From the first time he looked at the Wikipedia entry for the real-life pirate Stede Bonnet, Our Flag Means Death creator David Jenkins knew that the story of Stede and Blackbeard would end up being a romance.

“It was baked into the pitch of it. And to me, it was the only reason to make the show,” he tells Consequence. “The workplace of it is great, but when you look at Stede Bonnet’s Wikipedia, it’s like, wait, Blackbeard took him under his wing. Why? And then Blackbeard commanded his ship, but people would see Stede on the deck of the ship in his dressing gown, reading books. And then Blackbeard abandoned his crew and burned his ship. And you’re like, why?”

To Jenkins, the answer was an obvious one: “Why are we dancing around this? Clearly these guys were fucking. These guys were in love. And to me, those are the most interesting blanks to fill in: What is this relationship about? Why did the best pirate become enthralled with the worst, silliest pirate? Why did these two people need each other? That’s a great love story.”

Our Flag Means Death Season 1 introduced Rhys Darby as the aforementioned “worst, silliest pirate,” whose early adventures on the open sea eventually led to a collision with the fearsome Blackbeard (Taika Waititi)… whose softer side (aka “Ed”) soon emerged.

The ups and downs of Stede and Ed’s relationship have driven much of the action since Waititi’s debut in Season 1, though telling a love story in a serialized medium like television has its perils, largely because it’s tough to know how much you can draw out any unresolved tension. “I think we take it episode by episode and we try to not piss people off in taking too long and doing double beats and triple beats,” Jenkins says. “You can only do Will They or Won’t They for so long. Then you have to deepen it.”

It helps that in Jenkins’ eyes, the Will They/Won’t They trope goes deeper than that first kiss. “Will we kiss? Will we have sex? Will we fall in love? Will we move in together? Will we get married? The question of every relationship that we have is ‘Will we last?’ And those questions are more interesting to me than how long can we keep them separate? How many contrivances can we do to pull them apart and put them back together again? You can only do that so much before everyone’s like, okay, I gotta get outta here.”