A Trauma Therapist Watches Our Flag Means Death: This is Happening

Here’s how this works: I’ve already watched all of HBO’s Our Flag Means Death (maybe more than once), and you should too — there will be spoilers below. While I may reference other episodes, I’ll primarily be focused on Jim’s storyline in Episode 7, This is Happening.

Hello! And welcome to the first installment of A Trauma Therapist Watches. Since it’s Pride month, I thought it’d be fitting to start off with an episode of Our Flag Means Death. While plenty of characters have backstories including traumatic events, today we’ll be focusing on Jim, whose past we begin to see in episode 7: This is Happening. The main features of PTSD that I’ll be looking at in this episode are emotional arousal, intrusive symptoms, and the role of avoidance.

Up to this point, we know that Jim murdered Spanish Jackie’s favorite husband and was on the run, disguised as a man, but we don’t know too much more about them, as Oluwande highlights early on in this episode.

The first taste we get that we’re about to see more of Jim than they’re comfortable with is when the crew starts planning to go to St. Augustine. Jim stands up to protest, throwing out every objection they can think of:

No! It’s boring and awful, and the humidity? Do you understand what that will do to your hair?

When this doesn’t work, Jim storms off, ending up on the deck, looking at their dagger, when we see a flashback of a dagger being plunged into a body, and a child with braided pigtails falling to their knees and taking another dagger with Jimenez carved in the handle out of the waistband of the body. One of the really well-done things about this scene is the way that the plunging of the dagger times up with the music, which starts as Beethoven’s Für Elise (according to this source) played on piano, and then transforms into music that the subtitles describe as “Spanish guitar” once we’re in the flashback location. The timing of the visual with the music really mimics how unwanted and intrusive PTSD symptoms can be. We often think of flashbacks the way we see them in movies, as literal visual flashes of past events, but the use of music in this scene helps evoke the sense of how flashbacks are often experienced by folks with PTSD. People often report feeling like they are back at the time of the traumatic event rather than seeing the event before their eyes, and the background music transitioning to suit the scene of the flashback brings more of that emotional element than merely seeing the scene would.

When we return to the present, Jim is sitting on the deck while Oluwande asks them:

-So, you gonna tell me?
-Qué te pasa?
-Are you really not gonna tell me?
-(exasperated) Tell you what?
-Why you’re scared to go to St. Augustine?
-(defensive) I’m not scared of St. Augustine.
-No? You had a pretty strong reaction just then.
-No, I didn’t.

It may seem obvious, but let’s take a look at Jim’s desire to not go to St. Augustine, the scene of some of their earliest traumatic events. Immediately after a traumatic event, the space it takes up in our brain is divided up pretty equally between the autobiographical memory (the story of what happened), intrusive symptoms (such as flashbacks or nightmares), and emotional arousal (such as anger or fear that isn’t appropriate to the present circumstance). In an ideal world, our brains heal with time, and the autobiographical memory takes up more of the brain space than the intrusive symptoms or emotional arousal.

However, the world is very rarely ideal, and that’s how we end up with PTSD. Understandably overwhelmed by the intense emotions associated with their symptoms, folks engage in other behaviors to allow them to avoid thinking about the traumatic event.

Let me pause here to say: If you or someone you know is living with PTSD, none of this is intended to imply that people with PTSD should just “get over it” and end their patterns of avoidance. Your brain is doing the things it has learned to keep you safe, and if you feel like those things are no longer working for you or you’d like to learn more, please talk to a therapist.

We know that Jim is still experiencing intrusive symptoms from the flashback we just saw, and from their outburst during the crew meaning, it seems reasonable to conclude that they’re experiencing emotional arousal as well. These experiences are, to put it mildly, unpleasant, and naturally Jim would prefer to continue avoiding St. Augustine then to subject themselves to a potential increase in these symptoms. It takes Swede’s earnest begging of Jim’s help (“The teeth don’t go back in!”) for Jim to be persuaded to depart the ship.

Jim is visibly unhappy with this turn of events, leading to the following exchange with Oluwande:

-What?
-I can’t believe you made me do this. You have no idea how much I hate it here.
-Exactly! I don’t know because you don’t tell me anything, because you’re weirdly and freakishly secretive, Jim.
-No, I’m not. I’m normal secretive.

As we learn throughout the rest of the episode, Jim’s past, and particularly their childhood, has not been filled with pleasant memories. It’s possible that Jim’s secretive by nature (Oluwande goes on to point out that he doesn’t even know Jim’s favorite color), but it’s also possible that it doesn’t feel that way to Jim, because they avoid thinking about so much of their own past that it no longer feels like they’re hiding things from others.

Soon, we meet Jim’s Nana, a nun who raised them to seek revenge for the murder of their family. The dynamics between Nana, Oluwande, and Jim in this scene are fascinating:

Nana: The priest swore…that he’d die of rabies.
Jim (flatly): Well, he didn’t, did he?
Nana: No, he died years later. He was — oh, oh, ho! (laughs)
Oluwande: What? What? What?
Nana: He was crushed by a tree! (continues laughing)
Oluwande: Ha-ha. Wow. Dark humor over here.
Nana (stops laughing abruptly): Life is pain.

Nana is boisterous and open with Oluwande, even as Jim has clearly decided to separate themselves from the conversation, sitting with their body turned away from the two of them and using a markedly different tone from the others. Then Nana turns on a dime, sternly giving a reminder that Jim later hints they heard the likes of frequently growing up: life is pain.

We see more of Jim’s childhood through flashbacks narrated by Nana, these ones styled to be more like memories than intrusive symptoms.

Nana: This child was not raised to kneel, or to turn the other cheek. I taught them how to be silent, stealthy enough to stalk mice….I taught them to kill, to butcher. And after many years of practice, Bonifacia…was ready.
Oluwande: Ready? For what?
Nana: To take their revenge!
Nana and Jim together (Nana with zeal and Jim flatly): Revenge for their/my bloodline, revenge for the meek. God’s divine revenge.

These two scenes paint a picture of what Jim’s life immediately after the death of their family might have been like. Young Jim came to live with Nana and was taught the skills necessary for them to seek revenge, which Nana seems to value above all else. Is the implication that, because life is pain, there’s no use crying about the things that have happened, because that’s just how life is? It’s very easy to imagine Jim learning that they have to suppress their emotions to be rewarded in this environment. While it seems that Nana’s intention was most likely to make Jim strong and to do what Nana viewed as the right thing, Jim’s tone throughout their interactions with Nana indicates that, as an adult, they don’t look back fondly on those memories.

We get one more flashback as Jim tells Oluwande about what happened to their family. Compared to the first flashback we saw, this one also has the tone of being more of a memory, as it is framed by Jim’s voiceover, their tone fairly unemotional (though not flat as it was with Nana) as they tell the story, as if they’ve told it a thousand times. Jim finishes by saying:

“I don’t remember the rest. Must’ve blacked it out. When I came to, I was in the woods holding this: my father’s knife. I was out there for weeks before anyone could find me.”

It’s not uncommon for folks to not remember all of a traumatic event, whether because the event happened in early childhood, because they were in a state of mind where their brain wasn’t storing the memory, or because they were inebriated during the event. Regardless of the reason, folks often come into therapy worried that they won’t be able to recover from an event that they can’t remember. In many cases, it can be helpful to understand that coming to and not knowing what happened can in and of itself be traumatic. For Jim, waking up in the woods holding their father’s knife, with their last memory being of their father’s death, must have been terrifying. They were likely feeling another emotion often associated with trauma: helplessness.

At the end of the episode, Jim tells Oluwande that they’re leaving to finish seeking revenge, not for Nana, but for themself. As a viewer, I’m always left feeling sort of unsure about that decision. On the one hand, it seems that the trip to St. Augustine has broken Jim out of their avoidance cycle, and they’re once again able to engage with the memories of their family’s death. On the other hand, as a therapist, I don’t believe there’s any research backing the idea that seeking revenge on those who harmed you is a helpful intervention for PTSD.

Luckily, anyone who’s watched the rest of season 1 knows that we don’t have to watch Jim hunt down and kill all six remaining members of the Siete Gallos, and we instead see more healing happen for them in future episodes. While we don’t yet know what season 2 will bring for Jim and the crew of The Revenge, I’m going to hope that Jim gets to experience the feeling of safety for potentially the first time since their family was murdered.