Sails and Songs
Black Sails 3.2
Bad decisions this week:
1. Underestimating Eleanor Guthrie.
2. Thinking Eleanor Guthrie is dead (which is also underestimating Eleanor Guthrie).
3. Thinking Flint is dead.
There’s a pattern here. People think somebody’s dead, act accordingly, but unless you have actually seen the body they aren’t dead.
People don’t die on this show unless you see the body.
Also, that’s some really fun PTSD you have there, Flint. Not a surprise at all.
The ships look even more like they escaped from bottles during the storm scene. On the other hand, this show deserves an award for sound design. Their sound design is incredible.
Eleanor Guthrie and Edward Teach…that’s going to be one interesting confrontation.
(The guy playing Teach is good. He’s chewing the deck, but he’s good).
Black Sails 3.3
Okay, so if I was showrunner, Eleanor would be seducing the new Governor, helping him take over Nassau, then conveniently…he shows up dead.
I just write more competent characters.
Teach leads the defense of Nassau, but offering pardons to everyone except Vane seems to be working. Eleanor’s up to something, though, and it can’t just be revenge on her lousy ex.
Meanwhile, Flint and his crew are becalmed. Badly becalmed. Running out of food, running out of water, no sign of land. The very worst situation a sailing ship can be in.
The very worst.
This week’s yell at the screen “Don’t trust Eleanor Guthrie.”
Doctor Who 2.6 “The Interstellar Song Contest”
Eurovision is this week, which no doubt they considered in their timing. The Doctor and Belinda find themselves on the Harmony space station, home to an interstellar version of Eurovision.
Hosted by a guy they bring out of cryo every year just to host.
But Hellian terrorists have found a way to kill not just everyone on the station, but the three trillion viewers.
The Doctor…is displeased. And between that threat and thinking Belinda’s dead, he goes all Good Man Goes To War on the terrorists.
(Yes, he regrets it. No, he doesn’t kill them. They are justified…not in their actions, of course, but in their cause).
This isn’t a musical episode…there absolutely is music, but it’s not actually a musical episode. We also see a bunch of completely new species, some of which I’m thinking we might see again (the Hellians could be a throwaway, or…)
Beautifully done, if not quite up to the standard of the last two episodes.
Black Sails 3.4
Well, Eleanor isn’t quite seducing the new Governor, but she does seem to have him wrapped around her little finger.
Vane flees after blowing up even more of that poor fort. That poor fort. It keeps going kaboom and kablooie.
Meanwhile, Flint and his crew find a desert island.
Oops.
It’s not a desert island (in this context, “desert” doesn’t mean sandy, it means uninhabited).
It’s thoroughly inhabited, by a group of maroons (escaped slaves) who really don’t want the wider world to know they are there.
They’re in no hurry to kill the pirates, though, so one has to wonder what, exactly, they’re up to here…