Flinthamiltons - Blog Posts

In ep.IV they show us this embrace, this beautiful, beautiful and painful scene. Those few seconds hold such a deep meaning…and yet in that moment we do not know ANYTHING about it. So what? Is one supposed to see it and then go on with the show and forget about it, putting it in a corner of their mind with all those “you will understand later” things? Because that’s what happened, the first time I watched this season I completely forgot about it. And that’s such a WASTE! Pretty much all of the Flint/Miranda’s scenes in the first season are a waste, in a way. Please do not misunderstand me, I think those scenes are really amazing and I also think that the timing of the “great revelation” was perfect, I wouldn’t have liked it so much had it come before, and exactly for these reasons I’m saying that those wonderful scenes are “wasted”. Because a lot of those get lost in the first watch, since one can’t understand the importance of them still and so doesn’t even give them the right amount of attention they would deserve. Of course the mystery was intriguing, and something sounded pretty strange since the beginning, but still…STILL. Almost all of the scenes about the two of them or about Miranda kill me on rewatch, knowing their whole story. But that’s the thing, you have to rewatch it to get the complete beauty of them. And I think that’s a shame, because people who like the show but are not obsessed with it as I am would probably never rewatch it, but maybe, if they had remembered or rewatched at least those scenes, there would be one more chance for them to be as obsessed as I am with it.

Really, how beautiful this hug was? An “It’s over” kind of hug, but with a double meaning. It’s over like we put an end to part of our misery, venting our anger on the responsible for it, but also, it’s over like our old existences are over, and we will never be the same persons we used to be ever again. Which is pretty much what happens with every revenge (I’m not judging though). I just love it so much, I wish I had been able to see all of that since the first time I saw it.

They'll speak of me in whispered tones and say my name like it shakes their bones - a Captain Flint/James McGraw playlist

~[...] 'Cause when I'll stand these folks will run and tell the tales of what I've become ~

My humble tribute to this incredible character and his equally incredible story.

Hope this makes him justice.

Listen on YT:

https://youtu.be/mbedUGAoxr8?si=OSKzJtvjhiDVRt2M

You'll find timestamps, a translation of the italian song and some notes in the comments section on YT.

I was on pinterest and this detail (first image) of a bigger painting (second image) named 'The Jolly Boat' by Albert Lynch caught my eyes, 'cause it reminded me so much of that scene (third and fourth images) with Flint and Miranda on the run from London.

Now seeing the whole painting I can see the man is not looking behind but to the ship they are going towards (in the detail it wasn't so clear since there is also some land visible in the background), but still there's something in the facial expression of the two which definitely make me think about them. Something in the way the man looks haunted and the woman looks emptied, and they still are so close to one another...

It's so beautiful. Just like Flint and Miranda's relationship is to me.

It's the way they and the people who know them refere to those years in New Providence as a dream.

Some say it was a nightmare, and yes, it probably was, especially for James.

But you can't find in a nightmare someone who is so similar to you that you end up so often being unable to face for the fear of facing your same insecurities. You can't find someone who choses to walk by your side for the whole, dark and unsteady road toward a blurred, almost impossible future, just to make it possible for the two of you. You can't find someone who choses to love you without restrain, and to trust you, in the name of that love, giving their own life away in the hope that you will save yours.

This, you may find only in a dream. This is what they both did, in their own way, for one another. Miranda understood it. James almost did.

It's the way you go from bright colors but cold lights in 1705 to dark colors but warmer, secret, intimate lights in 1715.

Really, that's all.

It’s like she’s some sort of clock that’s finally struck its chime and woken me from this dream we’ve been living, reminded me how many years separate me from a world I still think of as home. How unrecognizable the woman I am now would be to the woman I was then.

If you ask me, the three of them deserve a whole show just for themselves. Like...only fragments in only five episodes? Absolutely not enough.

RUPERT PENRY-JONES as Thomas Hamilton, LOUISE BARNES as Miranda Barlow, and TOBY STEPHENS as James McGraw in Black Sails, Chapter XI.

Lately I found myself thinking about James/Miranda relationship as a reversed version of Orpheus and Eurydice’s story, especially towards the end of it. Not because these two stories match well (they do not) but just because I like making this kind of classical comparisons and I'm stuck from a bit on the fact that, right before her death, for the first time Miranda was the one to refuse the progress to look back at the past. 

After the loss of Thomas, James let himself slip into a darkness comparable to the underworld, a darkness which so often threatened to swallow him whole. He walked on a thin line between a reign of death and an island of life, and if that darkness was that reign, Miranda was his island. 

During their whole journey of processing their grief and climbing their way back to a life that could be called such, she was the one always trying to drag him towards the light. To her, the life that might have been waiting for them in the future was that light, while the past was the darkness, and not because she deemed it forgettable or unimportant, quite the contrary indeed, but because while she knew how to keep and remember the beauty of that past and the light of it, along with the sorrow, she knew perfectly well how different it was for James. How he could remember the beauty of it, of course, but also knew how to put it aside in favor of the rage and the guilt, his gaze clouded by the pain and the unacceptable shame. 

She said it herself: she didn't want to forget that past, not the bright side of it and neither the inescapable sadness of it, its tragedy being the spring of that very beauty, the ruins existing only because there was something precious to be ruined in the first place; and at the same time, what could the dark of it matter, the injustice, the grudge, when it condemned the both of them to never be able to see the light again? 

First time I heard their discussion in ep.VII after knowing the whole story, I wondered how could she ask something like that of him, to forget and pass over what they had done to him just to gain a liveable life, but recently I've actually been wondering : how could she not?

I'm not taking any side in this, as I recognize Miranda's thoughts to be the most reasonable ones as they often are but at the same time I can't say I wouldn't act as stubbornly and desperately as James did in that situation, they're just really different ways to conceive one’s own existence, influenced by their own problems and conditions and mind. All I'm saying is that Miranda was able to see the light even if just from a distance, she was able to hope that one day they would have been able to truly see it. James was never. 

He just lied to himself about the possibility of it. He had plans and tactics and strategies, but for how I see it, those were all desperate attempts to convince himself of the contrary. He couldn't, maybe because of his personality, maybe because he knew that his situation wasn't one that could ever allow him to found real light in that world, maybe just because he loved her less than how much he had loved Thomas, less than how much she loved him, but whichever was the reason, he couldn't afford to see the light after that abyss, and I think Miranda was the first to know that. The one who knew him like no other, the one who loved him like no other. She knew that without help he would have never really been able to reach the end of that dark state of being. And she tried. She tried to help him in so many ways, because she loved him, she really did, and because she had the damn right to claim at least a decent life for herself. 

And here we come to the end, to Charles town.

Charles town could have been her success. Charles town was James’ surrender. For the first time she glimpsed one real chance of having him back, she saw in him the real intention to leave all of that darkness behind, to follow her, not leaving the past behind, never, but learning to move forward, finally allowing her a chance for a new life together. 

He was actually ready to accept even that miserable condition Peter Ashe imposed on him in order to get rid of the darkness, to climb to the light -as short lived as that might have been, at this point- to give Miranda a better alternative than the ones he had been able to grant her up until that moment (as I think his whole Charles town plan was led by the purpose of doing something to save her): as useless as we all know that would have been, accepting that bargain has probably been the most selfless thing James has ever done, even if he did it also for himself in a tired, desperate and contorted way. 

But Charles town wasn't only this to Miranda. 

Charles town was the discovery of the betrayal, because I believe she understood it all the moment she first saw that clock, I'm sure of it. Charles town was her umptheen attempt and her umptheen sacrifice. 

I think that must have been to her a similar quest to the Maria Aleyne's one: respecting James by telling him the truth, something he deserves to know, even knowing how he will react to it, knowing how impossible it would become for him, then, to go on with his plan, granting him a one way ticket to that darkness, or keeping him in the dark, bearing alone the weight of that knowledge, accepting to live with the helplessness to remedy that fatal injustice, only in the hope to finally make him reach that light?  

Would Orpheus reveal Eurydike a truth which risked pushing her back into the underworld just because it might be right for her to know it?

Still, things had been different, more desperate, back to the Maria Aleyne. Now the chance to succeed was real. 

And at first she made that difficult choice, which was selfish in a way, but definitely selfless in another, all at the same time.

And she did it because she loved him. 

She loved him so much that when she glimpsed, in that light, the prospect of losing him, she had to recognize that that light was -as James would have put it in the future- only their light, the light of a world the two of them couldn’t be part of anymore. 

She loved him so much that she had to look back. To the past, to him, because her James was still behind her, still in the dark, the only place where he was allowed to stay, and only that version of him was the one she truly loved. She loved the real James, with all his broken parts, not the one that could be seen under the lights of their lies. 

So she couldn't help giving up that false light, because she had wished for tranquility, a normal life -as probably anyone in her conditions would have done- but she was not disposed to give up the man she loved in order to gain that, as she hadn't been in the past, when the prospect of the future had been only dark and still she had not deserted the ones she loved. 

And when she turned back, this time trying to shield him from that light, the darkness at the pit ended up swallowing them both. 

Miranda died, and James was dragged back full force and imprisoned into the worst version of himself, the ruthless, autodestructive one. 

There are two versions of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think that the two of them taken together perfectly represent James’ reaction to her death and its circumstances.

In Virgilius’ one, Eurydice slightly resents Orpheus for his action, for his “folly” -as it is called- and (if we may call it that) for his selfish gesture of looking back, that she paid with her second chance to be alive. 

After Miranda's death, James dreams of her reminding him how he had resented her “because they were so close” and of course since that's a dream is what he knew he had felt. But that was…collateral to the condition he had been left stuck in. That was the childish resentment of having explicitly denied something he knew deep down he couldn't have. 

In Ovidius’ one instead Eurydice doesn't blame him because she can't resent being loved, and I think this is what James really felt. After all, looking straight at the truth of the situation and looking back at their shared history, I think there were no ways for him to actually, rationally resent her. (And in fact in his last dream about her she uses a past tense, “you resented me”, hinting that was something he had felt only in the moments when he was at his worst as when, always in the dream, he heard her apology).

Moreover, I think he perfectly understood the meaning of those last moments of hers, how important it was to her to make her voice be heard in that moment. In fact, despite the clear and growing doubt and rage (and worry) on his face while Peter and Miranda spoke, he didn't say a word, he let her speak, despite knowing the risks  and I think this is amazing and just proves how beautiful and respectful their relationship was, and that there were no way he could actually deem her responsible of their failure in that mission (doomed to failure since the beginning ‘cause of the truth).

What hurts even more about her death is the fact that it looks like they got closer to each other once again during that trip, as they hadn't probably been in years, and then…everything got lost forever.

Gosh. So powerful.

This is exactly the spirit, the very soul of his fight and of his being.

"These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumph die like fire and powder,

Which as they kiss consume."

Romeo and Juliet

FlintHamiltons paintings aesthetic.

Two different worlds entwined by the strings of fate. I thought this ship deserved such kind of artistic tribute.

That last gaze between them...the complicity, the understanding, the solace, the love between the romantic kind and the friendship and way above both of them...one of the best couple ever❤

I found it, Miranda. Parrish’s ship? You found the schedule?

for @ellelan

"What's going on in this house is not a simple affair." ~ she said.

"It is not." ~ he replied.

I think what he really meant here was not "it's something worse", but "it's something more". It's something that changed our whole lives.

Even if I can't help blaming him in this scene for not listening to her, I have to say that his way of feeling things deeply without ever letting them show completely is so precious to me.

This conversation is perfect, seen in the aftermath.

It perfectly depicts these two amazing characters in all their shades.