‘Our Flag Means Death’: How Blackbeard & Stede’s Fantastical Underwater Reunion Came Together
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Our Flag Means Death, Season 2, Episodes 1-3.]
It doesn’t take more than a single second to recognize Kate Bush‘s haunting and heartbreaking tune “This Woman’s Work,” as Blackbeard, a.k.a. Ed (Taika Waititi), is pushed from a clifftop to plunge into the ocean’s depths below in Our Flag Means Death‘s Season 2 installment, “The Innkeeper.” But how did the pirate heartbroken over Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) wind up in this position? It’s a delicate and winding path that starts with the infamous pirate’s unraveling over the course of the latest season’s first two episodes.
Believing Stede intentionally abandoned him after planning to run away together at the end of Season 1, Blackbeard embraces the version of himself so many have conjured up in their minds as he leads the Revenge’s “new” crew to pillage and plunder on the high seas. His unhinged behavior eventually forces Jim (Vico Ortiz), Izzy (Con O’Neill), Frenchie (Joel Fry), Archie (Madeleine Sami), and Fang (David Fane) to violently take control of the ship and neutralize Blackbeard — or so they think — after he steers them directly into a storm.
When Zheng Yi Sao’s (Ruibo Qian) Red Flag happens across an eerie-looking Revenge on the ocean, Stede dives overboard in his excitement over the possibility of seeing Ed, only to be told various excuses for his absence by the crew aboard. When Stede directly addresses Izzy regarding Blackbeard’s lack of presence, the now peg-legged pirate claims the Revenge crew dropped Ed on a beach.
This seems to ring true as we see Blackbeard wash ashore and cared for by his own former captain Hornigold (Mark Mitchinson). While together, Blackbeard and Hornigold discuss the mutiny that took place and Blackbeard’s hopes for the future. When a role-playing scenario testing Blackbeard’s ability to be an Innkeeper, a profession he’s interested in, goes awry, he attacks Hornigold, killing the tarp-clad pirate. But when Hornigold rises again, Blackbeard realizes something is off.
Aboard the Revenge, Ed’s body is uncovered below deck. Believing him dead, Zheng Yi Sao is forced to consider killing the Revenge crew for mutiny after initially welcoming them aboard the Red Flag. And Stede has to cope with the idea that his love may be gone forever.
After hatching an escape plan for the Revenge team, Stede and pals return to their former ship, leaving Zheng stranded without a wheel. Going to sit with Ed’s body, Stede wonders why he had to go and get himself killed. Meanwhile, Blackbeard begins to realize he’s stuck somewhere between life and death, a place this Hornigold manifestation calls a “gravy basket.”
As the two men banter about the pros and cons of choosing life over death, Hornigold ties a boulder around Ed’s waist and throws it from the cliff they’re standing on, pushing Blackbeard into the ocean. Just as it seems as though he’ll succumb to the waves, Blackbeard proves Bush’s song right: Perhaps there’s a little life in him yet. When Stede lifts the cloth from his face on the Revenge, underwater Ed reacts to the change. Peering into the water, he sees a light from which a fantastical mermaid version of Stede emerges.
In the real world, Stede reacts to Blackbeard’s twitching hand, taking it in his and pleading for him to live as a montage of their moments together rolls alongside Bush’s still-playing song. The final seconds of the episode see Ed’s eyes open, giving Stede hope.
So, how did this moving turn of events come to pass? A team full of creatives was responsible for bringing the captivating and satisfying reunion.
Stede’s Mermaid Tail
“It’s a huge process,” putting together Stede’s practical mermaid look, according to costume designer Gypsy Taylor. She says “it started with me begging everybody” to avoid visual FX and make a tail for the sequence. The orange and glittering look could have followed several different styles, but ultimately, Taylor notes, “I thought if Stede is going to turn into a mermaid, and it’s in Blackbeard’s dream, it’s sort of his vision of a mermaid.”
Considering this, in Taylor’s mind, Blackbeard wouldn’t envision some epic fantastical creature; instead, Stede would “just be like a goldfish. He’d just be like a sweet harmless goldfish.” In putting sketches together of the ensemble, Taylor acknowledges the symbolism of the goldfish motif: “There’s a huge Chinese element that we have coming through, and goldfish in Chinese culture is considered lucky.” As this vision of Stede was responsible for helping bring Ed back to life, that luck was certainly there.
“I thought that was a pretty beautiful thing, that they meet each other under the ocean and then they find each other,” Taylor gushes. “And so I went a little deep on that, but really he’s just a goldfish.” In order to achieve the goldfish mermaid look, Taylor teamed up with props master Hayley Egan, who’s based out of Australia. “She happens to excel at making mermaid tails,” Taylor shares.
After securing Egan’s involvement, Taylor says, “We fit Rhys in a jumbo stretch long skirt and made sure it was really tight so he could still sort of do this dolphin [swimming] action. And then we bought these mono fins, which you can purchase online and put your feet in.” Safety was key, though. “He had to swim really deep and for a really far distance, and he’d never done anything like that before,” Taylor explains. “So it had to be really safe and doable.”
Once that was figured out, Taylor says Egan “cast something like 3,000 hand-sculpted silicon scales. There’s something like five kilograms of glitter in the whole thing. And then we hand-dyed pleated chiffon for all the fins, so that when he was swimming through the water, it would have this magic feel.”
While the scene may play as emotional and romantic, the story behind getting Stede’s mermaid look from Australia to New Zealand was actually quite comical. “[Egan] sliced two suitcases in half, filled [them with the mermaid tail], and then when it went through customs, the customs guy said to her, ‘Are you bringing fish into this country?’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, yes I am.'”
In total, there were four tails, including “a practice tail, a stunt tail, because Rhys had to do quite a few lessons before we got the real one on. And the real one was super precious, and chlorine’s very strong, it eats fabrics away, so we wanted to save the hero one for the hero shot,” Taylor reveals. When it came time to film, “We put him in [the tail], and it was just amazing.” In order to get Darby into the pool, Taylor says a ramp had to be built and the actor was placed in a wheelchair while costumed “and pushed in.” As unglamorous as it sounds, she adds, “it was like Rhys’s dream come true.”
How Kate Bush Entered the Music Mix
It’s safe to say Kate Bush has been having a moment on TV since last year’s “Running Up That Hill” needle drop on Stranger Things, but music supervisor Maggie Phillips says, “This Woman’s Work” was selected before Netflix‘s hit made headlines with their use of the aforementioned song. “When we were placing [the song in the season lineup],” Phillips says, “it was maybe weeks after Stranger Things, and I was worried that we would look like copycats.”
Phillips maintains that the song was in the mix before, but it ultimately “doesn’t matter because really what matters is that Kate Bush is a queen and more and more people need to know her music.”
She says, “From what I heard from David [Jenkins], it was a song that Taika was attached to.” At first, Phillips was reluctant to go with the song due to its prior uses, but “David told me not to worry about [that], that people have short-term memory when it comes to music.”
While she debated with the team over cutting it, “[David] has the visuals in his mind. I don’t. I’m just hearing it with a script and I had no clue how it was going to work until I saw the first cut, and it was beautiful and they picked a part of the song that worked really well with the visuals, so they sort of made it their own,” Phillips explains. “They added a different context to the song that I wouldn’t have been able to imagine myself. So they proved me wrong for sure.”
It’s hard to imagine the scene without Bush’s song. “It changes the way you listen to the song,” Phillips notes. “I got chills watching it and I know that song so well and haven’t gotten chills like that in a long time.” With all of the buildup, “You’re waiting for them to have their romantic moment. You’re waiting for three episodes for that to happen. And so it’s so cathartic when that song comes on, and you see them come together in this fantasy world under the sea. It’s just perfect.” This led her to email Jenkins. “I was like, ‘You were right. I was wrong. But this was beautiful, and thank you so much.'”
Blackbeard’s Wet Wig Woes
Anyone watching the scene unfold would have to notice Blackbeard’s silver tresses weaving through the water, a feat much more difficult behind the scenes than the seemingly simple sequence onscreen. “We filmed that quite late in the season, and so we were really planning and thinking about that all the way through [filming]. I was a bit nervous,” hair and makeup designer Nancy Hennah admits. “I knew that he was going to have to be under the water with his wig on for quite a long time.”
Even with high-quality wig glue, Hennah says, “You can do everything you can to make that wig stay on, but there’s a limited amount of time that the glue will last. So we had to use different products than we would normally use to get the wig down.” Because the product Hennah normally uses to keep hair back in a wig is water soluble, “it melts, and the hair starts coming out from the lace, and it can ruin the whole look of the wig.” She had to come up with a creative fix.
“I glued his own hair back, and then we glued the lace on top of that, and wildly, it lasted right until the very last shot when they were dragging him through the water by the ankles,” Hennah reveals. “The wig just came off completely after they’d finished shooting. And so he came up out of the water, and the wig was off to the side, [and he goes], ‘I think my wig came off.'” She calls the success of the wig “incredible” and “just a fluke really.”
When it came to capturing Darby’s underwater look, it was all about blending the mermaid tail with his skin. “With Stede, Gypsy had a beautiful mermaid tail made, and we did a whole lot of practice with different types of silicon and things that we had to blend that piece between his skin and the tail. We made these pieces of silicon with glitter and things in them that we individually stuck over the top of the mermaid tail,” Hennah details.
Again, there were concerns about getting “things to stick underwater,” but watching the scene come together from behind the camera eased those. “[When] we were standing there on the set that day and watching the monitor, it just was so beautiful that we were all blown away by it, and that tank that they were filming in was a couple of stories deep, and to be out there in that water, it was challenging, and they both did so well. It just went off without a hitch. It was one of those great days where it just worked for everybody.”
Don’t miss what else is in store for the season. Stay tuned for additional interviews and content as the second season of Our Flag Means Death unfolds.
Our Flag Means Death, New Episodes, Thursdays, Max
"To have spent my life holding my hands in tightly hidden fists. To try to understand what it would mean, now, to hold them open. I have always felt ashamed at being witnessed in the act of wanting something I could not have."
Jennifer S. Cheng, 'So We Must Meet Apart'
saw this quote and nearly went feral over how well it fit izzy, so
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