Thumbs Up, Baby 👎

1. reporting to ed about the crew's discontent

this one is i think the most straightforwardly weird to me as an interpretation. the idea i see from a lot of people is that when izzy goes to ed and tells him the crew doesn't want to throw treasure overboard, he is throwing himself on the grenade: he knows that ed will lash out violently at whoever gives him this information, so he's doing it before anyone on the crew can.

but there is a pretty obvious problem here, which is that if izzy believes ed will react to news of the crew rejecting an order by becoming violent toward them, and he wants to protect the crew from violence, then telling ed about the crew's sentiments is the absolute worst possible thing to do. if he thinks ed is likely to want to punish the crew, he is directly putting them in danger by doing this! if he wants to protect them from the wrath of blackbeard then he ought to be doing everything in his power to make sure ed does not find out the crew feels this way! talk the crew out of it, dump the treasure overboard himself, try to distract ed with other matters, literally anything.

maybe you think none of that would work, and ed would eventually find out anyway. in that case, if izzy really is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the crew, then what he should do is obvious: tell ed he himself is the one who doesn't want to throw the treasure overboard. present it as an idea that came from him, not from the crew. that way ed has no reason at all to even consider retaliating against the crew and izzy could be confident any consequences would fall only on him. and it would be a great scene! we in the audience would understand exactly what he was doing and why!

but he doesn't do that. he either does not think there is any chance of ed becoming violent toward the crew because of this, or he doesn't care at this point if it happens, at least not enough to try to stop it.

2. getting shot

the idea here is that in the scene where ed marches out on deck to point his gun at each crewmember and ask why the atmosphere on the ship is poisoned, the reason izzy finally shouts "pack it in" or "fucking end" or whatever it is he says, and then goes on to blame the atmosphere on the ship on "your feelings for stede bonnet," is that he cannot bear to allow ed to endanger the crew, and he is willing to take his life in his hands in order to confront ed and put a stop to this so the crew can be safe.

in this case i totally understand where you could come to that conclusion if you heard someone describe the episode. but watch the actual scene and it is clearly not what's happening.

because izzy does not do anything at all while ed is threatening the crew. watch it again. ed pulls out his gun and points it at each named member of the crew in turn for a total of about 15 seconds, which is a fairly long time on tv, and the entire time izzy just stands there stoically, watching what's happening, looking really tired and done with this shit (valid of him!) but not even particularly worried about what's going to happen. ed then turns the gun on himself, no longer threatening the crew, and then and only then does izzy act.

it would be very easy to rewrite this scene so that izzy actually did intervene to stop ed threatening the crew! all you'd have to do is change the timing of when he speaks up! if the writers still really wanted to show ed's suicidal ideation, they could have had the scene start with ed putting the gun under his own chin and then had him move to threatening the crew so izzy could put a stop to it at that point. if you really wanted to make the point you could have had izzy interrupt ed's tirade by physically stepping between fang and the gun. i can easily imagine that version of the scene and it would be really cool and badass! but it's not what happened.

(bit of a tangent here but one way you COULD interpret the scene is that while izzy is NOT trying to protect the crew from ed, he IS trying to protect ed from himself, despite knowing he's endangering himself in the process. that's not how i personally read it for a couple reasons - izzy waits several seconds after ed turns the gun on himself before reacting at all, and the later "dreamed you killed me" scene really reads to me like that's the very first time izzy realizes ed is seriously suicidal. the reasons i think izzy speaks up when he does are kind of complicated and i'll have to get into that in another post sometime. anyway though i do think that interpretation would be reasonable, unlike the one where he's protecting the crew.)

3. asking jim and archie to kill him

this is where we first see izzy in the next episode, where they've got him hidden in the secret room and he's screaming "kill me." the idea is that he believes ed will violently punish jim, archie and frenchie for defying orders by keeping him alive, and he would rather die himself than see them come to harm, so he's screaming in hopes of forcing them to kill him before ed can find him.

this has the same problem as scene #1 above: if the scenario izzy's trying to avoid is having ed discover him alive, then screaming is the absolute worst possible thing to do. every time he screams there's a significant chance ed will hear him and know what's going on - we know that's a risk because of how desperately jim and archie try to shush him! again, what izzy is doing is actively endangering the crew. i do not hold this against him at all, he's going through a lot here and i'd be screaming too. izzy is in severe physical pain, his chances of survival are at best a coinflip anyway, and he is on record as believing that being vulnerable in front of others is a fate worse than death. it's not surprising he wants them to kill him under the circumstances. it's not for their protection, though.

but imagine a version of the scene where izzy is heroically biting back his screams to avoid putting his caretakers in danger. imagine him instead telling jim and archie in a whisper to kill him so they can stay safe. that's easy to picture, right? and it would be a really affecting scene? that's what we'd have seen if the point of this were that izzy was trying to sacrifice himself for the crew's sake.

(there's part of me that actually kind of wishes we got something like that version of the scene. i think it would do a lot to strengthen izzy's redemption arc if at some point during red flags we saw izzy actually recognizing how big a risk jim and frenchie were taking for his sake and being touched by it. but the fact is we don't.)

4. trying to pick fights with stede

during the innkeeper ed is firmly out of the way. but izzy spends most of the episode trying over and over again to antagonize stede - insulting him, claiming to be the one who damaged his stuff, etc. the framing i see from people is that izzy is doing this strategically, because he views stede as a threat to the crew since stede could report the mutiny to zheng. izzy is therefore trying to keep stede's attention and ire focused on himself so that when stede realizes ed's been killed he will be inclined to blame izzy alone instead of the whole crew.

(typing the word "strategically" there made me realize a problem with this interpretation that i actually hadn't noticed before which is that izzy is simply never that strategic about anything. izzy's idea of cunning social manipulation is saying shit like "perform like it's your last night on earth" to a guy he thinks is going to be murdered tomorrow while he menacingly strokes a curtain. he is not capable of even the basic level of subtlety this theory attributes to him. when he antagonizes someone it's because he's sincerely pissed at them.)

now i do think that by the time of the innkeeper izzy has started to feel a genuine sense of gratitude toward the crew for the way they risked themselves to keep him alive, and he trauma-bonded with them during the mutiny. so i do think he sincerely cares about the crew at this point and wants to protect them. i also think it's correct that he perceives stede and zheng as threats. when he says to stede "we cannot allow this crew to suffer any more for our mistakes" i think he 100% sincerely means that. but i do not think that's why he's trying to pick fights with stede. because, like with the other scenes above, izzy's interactions with stede actually end up unnecessarily endangering the crew.

this comes back to the line i'm always obsessed with, where stede asks if they sent ed to doggy heaven, and izzy says "no, i could never do that." i always harp on how he doesn't need to say that - he could have skipped straight to "no, we left him on an island," he doesn't need to talk about his emotions or motivations at all - and how izzy's deliberately lying here. but in this case the thing to notice is that line straight up throws the crew under the bus. phrasing it that way makes it sound like the crew would have wanted to kill ed but izzy himself, individually, was the only thing standing in the way. if he wants stede to focus his anger on him instead of on the crew this is the worst possible thing to say!

izzy could have phrased this line in a way that protected the crew. he could have said "no, WE could never do that," emphasizing to stede that the whole crew loved ed and didn't want to harm him. even more than that, he could easily have phrased it in a way that would clearly give stede license to be angry at izzy individually while giving the crew an out! "no, i said we should put him down like a wild dog, but those soft-hearted twats insisted we leave him alive on an island" - that would accomplish the exact goal of giving stede a reason to hate izzy AND to want to protect the crew.

so if you think that izzy has been antagonizing stede as part of a plan to focus stede's anger on him and protect the crew, that line makes no sense. if however you interpret izzy's behavior toward stede in this episode the way i do - that izzy has an emotional need to position himself as stede's romantic rival and wants stede to give him the validation of responding to him that way, rather than admitting to himself what really happened and what his role in this narrative really is - then the line makes complete sense and actually reinforces the arc and even helps set up the ultimate resolution of that stede-izzy arc, where stede refusing to respond to izzy the way he wants and instead choosing to save izzy alongside the crew ultimately shocks izzy into realizing he owes stede his thanks.