MGM+ launched its new “Treasure Island” on Sunday, October 11th. The first hour ends with Long John Silver (David Oyelowo) standing in the galley of the Hispaniola. That is a long way from where Robert Louis Stevenson put him. In the 1883 novel, Silver is a friendly face the young hero meets in port and learns to fear later. Here, Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet) and his mother Bess (Hayley Atwell) have already watched him in an armed standoff that left a man dead at their inn. The Hollywood Reporter’s Angie Han put it plainly: “creator Robert Murphy reimagines it wholesale.” The premiere is where that rebuild starts, and it is a busy, bloody hour that burns the map before the ship ever leaves the dock.
The six-part limited series premiered with one episode, “Chapter 1: The Admiral Benbow”, and new chapters arrive weekly on Sundays through the finale on November 15th. Paramount+ carries it in the UK and Ireland one day later. Murphy created it for television and Playground produced it. Jeremy Lovering directed the premiere. William McGregor and Paul Walker take later episodes. It is set in 1788. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Treasure Island” and the premiere’s final scene aboard the Hispaniola.
The premiere is where that rebuild starts, and it is a busy, bloody hour that burns the map before the ship ever leaves the dock.”
The recaps from Ready Steady Cut, The Review Geek and FandomWire all open in the water. A ship has gone down in a storm, two men are fighting over a chest, and a prosthetic leg is drifting in the waves. The man who keeps the chest is Billy Bones (Tomer Capone), best known as Frenchie on “The Boys.” He takes a small box holding a map and leaves the rest. The leg belongs to Silver. Silver did not drown. He washes up on the same coast and wants his property back.
Bess and Jim run the Admiral Benbow Inn, and they are barely getting by. Bess is a widow whose late husband served in the Royal Navy. Her side hustle is her son. Jim has a photographic memory, so she lets drinkers bet that he cannot recite a passage of the Bible after one look. He always can. Not every customer believes the trick is honest. Bess is also weighing a marriage to Squire Livesey (Adam James), a match she sees as the way to turn Jim into a gentleman. Fans of the book will notice the name. Stevenson’s Livesey is the doctor, and his squire is Trelawney.
Bones turns up at the Benbow, and Bess sees an opportunity before she sees a problem. She and Jim try to open his chest, and he wakes up in the middle of it. Bess does not pretend. She tells him she knows he came off the wreck and offers help for a price. The two warm up fast. Bones backs Bess up when a customer who lost a bet calls her a cheat. They dance and flirt. Then he tells them the story. He sailed with Captain Francisco Flint, who buried his fortune on Skeleton Island and came back without the men who went ashore with him. Bones has the map, and he wants money from Bess to go and get the gold.
That sore loser from the bar is the one who points Silver toward the Benbow, according to FandomWire, and Ready Steady Cut ties Silver’s search to the long list of customers Bess has fleeced. The warning comes from Jim. He tells the adults there is a “strange bird” at his window. Bones knows the bird and knows the man who travels with it. He had believed Silver was lost at sea. While Bones goes out to face his old shipmate, Jim studies the map and commits it to memory. Bones then hands the real map to Silver. Ready Steady Cut’s Jonathon Wilson wrote that Silver “is more of a limping, Michael Myers-esque figure than the cliché of a pirate.” He also describes Silver “braining one of Bess’s more recalcitrant patrons” along the way.
Then Squire Livesey arrives with armed men. The treasure is out in the open now, and the room falls apart. Silver and Livesey hold guns on each other. Bess sets the map on fire. In the chaos, a stray bullet fatally wounds Bones, and Silver is taken into custody. The paper is ash, but the map survives inside Jim’s head. That is the trade the whole show is built on. Nobody can reach Flint’s gold now without the boy, and Ready Steady Cut points out that this is exactly why Silver has to stay close to the Hawkins family.
Livesey suspects Bess kept a copy. He writes to an admiral to make their escape harder. Bess and Jim reach the docks with six guineas, which is well short of the fare to Jamaica. Rescue arrives in the shape of Aaron Graham (Jack Huston), a merchant who offers them passage on the Hispaniola for far less than the fare. Graham is a new character, and the official logline calls him “the debonair, duplicitous British agent Aaron Graham.” On board, Captain Smollett (Tristan Sturrock) mentions that the crew has a new cook. He calls the man over. It is Silver. The episode never explains how a man in custody became a ship’s cook, or whether he knew the Hawkinses would be on board. Bess and Jim are now at sea with the man who wants what is in Jim’s head, and he is making their dinner.
That ending is the novel’s most famous reveal, moved forward and robbed of its surprise for Jim. Screen Rant’s Grant Hermanns ranked the early arrival among the most frustrating changes in the series. The A.V. Club’s Zack Handlen made the same complaint, arguing that it spoils the character’s ruthless pragmatism before Jim can be charmed. The Review Geek’s Greg Wheeler listed the other swaps in one breath. Bess is a co-lead, Jim has the memory, and “Billy Bones has been rewritten into a romantic interest for some reason” on top of that. Wheeler’s verdict on the hour was blunt: “After one episode, I’m not convinced.”
Collider, Screen Rant and The Hollywood Reporter all single out Oyelowo. Collider’s Charlie Ridgely wrote, “He’s terrifying and treacherous, but absolutely overflowing with charm, just as Silver should be.” Hermanns, no fan of the show overall, said Silver’s entrance on the beach “does a magnificent job of establishing how terrifying the iconic villain will be in the long run.” Han saw “the fury of a formerly enslaved man who’s had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap he’s ever gotten” in the performance. The People’s Movies says this Silver is “Reimagined with a Jamaican heritage” and calls Oyelowo “unequivocally outstanding in the role.” Wheeler and Handlen are less sold. Wheeler wrote that this Silver “doesn’t have the same swagger or charisma so far.” Handlen thought Oyelowo plays Silver with a “low-key gravitas better suited to a courtroom drama than a seafaring romp.”
The history is the other big swing. The logline sets the story in “a Caribbean on the brink of revolution”, and Han wrote that “real historical events like the Haitian Revolution play out in the background.” Her list of what the later chapters hold includes “an armed revolution, an aristocratic dinner party, a trek through the jungle, an active volcano” and plenty of knives at throats. Screen Rant singles out a standoff on a French-occupied island and a party hunted by an unseen archer on Skeleton Island. None of that is in the premiere. It is what the first hour is setting up.
The wider reviews are rough. Metacritic had the series at 52 from five critics on Monday. Han’s bottom line was “Admirably ambitious, disappointingly flat.” She also wrote, “You might as well be watching computers outwit each other at chess.” Handlen called it a “turgid, intermittently inspired slog”, and Hermanns gave it 4 out of 10. Ridgely was kinder, but he warned that “the latter half of the six-episode season has a lot of trouble keeping pace with its electrifying start.” The production at least gets its due. Handlen still called the sets and ships “gorgeous”, and Han found the settings “appealingly solid.” The series was shot partly in Spain, with filming starting in March.
On these accounts, the premiere does its job well. It is fast, it kills off Bones before he can become a fixture, and it ends on the one image every version of this story needs. The worry is the one Review Geek raised. A Jim who exists mainly as a memory is a thin hero, and Bess holds most of the agency. If the show wants Jim to grow up over six weeks, it has to give him something to choose besides which adult to trust. Silver in the galley at least makes that choice urgent.
What Do You Think? Does moving Silver onto the Hispaniola this early make him scarier, or does it waste the novel’s best surprise? Will Bess lean on Aaron Graham for protection now that Silver is on board? With the real map burned, how long can Jim keep Flint’s route to himself before someone forces it out of him?
See you on the next binge!
