feared he was, and proud.

I think that relationship is meaningful to both of them. It is singular, for both of them. We’ve never seen Silver invest in someone, in this way. So for him, it’s very new. It’s the first one of these relationships that we are aware of. We’ve seen Flint invest in people before, but not in this way, where he has allowed himself to be both Flint and McGraw, openly, and found some measure of comfort in that state. So for him, it’s new, also. I would argue that it’s not a contest, as to which of them felt it more deeply, but I think it was definitely meaningful. Personally, there wasn’t ulterior motives in their affinity for each other. It is genuine and it is complicated, in the way that it’s always complicated when you love someone. You don’t always make the best decisions when that thing is threatened. 

i recently finished watching black sails and i cannot stop thinking about the relationship between silver and flint. the unique love that existed between them. deeper than just friendship, more profound than brothers. they knew each other’s minds intimately and complimented each other perfectly in many ways, like night and day, but the ways in which they differed is what ultimately divided them. a man who was entirely driven by his past and a man who downright refused to be defined by his past, of course they wanted entirely different things in the end.

"The Flint and Silver ending, in its outlines, has always been there. We always knew that that was the climax of the story throughout, for both of them. It’s the most important relationship, for both of them. When it finally reached this moment of going from two people who seem to have nothing in common to being wary of each other to being opportunistic allies and then friends to two people who know each other better than anyone else in the world, and then finally reaching that point of not being able to go forward, was going to shape the end of their story."

I think where I understood him to be, I guess, both in the beginning and the end, but sort of within this story, was kind of as a guy who had run all but the last hundred yards of a marathon and could see the finish line and every step he took got exponentially harder, and it was just an onslaught of obstacles and traps and problems that were trying to prevent him from getting there, and the conceit that—when we started with a white board at the beginning in the season—was that he would figure out a way to get through every last one of them and have his nose on the endzone and it would be his best friend who was the one he couldn't get past.