The Ending Of Our Flag Means Death Season 2 Explained

Contains spoilers for "Our Flag Means Death"

In a world overrun with intense, brooding dramas and frightening news alerts, it's nice to get a break every now and then. Director Taika Waititi has always been pretty good about bringing something a little easier on the soul, from quirky and charming comedies like "Flight of the Conchords" and "What We Do in the Shadows" to the heartfelt Indigenous-centered coming-of-age dramedy "Reservation Dogs." In that same therapeutic spirit, with David Jenkins' giddily offbeat pirate fanfic "Our Flag Means Death," Waititi brought the world a wholesome historical fantasy and love story all rolled into one.

Over the show's first season, audiences fell in love with bookish dandy Stede Bonnet's (Rhys Darby) mid-life-crisis-turned-epic adventure and historical romance with Blackbeard. But after finally bringing the pair together, the end of Season 1 tore them apart, leaving audiences on a cliffhanger and Blackbeard with a broken heart. Thankfully, Jenkins and Waititi didn't make us wait too long into Season 2 to bring our favorite pirates back together — even if the changing world (and the pesky British navy) serve up a new set of challenges to their happily ever after on the high seas. Batten down the hatches and hoist the sails — Here's everything you need to know about the ending of "Our Flag Means Death" Season 2.

"Our Flag Means Death" follows the adventures of 18th-century "Gentleman Pirate" Stede Bonnet after he runs away from his aristocratic family life to pursue adventure as a seafaring pirate on the Revenge. Initially, he's a terrible pirate. But after accidentally defeating a British crew, he catches the eye of Blackbeard, who rescues him from the Spanish navy when Jackie (Leslie Jones) sells them out. They bond over piracy, books, and marmalade and agree to share their knowledge with each other. As their friendship grows, Blackbeard eventually abandons his plan to fake his own death using Stede as a pawn, causing tension with Blackbeard's first mate, Izzy Hands (Con O'Neill). 

Things come to a head when Izzy challenges Stede to a duel but loses on a technicality, leading to his banishment. When Spanish Jackie and Izzy team up to help the English ambush Stede at Blind Man's Cove, Blackbeard surrenders with him to military service. But despite admitting their feelings while imprisoned, Stede backs out during their escape as a heartbroken, angry Blackbeard returns to the Revenge and maroons most of its original crew. After a detour to Jackie's, Stede and his men end up working for the Pirate Queen Zheng (Ruibo Qian) while Stede hopes to reunite with Blackbeard. 

Under Blackbeard and Izzy's tyranny, morale among the Revenge crew plummets. After Izzy calls him out, Blackbeard shoots him, promoting Frenchie (Joel Fry) to first mate. But instead of killing Izzy, the crew cuts off his leg to save his life. When Blackbeard drives the Revenge into a storm, the crew kills him.

Zheng and her people board the Revenge, but discover the crew mutinied and plan their execution in accordance with pirate code. Stede leads the crew to reclaim the Revenge, discovering Blackbeard's body in the process. When Stede appears at his side, Blackbeard returns from the Gravy Basket — the space between life and death. But the crew banishes him, reviving his feelings of resentment toward Stede. They eventually reconcile, but Blackbeard decides to move on from his pirate ways as Stede finds the notoriety he craves.

After reuniting, Lucius (Nathan Foad) and Black Pete (Matthew Maher) happily tie the matelotage knot. Best friends Jim (Vico Ortiz) and Oluwande (Samson Kayo) are no longer hooking up, but they're completely fine with each other and supportive of each other's new relationships, and the Swede (Nat Faxon) thrives in his new role as Spanish Jackie's 20th husband. Meanwhile, after losing his nose for his role in Stede's robbery of Jackie, minor prince Ricky Banes (Erroll Shand) becomes an anti-pirate activist, destroying Zheng's fleet with explosive-filled clocks. Izzy is killed, the Revenge crew escapes, and Blackbeard and Stede retire to a quiet cabin.

Season 1 was all about Stede Bonnet's personal journey, as he never quite fit in with the landed gentry in Barbados. But almost as soon as he took to the sea, everyone around him either expressed frustration at how weak and soft he was or flat-out told him to go home. Hardly discouraged, Bonnet decided to carve a new path out for himself as a "gentleman pirate." But it's only after meeting the mythos-enshrouded pirate Blackbeard that he finds his true path in life.

By Season 2, Stede is finally creating a name for himself as the gentleman pirate he'd dreamed of becoming, and the focus shifts to Blackbeard. Despite his renown as a pirate, by the time he meets Stede, Blackbeard has started to wonder if there is more to life. After focusing so long on trying to help Stede become a pirate and then losing him, Season 2 finds Blackbeard on a completely unhinged rampage. But after returning from the dead, he's forced to finally face the fact that he's not happy with the man he has become, and he has to find out who he truly wants to be, without redefining himself around Stede. It's only after realizing he doesn't want to be the same violent super-legend he once was that he is able to find peace.

Gentle Stede establishes the importance of processing trauma early in his run as captain, telling his crew before their long-overdue first raid, "If someone returns from the raid mentally devastated, we talk it through as a crew." Almost every member of the Revenge crew has trauma that they, in turn, pass on to others. As a child, Jim watched their family be killed, setting their life on a troubled path. Blackbeard killed his father when he could no longer endure the man abusing his mother — an experience so traumatic he suppressed the memory, reimagining himself as a Kraken.

Internalizing that trauma causes Blackbeard to pass the cycle of abuse onto others in his life as the notorious Blackbeard, leaving them damaged in turn. By Season 2, Fang (David Fane) is so traumatized that he is easily reduced to tears, despite his once-fearsome facade. Things get so bad for Izzy that he eventually breaks down in front of the crew.

Lucius is severely disturbed after Blackbeard throws him over the side of the Revenge and he ends up tormented on various ships. His anger and blame become so debilitating he can't enjoy his reunion with Black Pete, but his effort to externalize those feelings only leaves him feeling worse. When he mocks Izzy for rewriting the story behind his trauma, Izzy turns it around, telling Lucius, "Not moving on is worse."

First introduced in "A Damned Man" when he runs afoul of Stede Bonnet's crew, Israel "Izzy" Hands is the glue that holds Blackbeard's crew together. A skilled swordsman and consummate professional, Izzy takes his job as Blackbeard's first mate seriously. He's so loyal to Blackbeard and his crew that he sticks around when Blackbeard sinks into a deep psychological hole, snapping off Izzy's toes and nearly killing him. Izzy understands his role well, at one point telling his boss, "For years I've followed your every whim. I've managed your increasingly erratic moods. I've massaged this crew when they were worried about your judgment," but that he did it all "because I was honored to work for the legendary Blackbeard."

Despite threatening to resign when Blackbeard meets Stede and, at one point getting banished for losing a duel, he even stays with Blackbeard when his boss completely loses the plot. After enduring Blackbeard's messy breakup energy, Izzy pushes him to become his darkest, most intense self — something he later comes to regret. But losing his leg makes him feel responsible for what Blackbeard became, and he begins to change. The crew eventually comes to accept him as one of their own, even making him a pegleg from the unicorn figurehead. When the fatally wounded Izzy uses his final breaths to apologize to Blackbeard, it's genuinely heartbreaking.

Although the Golden Age of Piracy only lasted about 70 years, real-life pirates developed plenty of lore and superstitions — after all, swashbuckling was a dangerous business. Although not initially heavy on the supernatural, "Our Flag Means Death" ends up integrating plenty of the show's own in-universe pirate myths and lore, both real and imagined. And by the end of Season 2, the universe has become even richer.

We first get a glimpse of the strange and potentially supernatural with Buttons (Ewen Bremner) in Season 1 as he claims to understand and communicate with his seagull, Karl. The pirates of the Revenge hang onto all sorts of superstitions like Frenchie's beliefs that fairies make bread rise and women have unlucky crystals in their bodies.

In Season 2, the crew encounters a seemingly cursed ship complete with a pentagram. Even though Stede doesn't believe it's real, the crew can't be convinced otherwise. There's also the introduction of "Calypsoing," or suddenly deciding it's Calypso's birthday (which is really just an excuse for a party). But it turns out there's some real magic in Blackbeard's world in Season 2, when Buttons apparently uses a spell recipe to transform into a bird to become a better lover for the sea. Season 2 also introduces the Gravy Basket — the show's version of purgatory that Blackbeard visits during his brief brush with death.

Played by the scene-stealing Leslie Jones, Spanish Jackie is the owner of the Republic of Pirates' most popular hangout, Spanish Jackie's. But you don't keep a pub running smoothly on a pirate island for long without being exceptionally tough and running a heck of a tight ship. From her nose jar to her habit of talking about herself in the third person, Spanish Jackie continually proves she's always in control. And her 19 husbands seem completely fine with it.

But it's through the Swede's eyes that we learn how truly good life is at Spanish Jackie's. She easily forgives him after he helps Stede steal her indigo. And when he sees his old crew again, he's clearly had a complete transformation, something they all can't help but notice. The Swede tells them he's thriving with Jackie as she encourages him to be his best self. She also makes an effort to make all of her husbands feel loved. And when she takes out the British with poisoned drinks, she shows how far she'll go to care for them, assuring the alarmed Swede that everyone in her household is "poison-trained."

Even though "Our Flag Means Death" is completely absurd and far from historically accurate, it is populated with characters from the real-life Golden Age of Piracy. It does so in a way that highlights aspects of piracy that are often overlooked or erased from our frequently hypermasculinized modern mythology surrounding the pirate age — particularly aspects pertaining to their expression of gender and sexuality.

Protagonists Edward "Blackbeard" Teach and Stede Bonnet were real-life associates. Like Stede of "Our Flag Means Death," the real Bonnet was a wealthy Barbadian-born Englishman who abandoned his family to become a pirate, building his own ship and paying his crew wages. The real Stede also sailed with Blackbeard for a time, and together they took clemency under King George's Grace Act only to return to a life of piracy once more — a decision that later got him hanged (Blackbeard died in battle). Several other figures introduced in Season 1 were also based on real-life figures, including Blackbeard's fierce first mate Israel Hands and Calico Jack (Will Arnett).

Season 2 introduced a few new figures to the show's history-based canon, including Ned Low (Bronson Pinchot) and female pirates Anne Bonny (Minnie Driver) and Mary Read (Rachel House, who are presented as lovers in "Our Flag Means Death." According to 18th-century writer Charles Johnson, Bonny was Calico Jack's lover, but both women dressed as men on the job. To boot, there seems to be some degree of attraction between the two — at least, enough to ignite Calico Jack's jealousy.

Besides its sensitive and dynamic character development, one of the things that elevates "Our Flag Means Death" above most comedies is its beautifully crafted soundtrack. The care music supervisor Maggie Phillips brings to the show's score is evident from the show's first episode — it's a soundtrack full of deep cuts and surprises. Phillips' selections brilliantly underline the first season's storytelling with songs like Moondog's "High on a Rocky Ledge," the Beach Boys' "Our Prayer," and Caetano Veloso's "The Empty Boat."

For viewers who appreciate the auditory attention to detail, Season 2 doesn't disappoint. The unsettlingly optimistic and sweet "Strawberry Letter 23" by Shuggie Otis gives a sense of how completely unhinged Blackbeard has become as he turns a wedding at sea into a bloody massacre. The longing of Blackbeard and Stede's troubled romance is captured with Nina Simone's "I Love My Baby" and the soulful "Pygmy Love Song" by Francis Bebey. Of the latter, Phillips told Collider, "It's supposed to capture the pain but inherent beauty of true love. It's romantic but tragic at the same time, like Stede and Ed's [Blackbeard's] love story — at this point in the story." And one of the show's most emotional moments, Blackbeard's return from the Gravy Basket, is the best inclusion of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" since "The Handmaid's Tale."

By the end of Season 2, just about every character in the series has undergone a dynamic transformation. The original crew of the Revenge has proven their worth as pirates, worked through their various traumas, and most importantly, become a family. Blackbeard and Stede have both grown into themselves, with Ed ultimately returning to the man he loves as a pirate, but a better person overall. With Ricky and the British defeated, the crew sails on under the capable leadership of Frenchie, leaving Ed and Stede to pursue a quiet life together.

Other than the heartbreaking loss of Izzy, the crew has about as close to a happy ending as they possibly could. Even if we'd love nothing more than to see where they go next, there's a sense that the story could easily conclude here without leaving any pressing unanswered questions hanging in the air. Creator David Jenkins told Entertainment Weekly, "If it turns out we don't make any more, I'm comfortable with that being a resting place." While Jenkins says he still has "a lot of ideas" for a third season, he wanted to leave things right between the show's central pair in case it doesn't come to pass.

If "Our Flag Means Death" gets renewed for a third season, there's still plenty of story left to tell. As the end of Season 2 saw Ed and Stede talking over plans to become innkeepers, there's a good chance we'll get to see just how well Innkeeper Jeff does in the field. And unless the series completely reimagines the ending for Ed and Stede, they're likely to return to the seas once more — although it would be nice for the show to write a story where they escape their real-world deaths and get a happily ever after. And that's not the only business we'll want to check in on. One of the last moments of Season 2 saw both the Swede and Jackie aboard the Revenge, with Jackie assuring him, "We're gonna rebuild the bar better than ever."

No matter who is in charge, whether they're working together to throw an epic shindig or pull an actual pyramid scheme over on the aristocracy, the Revenge crew is all about working together, and fans can't wait to see more of that in Season 3. As Jenkins put it in Entertainment Weekly, "I think Frenchie's Revenge would be an interesting place to work and an interesting ship to be boarded by."