‘Black Sails’ season 3, episode 3 review: Have we hit a turning point for Captain Flint?

Last week’s new episode of “Black Sails” was one of the show’s finest examples of pirate culture we have seen yet. There was a struggle at sea, terrible weather, and a food shortage that made it clear that an already-mad Captain Flint could be getting even closer to madness in due time.

With tonight’s episode, however, we saw the show offer up something that they really have not in some time: A glimmer of hope, an opportunity that our Captain can be something more than a man suffering to overcome his demons and lost in a sea of imaginations on Miranda. Sure, the Captain killed suspected food thieves, but his reaction at the end may have been cathartic. These were tears of many deaths, many hardships, and not knowing if he could move on. This, coupled with some sharks as food and land, may be enough to metaphorically turn the tide for this character as we get into the midway point of the season.

Elsewhere, we were at least slightly more compelled by the tale of Woodes and Blackbeard than last week, mostly because we don’t correlate it now to getting ripped out of a tempest. Woodes is trying to come up with ways to avoid being targeted, and having a price on Vane is an interesting step. Maybe they’re all twiddling their thumbs while we wait to see what Spain ends up doing, but for now, the political cat-and-mouse game is fun and it’s certainly a different side of Blackbeard than we expected on “Black Sails.”

In the end, we do find this season to be especially compelling, with the main reason being that we have some sort of drama and stakes in every place. Sometimes, it is as serious as the condition; at other times, it seeing characters like Anne and Max trying to reconcile who they are as people with what they could be together. Grade: A-.