Our Flag Means Death: "The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well" and "The Art of Fuckery"

(This is the third installment of my biweekly recaps of Our Flag Means Death, the HBO Max comedy series that debuted in March 2022 and quickly discovered an adoring fandom. I’ve never seen it! These recaps are only available to paid subscribers.)

• “The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well” (originally aired March 10, 2022)
• “The Art of Fuckery” (originally aired March 10, 2022)

‎I kind of hate reviewing comedies.

Sometimes, I remember many people's first exposure to my work came from my episodic reviews of Glee and Community. Across those two shows, I covered over 100 episodes of self-referential, metatextual comedy, and when I think about doing that work again, I just feel really, really tired.

This tendency seems like one lots of TV critics have in common. Reviewing comedy almost always starts to feel a little too much like math, because if I say, "I laughed a lot at this show," that doesn't make for a good TV review, even if it's accurate. You want to know more. You want to understand why the show works.

As such, when a show like Our Flag Means Death has an obvious hook in re: representation, critics tend to talk about that. Whatever you think of it, it's at least an angle. Here, we've all been prone to reviewing the series through the lens of how it presents queer masculinity. I spent far more words than I would have expected discussing the series across my first two recaps simply because I could go broad and talk about queer art in general. That choice, however, means that I've been rather shortchanging the actual "here is how this TV show works" part of my reviews, and when you dig around in the guts of OFMD, it's doing some really interesting things just on the level of sitcom structure.

Namely, Our Flag Means Death has a surprising number of things in common with Scrubs.

(Yes, the 2001-2010 hospital comedy that proved one of the early harbingers of the rise of the single-camera comedy, loved doing complex things with tone, and made Zack Braff a star. That Scrubs.)

I've had Scrubs on the brain, thanks to a terrific retrospective on the show from Jose, one of my favorite YouTubers. (Watch it here.) So maybe my comparison is unnecessarily influenced by that. Yet when looking at the two shows, I find they have one big thing in common: They create a workplace that functions as a sealed-off microcosm for certain aspects of everyday life and as a fulcrum point for testing a specific set of values.

In Scrubs, that test centered on what the broken American health care system should value most — patients or profits — and the series rarely left the confines of Sacred Heart Hospital. Our Flag Means Death leaves the Surprise more often than Scrubs left the hospital. However, it still uses the microcosm of the ship and crew to ask what value a traditionally structured society even provides if it's forcibly repressing and oppressing certain people.

Both shows are political in the sense that they examine a broader political reality but not in the sense that they suggest a "solution" to these problems. Scrubs knows its primary villain isn't Dr. Kelso but the uncaring American health care system he operates within, which is why it made him so cuddly so quickly. Our Flag Means Death presents the villainy of the British aristocracy more directly, but that's also a problem few of us have to deal with in our day-to-day lives. On the other hand, the question of how to live life as a queer person, unfettered from societal expectations, is one many of us will deal with every single day, and OFMD doesn't have an answer to that question, short of "Maybe buy a pirate ship?"

‎Also, Stede and J.D. are surprisingly similar characters. Their function as windows the audience gets into a world we don't wholly understand allows both shows to dive into meatier topics more quickly than many series would be able to. Fascinatingly, J.D. represents a lower-middle-class character entering a world dominated by upper-middle-class people, while Stede is almost the exact flipside of that idea. Somebody write a dissertation on that.

Scrubs was fond of "You don't get how things work in my world!" episodes, and OFMD is too — but with a twist. On Our Flag Means Death, swapping worlds, costumes, or lives is all an excuse for some form of queer fuckery or another. As a case in point, consider "The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well," which gives us a look into Blackbeard's past to explore why he's so drawn to Stede's life. (By now, it's clear he has no intentions of murdering his new friend.)

Stede, who has left that life behind, scoffs at returning to it. Yet when he sees that Ed would love to do so, he helps Ed figure out the best possible look for the occasion. The two attend a fancy party, and for a time, Stede can't believe just how good Ed is at making everybody at the party adore him. Why is it so easy for him when it was so hard for Stede? Yet as the evening wears on, Ed's lack of practice in these social niceties starts to expose him for who he is: a pirate who never learned how to operate in a more "refined" society. Stede saves the day with a little passive-aggression, and the adventure ends about as well as it could have.

What I like about both Scrubs and OFMD is how they reject simple binaries at their best. In "The Best Revenge," the beautiful finery of Stede's old aristocratic life is a straitjacket that he longs to escape from, yet even as Ed longs for it, he soon realizes that it's a straitjacket for him too. However, the more traditional, violent, diabolical version of himself isn't the more honest version of who he is either. To be himself requires escaping the expectations of Stede's world and of Ed's world, which is why the series' queerness doesn't need to be particularly overt to be present in these episodes. The ways the two are drawn to each other are evident, even when they're not explicitly "into" each other. What's more, the fact that finding a way just to be friends will require finding some other way of existing is made clear by the other episode this week, "The Art of Fuckery."

"Fuckery" functions as something of a mirror image of "The Best Revenge." Here, Izzy Hands proves the threat that could separate Ed and Stede, as he keeps reminding Ed of his plan to murder Stede, to the degree that Ed finally agrees to do so at the first available opportunity. Yet when such an opportunity presents itself, Ed cannot go through with the murder, and he later confesses to Stede both the existence of the murder scheme and that the only man he's ever directly killed is his father. Ed is, in the episode's rather tortured metaphor, the Kraken.

Stede being Stede, he bounces right back from the "oh, I planned to murder you, pal" confession, then manages to get Izzy banished from the ship by winning a duel by default. (More on this in the "other thoughts" section.) The specter of violence will always hover over these guys, however. It's a part of what they do.

"Fuckery," then, looks at why the bloodthirsty pirate's life doesn't work for Ed and Stede and almost anybody aboard the Surprise. Traditional society has no room for any of these people. Yet it attempts to create a mirror of itself in the idea of pirates as vicious, violent beings who lack civilization or the rule of law. Yet it is in the best interest of Stede's former friends to paint piracy in this fashion because it helps them maintain their grasp on power. In a vacuum, men like Izzy are only too happy to live up to that broken ideal, but it's proving too constrictive for Ed, who thought he could live up to it and now longs for something new.

If there's a major difference between Scrubs and OFMD, then, it's the fact that the former is using its microcosm to say, "This is how the world is — and maybe it shouldn't be," while the latter says, "This isn't how the world is — but maybe it should be." The Surprise isn't a perfectly egalitarian society. The existence of class still looms large. But it is a place that's small enough and sequestered enough to start building something like utopia.

Will the crew get there? Well, I know there are four episodes left in this season and at least one more season to come. So maybe not. But that's the joy of the TV sitcom: watching people try to get to a place we know they can't ever reach.

Other thoughts I thought:

• As someone who has recovered traumatic memories, I have rarely met a TV show that utilized the device in a way I found at all thoughtful. While I get why OFMD needs to speedrun Ed thinking back over his dad's death — and arguably, he's always remembered that he murdered his dad (though it's sure presented as a fresh memory) — it's a particularly egregious offender in this regard.
• So what is it with queer TV romance and the obligatory "I want to kill you, JUST KIDDING???!" moment? Ed and Stede never seriously seem like they're about to murder each other, but Stede does stab Ed and make it seem sexy, then takes a sword through the midsection just like Ed taught him. "I am so attracted to you that I must murder you" is a thing in some cishet TV romance, but it sure seems like it's a thing in all queer TV romances. Wild!
• I have to say I haven't been tracking heavily on the "Lucius and Black Pete should get together" storyline, but it was sweet to see them kiss.
• Speaking of Lucius, he gets a lot of amazing stuff to do in these episodes. I especially loved him sketching the pirate to get out of chores (then drawing an extremely accurate penis and testicles) and him cutting his finger off at precisely the right moment to scare everybody.
• Nat Faxon has kind of gotten lost in the background of this show so far, but his "scary singing" was very funny.
• Another Scrubs comparison point: Both shows ended up having vast collections of characters who could drop in for a gag or two, then exit the premises. I do think a 22-episode sitcom like Scrubs was better built for that than a 10-episode sitcom like this one, but it's a strength both shows possess.
• Oluwande and Frenchie inventing the pyramid scheme is a bit of an obvious gag, but it's a funny one, nevertheless.
• A little Nick Kroll and Kristen Schaal can go a long way, but "Best Revenge" gave me just enough to keep me from losing it.
• I keep meaning to bring up how much I enjoy the music supervision on this show, which always feels period appropriate while also consisting of modern tunes. It's low-key one of the shows with the best music supervision on TV. Here's a playlist of some of the songs used.

On October 3: I'm guessing there will be more intrigue around whether Ed and Stede will kiss in "This Is Happening" and "We Gull Way Back." Only two installments left, people! Look alive!