by Sam H. and Aero S.
A year and a half after Our Flag Means Death’s cliffhanger ending left fans yearning for more, Season 2 has finally arrived. While it was highly anticipated, its reception wasn’t met with as much praise and attention as its debut season – this could partially be blamed on the then-ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike that prevented the cast from promoting the show, but there’s another explanation for the lack of cultural impact: the season just wasn’t very good. We at The Stinger are massive fans of the first season of OFMD, and we do think that the show has helped push boundaries of diversity and representation in television, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see the glaring flaws scattered throughout this show’s second season. Furthermore, our opinions on individual personnel involved in the show don’t inform our opinions on the show expressed in this article.
One thing the show so great in its first season but has since abandoned for its second, is good and consistent pacing. The second season’s stories move at hyperspeed, leaving audiences little time to take any of it in before jumping to the next one. This is made even worse by the aforementioned rollout schedule. Two episodes that move at breakneck speeds every week is just not a sustainable way to maintain an engaged audience. To make things even worse, the characterizations of everyone on this show also fall victim to the atrocious pacing; no one had any actual room to grow and develop further, leaving the crew less like an ensemble of characters and more like cardboard cutouts of the characters that they used to be, often giving these ensemble characters lines that could easily be interchangeable between all of them.
In addition to the pacing, the individual character development was confusing and inconsistent. For example, what the hell was going on with Oluwande and Jim? Jim’s new love interest, Archie, is underdeveloped and barely introduced, and the dynamic between these two characters that drew audiences in during the first season just somehow disappeared. To make matters worse, fan favorites such as Roach and Frenchie are nowhere as fleshed out as they were in the first season. For a show that claims to be ensemble-led, it sure seems like most of the crew members are mere cardboard cutouts of themselves – they feel like stand-ins for the characters that viewers had come to know and love in the first season, and not much development occurs with them. Sure, Frenchie becomes Ed’s second in command, but even that wasn’t treated with much fanfare. The only character that seems to get a full character development throughout the season is, surprisingly, Izzy, and even he dies in the end. So much of the experience of watching television is watching beloved characters adapt to situations and grow from them, and it was so frustrating not to have any of that this season.
Here’s the point in the piece where everyone’s going to boo and throw tomatoes: we don’t think there needs to be a season 3. Season 2 left off on a pretty solid note, with all the storylines wrapped up, and getting the pirate crew back together for nostalgia and another season would feel superficial. Famously, shows that involve the central crew breaking apart and then deciding to make more seasons and thus scrambling to reconnect all these characters never perform well. Think about the last season of Parks and Recreation or season 3 of Mythic Quest.
Also, we would be amiss if we didn’t address the Izzy Hands situation. Personally, we’re not the biggest fans of Izzy Hands as we see the centering of his storyline in attempts to appease fans as a pandering to white favoritism in a show that supposedly centers around queer and trans characters of color. His death in season 2 marks an important end to a storyline in the show, one that includes a resolution for Ed’s conflicts with his identity, and considering how intense fans can be about Izzy Hands, making a season 3 without him would piss a certain demographic of fans off. However, even if Izzy returns in flashbacks or visions or whatnot, it’d mostly be nostalgia-bait and feel inauthentic.
All this is to say that if there will be season 3, David Jenkins better knock it out of the park after fumbling season 2 to the point of us writing this article about a show we used to like.