I can't stop. Now I'm thinking about how similar Black Sails' approach to history is to the way it approaches Treasure Island.
Just like with the historical record, it doesn't limit itself to being perfectly faithful to Treasure Island. It avoids setting a precedent where every minor discrepancy becomes a flaw.
Just like the historical record, events are grounded in and recall the shape of the book, but are distinct enough to frame Treasure Island as yet another distortion of pirate history. It uses these differences deliberately, to call its own source text into question. The differences are a feature, not a bug.
And they take this theme of narrative ambiguity and weave into the story by creating an ensemble of morally ambiguous characters. Which means you can choose to follow any major character, and watch the story change depending on who you're following, who you relate to.
It's a show about the subjectivity and ambiguity of stories/history told through a collection of ambiguous, subjective perspectives. I can't.
When you go to read Treasure Island, everyone is now a potentially unreliable narrator (including RLS himself). The novel itself now feels like an unreliable distortion of whatever truly happened 20 years after the show ends. Just like the historical record now feels like an unreliable distortion of the real, forgotten history.
Again, I can't name one other TV adaptation that deconstructs its source texts like this. That finds a balance between "this has to line up perfectly" and "we're doing whatever we want" and then makes a point out of that space at every opportunity. Its themes are just so perfectly tied to its structure, its form, its genre(s). Its so good it makes me angry.
