Flint. Rogers. Silver. That bloody Urca gold. It’s all come down to this, the final episode of Starz’s damn fine pirate drama, Black Sails.
As much as we’re not looking forward to saying goodbye to Nassau and its rebellious inhabitants, we are curious about how it will all go down. Who will end up with that gold? Is there any hope for Billy Bones? Will anyone get a happy ever after?
Co-showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Steinberg (Jericho, Human Target) tells EW fans should expect closure, completion, and that we’ll all leave things in a place that feels “gratifying.”
“I think every one of our finales so far has been an exercise for us in how to top the last one, in terms of scope and speed and in terms of fun,” says Steinberg of episode “XXXVIII,” which he also directed. “I think we got this one over the bar too.”
So does that mean they got to do something in this final episode they didn’t get to do before?
“There weren’t a lot of things left to do this season,” admits Steinberg. “We’d done ship boardings before, but they’d always been restricted in some way — a restricted point of view or the tactics of it. The one thing we felt we didn’t want to leave on the table was to do one in all its glory, so we pulled out all the stops and did the biggest one we could think of.”
Should we worry about any characters breaking our (or their) hearts at some point during the episode?
“It’s hard to say,” Steinberg says carefully, avoiding spoilers. “We’re saying goodbye to some relationships that we, in making the show and the actors in building it, that I think the audience, in going along with it, have invested in and they were never built to make it to the end of this road. This was always intended to be a tragedy and I think at a certain point you have to embrace that and do the best version that you can, so there’s a fair amount of heartbreak — if you’re in the show at this point, there’s a fair amount of heartbreak in the end.”
The series finale of Black Sails airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on Starz.