The Pirates of the Caribbean series may have put plenty of attention into its world-building, but the fifth film Dead Men Tell No Tales boasts a pretty egregious Captain Barbossa-centric plot hole. Released in 2003, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie The Curse of the Black Pearl was a rare blockbuster that won both critical plaudits and fan adulation worldwide, launching the franchise into cinematic stardom and reigniting interest in the pirate movie sub-genre as a whole after the failure of Cutthroat Island.
Starring Johnny Depp’s unforgettable antihero Jack Sparrow, the series combined humor, romance, action, and mythology to great effect. The Pirates of the Caribbean sequels couldn’t reach the high bar set by The Curse of the Black Pearl, but the interplay between Sparrow and his nemesis/occasional reluctant co-conspirator Barbossa nonetheless remained a high point even as the later installments became bogged down in byzantine backstory.
However, this iconic friendship wasn’t without its occasional jarring plot holes. Take, for example, the twist revelation in 2017's fifth film, Dead Men Tell No Tales, that Kaya Scodelario's heroine Carina is secretly the daughter of Captain Barbossa. It’s a supposed bombshell that a lot of viewers guessed early, but it’s also a revelation that makes no sense when Carina is not even 20 years old during the movie’s action and she was supposedly conceived back when Jack and Barbossa were still good friends. But Jack and Barbossa have been double-crossing each other for 30 years by this point in the series, so how is Carina so young?
Early on in the fifth film of the franchise, the critically reviled Dead Men Tell No Tales, it is stated that Carina’s mother knew Barbossa and Jack when she fell pregnant and that the pair were still firm friends at this point. Only that doesn’t make sense, since for that to work she would have met them before Barbossa stole the Pearl from Jack. Barbossa’s mutiny took place ten years before the Pirates of the Caribbean series began, which is thirty years before the events of Dead Men Tell No Tales. Carina is nowhere near 30, so what gives? The answer may be that Barbossa met her mother again closer to the events of the first film, but there’s no canon solution to this glaring plot hole, particularly when it is stated that Jack and Barbossa were friends at the time of her conception.
It’s the sort of tricky oversight that plagues the later Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, which were hated among many critics and even some franchise fans for prioritizing ambition action set-pieces and more Jack Sparrow screen time instead of explaining the lore of the series. One common criticism of the first two sequels, Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, is that their convoluted backstories were too complex for casual viewers to keep track of. But if the alternative is glaring plot holes like the fifth film’s Captain Barbossa oversight, maybe complicated Pirates of the Caribbean mythology isn’t such a bad thing after all.