One thing that I like very very much about the way Black Sails handles Miranda is that like. She’s obviously dead from the beginning; she represents the hope of reconciliation, and there’s only one way for that to end.
But.
But, in any other show, they would have forced her to die innocent. Not of everything, perhaps. She could be allowed to know she was betrayed before she died; showing her shock and sorrow would heighten the tragedy. But still, it would have to have blindsided her. She wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise. Other characters would be able to use “this isn’t what she would have wanted” against Flint. This is all very classic for this type of plot beat.
Which is why it’s so great that the show doesn’t go that way. Miranda dies, yes. She dies quickly and brutally and at the hands of a person who didn’t give a fuck about her as a person. But she does get something; she gets to die enraged.
She is the one who sees the clock. She is the one who puts it together. She is the one who weighs the choice: go along with the reconciliation she pushed for and wanted, or take the violent path, with all the miseries of the last ten years and the risk of death?
And she chooses. She dies for it in the very next instant, but she chose.
Which is a hell of a lot more respectful of her as a character than dying still wanting England’s forgiveness would have been.
