Anon, I don’t even know. Not making that comparison is like, idk, not analyzing that Pearl in The Scarlet Letter is named for the biblical verse or that Nick in the Great Gatsby is queer enough to sleep with dudes. It’s explicit enough in the text that there is an existing comparison to be made between Peter Ashe and Silver that they use the same dialogue. They use the same justification! Like, I hate Peter Ashe as much as the next person, but he is very clear that he did it because Alfred Hamilton threatened his future and threatened his daughter. How is that any less of a justification than doing it for Madi and the future that Silver wants with her? He is just as clear! He says to Flint that he sees a future with Madi and wants it. It’s right there in the text. It’s not like, “ho ho, i want to find the worst possible read on Silver because he is a mustachioed villain.” It is because everyone has a reason for doing what they’re doing. If you’re extending sympathy to Silver because he is afraid and wants to save Madi and is trying to have a future where he saves lives, you should be able extend that sympathy to Peter Ashe for wanting the same things. If you are using Silver’s practicality as it regards Madi and Flint’s end goals to justify what he does, you should be able to give that same acknowledgment to Peter Ashe who, again, does the exact same thing. Just because we see the fall out of what Peter Ashe does and not the full fall out of what Silver does doesn’t mean that those things don’t happen.
One of the moral and ethical complexities of this show is that you can have good reasons for what you are doing, really sympathetic understandable reasons, and still do terrible things. The good sympathetic understandable reasons don’t make the terrible things less terrible. They don’t make the people who pay the price of them less hurt. Does anyone who burned in Charlestown or any of the other towns Flint sacked give a solitary shit why he did it? No. Is the first runaway slave to get turned away from the Maroon camps or returned as per the terms of the treaty going to give a single fuck that Max and Jack and Madame Guthrie and John Silver made it so that the treaty was part of the terms of surrender in a war the Maroons hadn’t actually lost? I doubt it. Is that person going to care that Julius wants to preserve the things they have instead of risking the future? God knows I wouldn’t.
AND THEN. Yeah, let’s get into Alfred Hamilton and John Silver because this is where I think things get really interesting. Let’s throw Hal Gates in there too, because he does this to Flint as well.
There are three pivotal moments in Flint’s life where someone looked at him and essentially said, “What I want matters more than what you want and I am going to make you go away to get it.” Do they all have good reasons for it? I’m sure Alfred Hamilton thought the preservation of his name, power, and influence was more than enough reason to make an officer from the lower classes and his troublesome daughter in law go the fuck away. But do we think that? No. Because it hurt characters we’re invested in. Because the reason isn’t good enough for what he did and he only ruined three lives. Hal Gates wanted Flint and Miranda to go away because Flint maybe possibly killed Billy and didn’t care about his men. Were his reasons good? Maybe. To Billy, sure. To Dufresne and Degroot and the rest of the crew, yes. Good enough to make it so they thought that Flint should hang for killing him.
So what makes John Silver’s actions different? His reasons are good to him. He wants to save Madi at all costs. He wants not to go to war. These are all fantastic reasons, much like Gates’ reasons are fantastic reasons. Alfred Hamilton’s reasons are excellent reasons to him. But the end result for Flint is the same: he loses all the things he’s worked for, he is made to go away, and someone else dictates the terms of his story.
Silver has his reasons for wanting the war to end. Max has her reasons. Julius has his. Flint and Madi and the pirates and maroons who came to fight England had theirs for wanting it to continue. Everyone counted up the costs to what they were doing and decided those costs were worth it and that put them into opposition with each other. That doesn’t make one side objectively right or wrong. It means that you take the reasons the show presents and compare them to your own ethics and morals and fucking engage with the text on those terms. And, much like the show, everyone watching it has their reasons for their reaction and those reactions are entirely valid based as they are in our own lived experiences and our beliefs and our histories.
This is why that assertion that the people criticizing Silver for what he does in the ending are flattening the ending or losing the moral complexity of it by comparing what he does to previous antagonists really really irk me: the ethical complexity of the show is LITERALLY the point of the comparisons. Good people do terrible things. Terrible people do good things. Everyone contains multitudes. Everyone’s reasons for what they are doing are good and justifiable to them. Whether those reasons are good or justifiable to anyone/everyone else is the one of the points of the show.
Hey! Really good and well discussed meta above, however I’d like to contest something. What Silver did in the end may be comparable to both Alfred Hamilton and Peter Ashe’s actions in terms of “he had his own excellent reasons and so he sent Flint away,” and so they may look similar on the surface but they are absolutely not comparable when you consider the way those characters felt about Flint. Alfred Hamilton considered Flint to be disposable. He probably barely gave him any consideration. Peter Ashe betrayed both Thomas and Flint in the process and separated them for ten years, and when Flint showed up at his door asking for pardons he continued the ruse and thought it a better idea to expose Flint to London’s ridicule and judgement rather than admit to what he did and tell him about Thomas still being alive. (You could argue Silver does this for half of s4 and you would be right. Except Silver comes clean and Peter does not. The threat of Alfred Hamilton no longer exists. He could tell Flint, and yet he doesn’t.)
The closest betrayal to Silver’s is probably Gates. Gates loved Flint, in some ways, and Flint loved him in some ways. This betrayal is also completely different to the ones mentioned above. I think its doing a disservice to both Gates and Silver to throw them together into this pile of shit.
Silver literally reunited Flint with the man he loves. Silver did the exact opposite of what both Peter and Alfred did. It still served to take Flint out of the picture but it still has to be taken into consideration when judging the moral rightness vs. wrongness of his actions, and especially when considering their relationship. It’s not the same thing. It’s not. It might stem from the same motivation (to protect their own), but the way they go about it and the repercussions that Flint ultimately faces is completely different. It is absolutely a betrayal, but it’s not of the same kind. Gates and Silver both loved Flint, and wanted on some level to keep him safe. This is an aspect that needs to be considered and I don’t think that’s contestable. It’s still paternalistic and it is most definitely robbing Flint of any agency, but the underlying relationships between these characters definitely have to be considered. That’s what’s being flattened when both Silver and Gates are lumped together with Alfred Hamilton.
Let’s also remember: Silver sent six men to kill Flint and tried to kill him himself literally hours before he reunites him with the man he loves. Reuniting him with Thomas wasn’t the goal, which we know because he doesn’t do it when Flint is of use to him; reuniting him with Thomas was the carrot to keep him away from restarting the war.
But in the end, i would argue that whatever the feelings motivating the actions don’t actually matter to the person being disposed of. We don’t know how Peter Ashe felt about James McGraw or Thomas, just that when weighed against his wife and daughter, they were worth less to him. Flint, when weighed against Billy, was worth less to Gates. Flint, when weighed against Madi’s survival, was worth less to Silver.
The relationships are context for the tragedy but they don’t actually change the action.
I’m not saying they change the action, I’m saying they should change the way the action should be judged. In the same way Flint killing Alfred Hamilton and Flint killing Gates is not the same thing.
I also fundamentally disagree that Thomas was a….carrot. I think if the only goal was to keep Flint from starting the war, Silver could have just killed him. That’s surest possible way to keep him from restarting the war, wouldn’t you say? Why bother keeping him alive? Why bother hunting Thomas down? Why bother offering days and weeks and months of your time to convince Flint to let the war go other than just outright shooting him? Why bother taking Flint to Savannah at all? All of this is active effort in the middle of a war. Keeping him alive is Silver going out of his way to keep him alive.
The way I see it, if Flint is alive, re-uniting him with Thomas was at least some part of the goal. If the goal was to get rid of him, there’s a sure fire way to do so. If Flint is alive, there is something that stays Silver’s hand. There’s is something that has him hunt Thomas Hamilton down, there is something that has Silver go on the ship to Savannah and deliver Flint to Thomas. That’s a thing that should be considered. That’s the way I see it. I don’t understand at all how that can be ignored. There’s complexity here that is being missed out on. That’s the whole point.
This is addressed in the show. The reason Silver can’t kill Flint is named Madi, who would have continued the war in his name if Silver had martyred him by shooting him. I don’t deny that he cared about Flint or that Flint cared about him, but that wasn’t what stayed his hand, as evidenced by the fact that literally a few hours earlier, he was fine with sending men to kill Flint and then tried to do it himself. The difference is that in the time between then and the end of the finale, Flint had very publicly won a major battle in the war against England and had the loyalty of a lot of people from that, which meant that he could no longer be painted as a traitor to the cause. Instead, he had to be gotten rid of in a way that made it seem like he’d disappeared willingly. No one’s ignoring the complexity of anything, we’re simply saying that Silver had reasons other than fondness to do what he did.
Esp yes to what @flintsredhair said above:
The difference is that in the time between then and the end of the finale, Flint had very publicly won a major battle in the war against England and had the loyalty of a lot of people from that, which meant that he could no longer be painted as a traitor to the cause.
Silver could not afford to let Flint become a martyr or be seen to be betrayed.
As for the grand gesture of reuniting Thomas and Flint- however late, at however convenient a time- please let us not forget that it was essentially condemning Thomas and Flint to a life of slavery. Oh it’s dressed up and made to look palatable: but it is NOT a paradise of any sorts, from any angle. It is a slave labour camp that we know houses not just murderers but also people who are ‘inconvenient’- i.e. those who have not committed any crime at all, except that of violating society’s codes.
Also, idk, this may sound Strange and Weird to people on this site, but y’know what? True Love does not make up for everything else wrong with this world. At best, reuniting Thomas and Flint helps in the sense they no longer have to face the world’s injustices alone (esp in the case of Thomas, in Flint’s case it is more complex- he is denied one kind of solidarity and given another), but it does not change the fact that those injustices exist and must be faced and lived with and fought against. Sending Flint to the slave camp sends him to a place where he is possibly literally without any resources to fight. You’ve devastated him emotionally, robbed him of his allies and friends and then- sent him into enslavement and it’s supposed to be magically OK because…True Love???
Thomas and James are people who existed before they met each other, who had principles and causes and ideals before they met each other; yes they probably profoundly shaped each other’s thinking: but they exist outside of their relationship with each other too. So think on that for a second or five and then consider what it means to keep these characters in perpetual enslavement and then call that A Good Thing just because they are together.
But when did the parallel between Silver’s decision and Alfred’s became a bad thing? O_O Some of the most prominent s*ilverfl*nt blogs have done it in the past. The parallel *is* there. The reasons are different, but the parallel is there. Why is it a problem now? Because a non-s*ilverfl*nt shipper has done it? captain-flint(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159649086888/flint-is-gone-retired-from-the-account-he-was gaysails(.)tumblr(.)com/post/159321573042/i-dont-know-why-you-did-this-but-i-know-you-did
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