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londonspirit · 6 months

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Paste Magazine: Going back to the fan reaction to Season 1, a second season seemed assured. But then major management and content shifts were happening at WBDiscovery and Max, which delayed the pick-up. When you finally did get the Season 2 order, did you fundamentally change your thoughts about the story you wanted to tell?

David Jenkins: No. I think they’ve been a dream to work with. Every time I’ve made something, there’s been major corporate upheaval and I am starting to think that every time anybody makes something, particularly now, there’s major corporate upheaval. The first season of this television show took place in one era. The second took place in still another era that has since ended. And if there was going to be a third season, it would take place in an entirely new era.Throughout it all, we’ve had the same execs. Suzanna Makkos has been with the show for both of those seasons and they’ve been nothing but supportive.

In terms of us in the [writers’] room, we just try to mind our own business, and make sure we can pay for everything.

Paste: As the season has progressed, have you been surprised by the audience’s reaction to any particular story lines?

Jenkins: Well, I’m not trying not to be as plugged in as I was in the first season. I’m just trying to let it have its own life. But I love how excited everybody was about Izzy (Con O’Neill) singing. Everyone wants the full “La Vie en Rose” recording from Con, which is beautiful.

I love that Ed and Stede getting together and having sex was not a titanic explosion. It was more like, “Of course they’re gonna have sex. They’re together, so that beat is gonna happen.” And I love the general acceptance of Buttons (Ewen Bremner) turning into a bird, which is the most ludicrous story point.

Paste: Our Flag Means Death has such a passionate LGBTQ fandom and that audience has been burnt many times before with promised “ships” that have ended badly, or with the painful “bury your gays” trope. Going into “Mermen,” this fandom was sweating with anxiety, but you gifted them a love letter. Did their expectations feel especially weighty when writing the finale?

Jenkins: It felt like the opposite, and the wind was in our sails. We could fully go into these storylines with all of these different characters and [know] people are invested in all of these relationships. Doing things when we’re writing that excite us and guessing—most of the time, correctly—that fans will love it is a great feeling. The thing we’re trying to do, in the room, is [ask]: do we like it, does it surprise us, and does it feel exciting? And the room has a spectrum of sexualities, so it’s just making sure that, “Hey, we doin’ okay? Does everybody feel good about what we’re putting out there?”

When you have a show, you run the Deathstar, essentially. You’re shooting this beam out into the culture, that if you aren’t paying attention, you could do a lot of damage. I think particularly for this season, that “bury your gays” thing… I didn’t want to end on a downbeat for Ed and Stede. We did that in the first season. I like that there’s a lot of different flavors. It’s even a little melancholy because the Republic of Pirates got blown up. But there’s still more good things.

Paste: In the breaking of the season, how much changed while plotting out the season to the finale?

Jenkins: I wanted to start at the Republic of Pirates this season and end at the Republic of Pirates. And I knew I wanted the Republic of Pirates to be destroyed, ultimately. Within that, we are making a one-hour show on a half hour budget, on a half hour schedule. The questions then become: if we have a bar fight, and you have everyone fight, how big can we make it? And if we have everything blow up, how much can we blow up? Or if we have a fight, how big of a fight and what parts of the fight can you actually show? It’s about making something that felt like it had some heft and size to it. In the room, talking through it, as a showrunner I’m thinking, “Oh, man, we’re gonna put these department heads through hell. They’re gonna have to work so hard.” You already feel bad.

Paste: That beach battle with Ed, Zheng, and Stede fighting in parallel with the moving cameras was impressive.

Jenkins: It was the entire team working so well together when everybody’s fried by the end of the season. Like you hand the script to [costume designer] Gypsy Taylor and she sees that she has to come up with 200 English uniforms. She blanches, but then she nails it. And it’s an amazing team across the board. I think we all pull together because we like it. We want it to feel epic.

Paste: Was there much debate about any particular story line for the finale?

Jenkins: In terms of ending this season, it all felt right just in talking through it when we were in the room. It felt pretty intuitive. When you get to the third act of the story, things kind of settle in. There’s gonna be a funeral. We always knew we wanted a wedding at the end of the second season. And I knew that I wanted Stede and Ed to start an inn together. So once you have those beats, it’s kind of locked in. But I wasn’t prepared for the emotional weight that I feel when the crew sails off together and the parents are watching from the inn. It’s just lovely.

Paste: Speaking of that funeral, Con O’Neill played Izzy’s journey across two seasons so beautifully. When did it come to you that his last words to Ed about just being himself were going to have such an impact?

Jenkins: It’s kind of a strange arc in that I knew we were going to put him through all these things, and I knew he would ultimately die. But I think him becoming a father figure to Ed in the last episode didn’t really dawn on us until we were breaking the last episode. Asking what would this man say to Ed at the end because they’ve been together through everything? He went from a troubled and downtrodden employee to a jilted lover to a discarded employee, to someone that is just trying to find his footing again—no pun intended—to actually becoming this guy’s parental figure on some level. And he’s one person who kind of raised Ed right, because Blackbeard usually kills his parental figures. So, it felt right and it felt like that’s how the mentor dies. The mentor in a story usually dies in the second act and then our hero has to go on and try to do it without them. It felt like the right journey for Izzy and a gratifying one for Condon.

Paste: OFMD doesn’t have a third season pick-up yet, so it’s a difficult feat for writers to thread the needle in a finale that gives audiences closure but also leaves enough story to continue.

Jenkins: I don’t think it was a very hard thing to do. I think it was more that I felt a responsibility to leave Ed and Stede in a good place, at least for now. It’s not gonna go well. They’re not going to run a business well. Ed’s too much of a talker. Stede can’t focus. It’s gonna be challenging.

Paste: So you have more stories to tell?

Jenkins: For a third season, I have a clear idea of the way through that so it will be good, big, and interesting. But not too big, Max.

#our flag means death season 2 #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #spoiler #our flag means death #ofmd #david jenkins #interview #paste magazine article

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goddessofthundathighs · 5 years

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Chapter 3

The rain subsided shortly after O’Bannon made it back to his Key West home. The time was now two am and he knew that his wife and and daughters were sound asleep, all of them having to get up for work and school in the next few hours. He placed a call to Javier Perez, his head of security detail to dispose of the young woman’s body. Perez was ex-military and had worked for O’Bannon for the last 10 years. He was a short gentleman with broad shoulders and curly black hair. He arrived to the mansion shortly after O’Bannon, wasting no time loading the body into the back of his SUV. He lifted the body with a grunt, careful not to let the sheet unravel. He tucked away the stray strands of hair that peeked out before carefully laying the body across the back seat.

“Thank you, Javier.”

“No problem, Senator.”

“I owe you my life.”

“In more ways than one,” Javier jokes. “Get some sleep, Senator. I’ll take care of things from here.” The two men exchanged pleasantries before going their separate ways. As far as O’Bannon was concerned, this whole thing was a distant memory and life as he knew it was back to normal.

Perez drove for about 20 minutes before finally coming to a stop. He hoisted the body from the backseat of his truck and dumped it in the gulf.

“Good riddance,” he muttered as he watched the body float away. He stood and watched for several minutes before finally driving away. With the way the current was rushing, it would take weeks for the body to be discovered by anyone, provided the sharks and gators didn’t get to her first.

The lights of the medical examiner’s office glowed bright white, casting an almost ethereal glow. Detectives Ramirez and Fitzgerald followed the coroner to the exam room, passing several operating rooms along the way.

“A group of guys fishing caught her in their net. With the way her body has swelled, she’s been dead at least a week.”

“Did she have any form of ID on her?” Ramirez asked.

“No, she’s a Jane Doe.”

“We’ll check the missing person’s database. What’s the cause of death?” Fitzgerald asked as his eyes roamed the body. Although swollen and severely decomposed, he was sure he had seen the young woman before, but wasn’t exactly sure where.

“Jane Doe died of asphyxiation. She has the indentation of handprints on her neck as well as traces of her attacker’s skin under her nails. She tried to fight back, but was unsuccessful.”

Fitzgerald studied the woman more closely, paying particularly close attention to the pearl ring she wore on her right ring finger. He had definitely seen that before, on the finger of Mrs. Maria O’Bannon. His eyebrows knitted tight together as he attempted to piece together what was going on. He made a mental note to place a call to the chief as well as to the senator’s office to see if either of them could be of some assistance.

“Everything alright, Fitz? You look bothered about something,” Ramirez asked as they left the office.

“Something isn’t adding up. The ring Jane Doe was wearing belongs to Senator O’Bannon’s wife. I’ve seen her wearing it the few times I was on security detail at the Capitol.”

“You thinking the senator is having an affair?”

“Or maybe Jane Doe worked for them and got a little carried away in Mrs. O’Bannon’s jewelry box. He’s giving a press conference later on about the upcoming election. I’ll see what I can find out from there.”

Back at the police station, Detective Ramirez was reviewing the footage from the traffic cameras the night of the accident. He enhanced and edited the video until he was able to make out the driver of the black Mercedes Benz Derek Jenkins remembered seeing.

“Chief! You’re gonna want to take a look at this!” he yelled once the video was fully enhanced.

“What the hell did you do, O’Bannon?!” Agent Quintin Moralez screamed at the solemn looking man sitting across from him.

“It was an accident. I-I didn’t mean to kill her. You gotta help me, Q. This can’t get back to Maria.”

“Stop your whining. I’ll try to pull some strings and see if I can get the heat off of you, but in the meantime, sit your Cuban ass down somewhere. Go home to your wife and children and act like things are normal.” O’Bannon nods, lifting from his seat in front of Agent Q’s desk before quietly exiting. Agent Q sits down at his desk, pulling out his cell phone to make a call.

“Yeah, Chief Monroe. It’s Agent Moralez with the CIA. I need some of your men to do a little dirty work for me.

In the days following the accident, Derek Jenkins tried his best to carry on a normal life. After Tameka’s death, he stepped down from the senate, choosing to be an alderman for the state of Florida. The paycut and new job title meant that he would have more time to spend at home with his son, making sure that life for him remained as normal as possible. When David was 8 years old, he expressed interest in joining the Little League baseball team in their community. Derek was apprehensive, but knew that it would be a great experience for David. After his first practice, David fell in love and it wasn’t long before Derek had hopped on the bandwagon too. He made friends with Dillon and Todd Chambers, the sons of their next door neighbor Margo Chambers. The trio was inseparable, which angered Derek because Margo was always trying to spark up conversation with him. Though he knew she her actions came from a genuine place, he just didn’t have it in him to get close to another woman. David’s death, however only made him close himself off more. He started drinking again, often having to have a bottle of Jack a day in order to function.

“Alderman Jenkins?” a chipper voice pulled him out of his thoughts and brought him back to the present. He was back in his office and his assistant was there to go over the budget for his campaign as well as confirm his attendance to Senator O’Bannon’s press conference later that day.

“I apologize Naomi, please continue.” As the young woman continued firing off what was on the agenda before her, Derek couldn’t help but lose himself in his thoughts again. It had been a week since the accident and he still hadn’t heard anything from Officers Ramirez and Fitzgerald. He hoped that they hadn’t forgotten about him and that his son’s killer wouldn’t get off scot free.

He wanted justice to be served. He wanted to make everyone involved pay for what they had done to his family.

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