Black Sails

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**Ratius**

Anyone watching this to date?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sails_%28TV_series%29

Watched the first 4 episodes and am loving it.
Has a sort of GoTs feel to it, lots of intrigue and backstabbing but with a dark humour to it too.
Some of the characters are excellent, Flint, Jack, Billy etc and the production values are quite high.

If you're easily offended probably best to stay away though, violent, language and nudity all in the mix

**nels1031**

Yeah, I'm enjoying this show. Not as much fighting as I'd like, but it's still pretty awesome.

I like how they put historical pirates into the show. Charles Vane, Jack Rackham and such.

One big surprise for me :

Spoiler:

**Ouze**

I'm watching it, and I like it. It's the current boobs and blood show on Starz, and if you liked the previous B&B they ran, Spartacus, you should watch this as well.

My favorite is that tiny mean woman that doesn't show much of her face.

Also

Spoiler:

**Blacksails**

I'll have to check this show out.

Great things often share great names.

Not that I'm biased.

**nels1031**

They never show his death, they leave it very ambiguous but my theory is :

Spoiler:

I'd say this show has so far only had about 1/4th of the blood and boobs as Spartacus.

It's really a neat show, as I was a huge fan of Treasure Island( the book and all it's adaptations) and it's fun to connect the dots on how the characters are now and how they'll end up. For instance, I want to see what Allardyce was like before he became a treasure marker, how John Silver lost his leg etc.

I also dig the hurdy gurdy song and the visuals during the opening sequence.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ouze wrote:
.

My favorite is that tiny mean woman that doesn't show much of her face.

Yeah, she's an interesting lady, and based on one of the most well known female pirates!

**Ouze**

Well, when I said it was a B&B show that wasn't a negative, I like B&B shows. I would agree it's they have restrained themselves more that Spartacus but I think my classification was accurate.

I have intentionally not read anything about the characters in the show because I want to avoid spoilers. I did a lot of reading when I was watching Rome and was unhappy that I knew how some things would unfold. I mean, I obviously knew how Caesar was going to wind up, but I didn't know about Cicero or Pompey.

I imagine that if you're well educated, you probably don't enjoy very much historically based television. Luckily as a product of the 80s NYC school system, I am unburdened by that knowledge.

**nels1031**

Ouze wrote:
I think my classification was accurate.

I think it's accurate as well, it's just not as over the top as Spartacus is all I meant.

Ouze wrote:
I have intentionally not read anything about the characters in the show because I want to avoid spoilers. I did a lot of reading when I was watching Rome and was unhappy that I knew how some things would unfold. I mean, I obviously knew how Caesar was going to wind up, but I didn't know about Cicero or Pompey.

Snap, sorry if I spoiled anything! I should've been more liberal with spoiler tags.

**Ouze**

No, you didn't at all, I was just speaking in general.

So... I always thought that pirates were essentially ruled by their captain, but here it looks like the balance of power is a lot more equal. Is that historically accurate?

**Seaward**

Ouze wrote:
No, you didn't at all, I was just speaking in general.

So... I always thought that pirates were essentially ruled by their captain, but here it looks like the balance of power is a lot more equal. Is that historically accurate?

To an extent, actually, yes. Pirate captains didn't have any sort of institutional support behind them, the way naval or even merchant captains did, so a pirate crew mutinying didn't have much to fear from anybody; if you were on a British frigate and mutinied, you knew the Royal Navy would never stop hunting you, but if you were on a pirate ship and mutinied, who was going to care? Not to mention pirate captains didn't have marines around to put down mutinous crews, half the reason navies in the Age of Sail put marines on ships to begin with.

That's actually one of the prevailing reasons men turned to piracy; you ended up getting treated a lot better, on average, than you would have been in the Royal Navy or wherever else. The captain/crew relationship was much more of a bargain situation than it was in a national navy or even the merchant service.

**Ratius**

I didnt know they were based off real life people, very interesting.

I know nothing of the Starz network and didnt know they had done Spartacus.
However, I think BS is way above it however in terms of interest and general "class".
Fully accept it has a bit of blood and boobage to it but its not as OTT as Spartacus.