Abstract: This paper uses OFMD to tease out the limits of utopian thinking, especially as it relates to the corrective impulse of recent eighteenth-century adaptations, an impulse that I trace through artificial encounters with history in both Our Flag Means Death. After sketching trends in utopian thinking and historicity in queer storytelling, I turn to the closing scene of Our Flag Means Death's eighth episode, which depicts a violent arrest by the British navy. Central to this paper is an understanding of queerness as an oppositional mode of being, one that exists in antagonism with police and carceral systems, but I argue that this encounter pits the queer utopia of the Revenge against the blustering cruelty of the navy in a clean, comforting opposition between queerness and imperialism, one that allows individual queerness to exist as a substitute for other kinds of resistance. At the same time, by examining the messy emotional terrain produced by the contemporary soundtrack, which actively impedes our access to the "right" feelings as we watch, I recoup a sense of unease and alienation that might be a more productive model of resistance for queer historical fiction than the smooth sailing of utopian thought.
Jesslyn Whittell (2026) studied this question.