Pirates of the Caribbean -- The Sequel That Wasn't

Well. I think we've had enough poetry for now, don't you agree? How about some screenplay stuff?

The second Pirates of the Caribbean movie is due out soon, I hear, and from what I can tell, it's not going to be anything like what I came up with after walking out of the theater from the first one.

So this isn't a spoiler. Unless, of course, you haven't seen the first movie, in which case, you shouldn't be reading this; you should be running to your nearest video rental place and picking the thing up. It's nothing less than spectacular.

But it did raise one troubling spectre, if you'll pardon the pun. You see, if you remember, Will (the blacksmith turned hero played by Orlando Bloom) was the son of Bootstrap Bill Turner. When Barbossa led his mutiny against Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), old Bootstrap Bill had been the only member of the crew who thought it was wrong. He sent a piece of the cursed gold to his son Will, so that the mutineers would never be able to break the curse, and when Barbossa found out, he strapped Bill to a cannon and dropped him into the briney deep.

Why didn't they just kill him? Well, if you recall, part of the gold's curse was an inability to be killed. So weighing him down and sinking him was as good a way of any of getting him out of the way.

See where I'm going with this?

At the climax of the movie, Will cuts his palm, gets his blood on the last of the cursed gold, and drops it into the chest of coins. At which point, the curse is broken. All of the pirates become mortal, and hence killable.

It's funny how everyone glossed over Will's little act of patricide there. Because, of course, his father must have, er, given up the ghost at the very moment when the bloody gold piece hit the chest.

My theory was that in the second movie, this would all come out. Will would start having an awful run of bad luck, or see frightening visions, and when he checked with some palm reader or the like, he'd find out that it was because he'd caused the death of his father. And that the only way he could break the curse would be to find his father's remains and give them a proper burial.

Will and Elizabeth would have some adventures in the process, and at the end, we'd find out that it was a hoax, and that some relative of Captain Barbossa (the pirate who deposed Captain Jack Sparrow) had rigged the whole thing in order to get revenge on Will. Ah, and at the last moment, Will's life would be saved by...

...his father, of course. It would have turned out that the straps holding Bill and the cannon together had finally frayed and come loose, only a year or so before the events of the first movie. He'd been looking for Will all this time. Of course, Bootstrap Bill gives his life heroically, saving his only son. Sniff.

I still think it would have made a decent sequel. Be interesting to see what they actually do. And whether they'll ever deal with the whole patricide thing.

[Just a note about the pronunciation of Caribbean. I once heard, many years ago, that the original pronunciation was ca-ri-BE-an until a popular song came out which used the pronunciation ca-RIB-ean in order to fit the rhythm of the lyrics. I have no idea if this is true, and I can't find anything on the Internet to substantiate or refute it, but I thought I'd mention it as a possibility.]