Stede Bonnet is a terrible pirate. He's wealthy, he's polite, he's read too many books, and he'd rather talk about feelings than plunder anything. He leaves his family, buys a ship, calls himself the Gentleman Pirate, and sets off to be someone else. The joke of Our Flag Means Death is that he's wildly unqualified. The surprise is what the show does with that joke. It lets the people around him be unqualified in their own ways, and then it builds a home out of all of it.
I came for the comedy. I stayed because I've rarely seen a show handle the question "who are you, and why are you allowed to be here?" so gently, and so many of its answers apply to teams.
If you've watched Resident Alien, you know the core premise: Harry, an alien, crashes on Earth and spends the series pretending to be a human so he can complete his mission (and eventually repair his spaceship). He's brilliant at it. He studies human behavior obsessively. He nails the performance. He says and does all the right things.
And he's absolutely miserable.
The alien's constant act of "being human" — perfectly mimicking behavior while feeling fundamentally separate from it — is actually a masterclass in imposter syndrome. And what's wild is how closely it mirrors something I see constantly in development teams: brilliant people who excel at their jobs while feeling like complete frauds.
The difference? The alien's situation is literal. He's actually not human. But the developers I know? They are good at what they do. Yet they're convinced they're faking it, waiting to be exposed, performing competence while feeling like imposters.
Resident Alien shows us why this matters and what healthy teams do differently.