SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “Every Single Piece of My Heart,” the sixth episode of “The Buccaneers” Season 2, now streaming on Apple TV+.
Hearing the word “murder” still catches the showrunners of “The Buccaneers” off guard. In the Victorian-era drama, while backstabbing is commonplace among the ruling class and the cultural elite, actually killing someone has never been part of the Apple TV+ series — until now. In the sixth episode of Season 2, the storyline of Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) trying to escape her abusive husband Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick) came to a close when his last-ditch attempt to imprison her ended with him killing his own brother, Lord Richard Marable (Josh Dylan).
“It’s interesting hearing it called ‘murder’ — but of course, it is murder,” says series creator/writer/executive producer Katherine Jakeways.” We talked a lot about whether it was going to feel like too much, and whether it was possible to do that in our world of fun. But we’ve explored difficult themes in the past, and we took it quite seriously in terms of whether it was going to work.”
The decision to kill a character so foundational to the story –– Richard’s marriage to Conchita (Alisa Boe) launched the series –– bore the responsibility of not only ending this Seadown storyline that has driven much of the action since the Season 1 finale, but also justify sidelining a number of other pressing storylines, including the cliffhanger from the last episode when Lizzy (Aubri Ibrag) stood on the steps of the church deciding whether to marry Hector (Jacob Ifan) or run away with Theo (Guy Remmers). For what it’s worth, she chose neither. But the severity of this episode called for a different tone than romantic indecision.
Angus Pigott
“It is kind of a hospital waiting room episode, where something big and awful has happened to one of them, but because they’re all a gang and they’re kind of a found family, it feels like it’s happening to all of them,” Jakeways says.
It also marked the first time the entire young cast shared the screen since Season 1.
“The real joy for us in this episode is that they are all back together, but they have to leave all of their problems at the door,” executive producer Beth Willis adds. “All eyes are on Jinny. If you’re in a hospital waiting room, you’re not talking about life or the argument you had yesterday. You’re focusing on one thing and we just thought that was a really interesting way of exploring [all of the tension].”
After Seadown’s controlling, violent nature shattered their seemingly fairy tale marriage in Season 1, Jinny fled to Italy to save herself and their son. But Seadown found her in the most recent episode, and when he failed to compel her to come home, he took their child. With the help of her assembled friends, Jinny returns to England and finds sympathy in a reporter who helps her circulate the truth of Seadown’s cruelty. But when she angrily confronts him in a theater, he uses the image of a hysterical woman to have her institutionalized and later confined to their home.
Jakeways says they worked closely with historians, domestic violence experts and Fishwick, who is otherwise a comedic actor, to responsibly elevate his final acts of abuse by Seadown, who has already beaten Jinny and manipulated her return. Once she’s in the asylum and then again at home, he emotionally tortures Jinny by holding her son out of her reach, hoping her heartache will force her submission.
“In Episode 6, he knows the law is on his side,” she says. “That’s the bottom line for him. Jinny has gone to Italy and we’re pleased that she’s run away, but we had to show the stakes of why she was running away, and the fact that the laws said that baby that she hadn’t even given birth to yet was not her property. She is Seadown’s property, the baby is Seadown’s property, and when she comes back to England, she is the criminal, despite everything that we’ve seen that he’s done to her. He’s in the right, and he’s got that kind of cocksure attitude about it.”
Still, Jinny manages to assert what she is and is not willing to this marriage, despite the danger of provoking her increasingly deranged husband. During an awkwardly forced dinner, she tells him, “I am here. I will be your wife. I will allow the world to believe that I am unfit. But I cannot love you. I can’t, and I won’t.”
“That is the moment where he loses hope,” Willis says. “Despite the fact that he then locks her in a bedroom and pretends she’s not there when his family comes round, I think it destroys him. There is huge power in what she says in that moment.”
By episode’s end, only Seadown’s siblings, Richard and Honoria (Mia Threapleton), believe they can reason –– or at least trick –– their brother into coinciding this increasingly desperate plan, and break Jinny and her child free. It provided a rare glimpse into the dynamics of the Brightlingsea family. Earlier, Seadown confides in his mother, Lady Brightlingsea (Fenella Woolgar), that he doesn’t much care for his son, and found their trip home from Italy to be quite annoying. He took him only to lure Jinny back to him. In turn, his mother tells Richard of her concerns, despite otherwise celebrating Seadown’s behavior up to this point.
“Then in the final scenes, we see how the sibling relationship is played out, which was something we hadn’t seen before, and we were really excited about being able to have at least one scene of that,” Jakeways says.
But one scene is all audiences will get. Under the guise of a wellness check, the siblings share a laugh at the expense of their oblivious parents, who loved the dogs more than their children. They bond, in an effort to weaken Seadown’s defenses. Then, Honoria manages to sneak away and snatch the baby, and Richard frees Jinny from her locked bedroom. But he stays behind to deal with the wrath of his brother, who has since retrieved his pistol. It looks like he might turn it on himself, but Richard tries to intervene. When Jinny hears a gunshot and goes back to investigate, she finds Richard dead and a completely shattered Seadown nearby. Given how different this is from the largely romance-driven series, the showrunners didn’t want this act of violence to be a gratuitous or completely unwarranted scene.
“I don’t think it’s premeditated murder,” Willis says. “It’s absolutely an accident. And we didn’t want to linger on him shooting himself, and we didn’t want to linger on the dead body. The moment of that episode, or that section of the episode, that mattered most was seeing Jinny have to tell Conchita, and actually the burden for Jinny of having to be the one to deliver that news. That’s the most horrible bit of that story, actually.”
The showrunners and writing team struggled with whether to actually kill off Richard, and considered letting Seadown take the bullet in the brotherly brawl. But Richard’s marriage to Conchita has grown into a resilient, loving union at the head of the Brightlingsea family. It is the one stable relationship on the show, and for that reason, they knew this was the best narrative choice.
“This is such a fascinating place for her to jump from and see where she is going to go from here,” Jakeways says. “How’s this going to affect her life and being a single parent, and also for Honoria getting a bit of strength from having had this awful experience. It felt like it opened up a lot of possibilities for us so we fought through the heartbreak of it.”
The fleeting moment for the Brightlingsea siblings also shows the tragedy of what could have been between them. “You feel like under different circumstances, and if whatever had happened to them during their childhood, they could have been brothers,” Jakeways says. “I think Seadown would have loved that, and probably Dick would have as well. They could have been a real kind of force of nature as brothers, like Theo and Guy are. But they just aren’t able to be because they’re too British.”
Richard’s death completely rewrites the stakes of the series, which up until this point has suggested the worst fate is expulsion from high society or choosing the power of royalty over the pull of your heart.
“Once you’ve experienced something like this in life, you don’t really ever see the world in the same way again, do you?” Jakeways says. “So it changes them, it changes the show and it makes them grow up, as all the little pieces of Season 2 have made them become women and more rounded people.”
