I think it sounds like an acknowledgment that in fact, if looked at from literally any other perspective than “no more people died in the last episode, wheee!” the end of the show is a tragedy. Flint and Madi were betrayed by the one closest to them, and all their work was essentially thrown out the window as if it meant nothing when in fact it could have meant everything to generations of people. Flint is enslaved, Madi’s left with her authority undermined among her own people, her lover become foreign to her, standing there telling her that he’s sold her friend.

When you get right down to it, the list just goes on and on. The Walrus crew is dead, the ship itself is blown up, Silver throws away an entire life he could have lived with people who would have cared about him, loved him even, and all for a scant few years of peace in that area before the British Empire decided it wanted its islands back. All of that – for what? When they could have had so, so much more. Yes, Flint is alive. He’s also being locked away from the world, condemned to be nothing more than a monster in a children’s story, exactly the way he feared, what he stood for forgotten, his reasons disregarded, no progress made, all those people he lost dead for nothing. Vane is dead, and nothing came of his death, not the revolution he wanted to spark, not the abolition of slavery, not even safety for Eleanor if he still wanted that. Eleanor died, and Nassau burned again, and the slaves on those plantations suffered horribly, and for fucking what? For one man to say, this fight isn’t worth fighting, it doesn’t matter to me, I’m ending it. For he and Max and Madame Guthrie to decide to strangle the cat rather than dealing with the root cause of the problem to begin with, as if there were only one solution to the riddle?