place that she so longed to leave, but, frankly, that’s not the point here. The real point is that Black Sails doesn’t actually achieve anything by having Max brutalized in such a horrifying way. The end of her relationship with Eleanor had already been established, and Eleanor already had more than enough reasons for banishing Vane, what with him hitting her in the first episode and conspiring against Captain Flint. Furthermore, the men of Vane’s crew could have threatened her well-being in any other way as a form of punishment. Anne Bonny herself tells Max that she thought the men would merely kill her, so why did the show see the need to make her a victim of sexual violence?
Well, to answer this question, we have to take a look at the media landscape at the time that Black Sails came out. More specifically, we have to examine a show that we’ve already mentioned in this article, a small show that you might’ve heard of. Back in 2014, Game of Thrones was in its fourth season, and audiences were still reeling from the Red Wedding and Joffrey’s (Jack Gleeson) murder. The show was by far the biggest thing in the entertainment world, and part of its mystique was how unafraid of being violent and explicit it was. Anyone could die at any moment, and nudity — particularly female nudity — was far from being a rare commodity. This led to other networks jumping at the chance of making their own extremely graphic shows in the hopes of replicating HBO’s phenomenon. This is where Black Sails comes in.
Full of gratuitous female nudity and blood spatters, the first season of Black Sails fits perfectly in an entertainment world in which Game of Thrones reigned supreme. However, by 2014, Game of Thrones was already starting to catch some flak due to some of its scenes. Rape scenes, in particular, were being criticized left and right for how eroticized they felt or for how they were included merely for shock value. A year after Max’s rape in Black Sails, a scene in Game of Thrones would bring the whole castle down: after being married off to Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), young Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) is assaulted by her new husband. Suffice it to say that audiences were not happy, and they were even more distraught when the show later treated Sansa’s rape as an essential point of character development for her.
So, in a way, the reaction to what happens to Max in Black Sails anticipated the backlash to Sansa’s storyline. Both scenes felt and still feel incredibly pointless, almost like misery porn centered around the suffering of women. When it comes to Max, there is also the fact that she is a woman of color, which plays into debates about whose bodies we see violated on screen. Of course, defenders of these scenes tend to argue that such forms of violence were common in the times depicted in both shows, but neither Game of Thrones nor Black Sails are that closely tied to reality, the former being a fantasy series, and the latter, a Treasure Island prequel.
‘Black Sails’ Learned Its Lesson After Season 1
But even if they were perfectly faithful renditions of past times, why would violence — and, most significantly, sexual violence — be the only thing that could be reserved for its female characters and characters of color? The past is also made up of rebellions centering on disenfranchised groups, of figures that managed to have a semblance of power despite their original status, of women, queer people, and people of color that just managed to exist despite all odds being against them. Why is that not what is shown in historical pieces of media? Well, Black Sails heard these complaints, and its ship completely changed course.
By Season 2, or even by the end of Season 1, Black Sails started giving more room to its female, queer, and Black characters. The story stopped being about a bunch of straight white men with a few women and Black people thrown around to focus on multiple queer romances. Eleanor gained prominence, as did Anne Bonny, and Max herself became a force to be reckoned with in Nassau. By Season 3, the show introduced the maroons, formerly enslaved Black people who managed to escape and form their own communities, as an essential part of Captain Flint’s fight against the British colonial empire. The series became not just a story about pirates, but a story about disenfranchised people fighting for their own freedom. And, in the end, despite its somewhat bittersweet finale, it succeeded beautifully at that.
Now, Max’s rape is never exactly dealt with in Black Sails. We don’t get to see her heal from her trauma nor get back at the ones who wronged her, though they are punished by the narrative. Still, at least Black Sails never went down this route again. Instead of doubling down on the violence, it chose to go on a different path. And, as it sailed across these waters, it created something truly memorable and unique.
Black Sails is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.
Watch on Netflix