Lagoon Nebula

The Captain only lived for a day. He did not, in life at least, get to be one of the butterflies who come out of a dark cocoon and are themselves, wings spread, colourful and flying. He was like the one insect who is born, has a day to experience everything there is in life, whatever they can manage, however little that is, and then they die. In death, he had another chance to be free like the butterflies.

I wonder how Havers coped after the Captain died. Was he angry at the men who prevented them from meeting again? Did he stay with the body until the medics came to take him away? Did he cry, locked away in his room, as the other men left Button House to go home to their wives?

some of his scenes in season 1 are so blatantly gay, people joke about cap being repressed but he actually didn’t seem particularly repressed at the start of the show at all (“he’d make a very fine soldier”). and by season three it’s clear that everyone knows, save for kitty because her brain doesn’t quite work like that.

and then his jokes and gestures start to become more intentional, he has a greater understanding of how people like him are perceived in the modern day after seeing the wedding, it’s somewhat of an open secret. so by the time he shares how he died, it isn’t a coming out scene, because everybody knew already- it was him confronting his death in the same way they all had. there was no “you like men?”, there wasn’t even a hint of surprise because they all knew and he knew they knew. and they still loved him now that it was even more blatantly out in the open.

And I feel like this was pretty inevitable? I mean, when Ghosts first aired in 2019 it was for a lot of us the first time we had seen these six actors all together again since we were little and watching Horrible Histories - I remember when the first promos for it were coming out it was quite literally described as “Horrible Histories for adults!”. So naturally its audience was always going to be predominantly young people in their late teens/early twenties because those were the people who had been watching Horrible Histories when it was first on air and knew and loved this group of actors. And it was always going to be slightly nerdy young people because you had to be a pretty nerdy ten-year-old to really love and obsess over Horrible Histories (speaking from experience here). And so of course this young, kind of dorky audience were going to watch this show and project fandom culture onto it.

And then obviously having an explicitly queer character in the show would only boost fandom culture. The Captain has been so special to so many of us, not only because he’s just a brilliantly funny and endearing character (and not only because he’s played by the lovely and charming Ben Willbond), but also because he’s just a really refreshing representation of queerness in tv. He isn’t a walking stereotype, and he isn’t some horribly tragic character either, even though he does obviously have this very sad history. There are times when his queerness is taken more seriously, like his love story with Havers, but they also weren’t afraid to show it in a more light-hearted way which I think makes it seem so much more normal and identifiable - it’s often played for laughs but never in a cruel, laugh-because-he’s-gay way, more just a we-have-this-little-inside-joke-with-the-characters kind of way, you know? And his queerness isn’t everything either - as Ben and Larry talked about in that one podcast ep, the Captain isn’t this extremely one-dimensional queer character, there’s so much more to him than that and so much more that defines him. He’s just a wonderfully well written character and it’s no wonder we’ve all latched onto him the way that we have.