Treasure Island Episode 3 ends Bess Hawkins’ journey aboard the Hispaniola, and the swerve from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel is bigger than it first looks. In the book, Jim’s mother never leaves home at all.
Going into “The Wide Eternal Sea”, Bess looked like the safest character on the ship. MGM+ built this version around her, Hayley Atwell leads the cast, and the series made her the person who burned the treasure map in the premiere. Killing her off at the halfway point of a six-episode season is a bold call, and it rewrites what the story is about.
Spoiler warning: the rest of this article covers the ending of Episode 3.
Where Is Bess Hawkins in Stevenson’s Novel?
Barely anywhere. Jim’s mother is a widow who runs the Admiral Benbow inn after her husband dies, and she is remembered for her fairness. When she and Jim open Billy Bones’ chest, she counts out exactly what the old sailor owed her and not a coin more.
After that, Jim takes the map to Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney and sails as cabin boy. His mother stays behind, and she never sets foot on the ship. The series gives her the name Bess and a place on the voyage, which Atwell has been open about.
“She’s hardly in the book at all,” Atwell told TV insider. “She’s Jim Hawkins’ mother, but that’s pretty much the only thing that we know about her…Then I read the scripts written by Robert Murphy and thought, ‘What a brilliant way of updating this version, which is still true to the spirit of the book and the call to adventure in the book and has all these universal themes, and … offering it to a modern-day audience and what feels like a much fairer representation of the female experience.”
The show fills that gap in a big way. Bess burns the physical map in Episode 1, which leaves Jim’s memory as the only copy and makes her the person Silver and Graham try to work, since both believe she holds it. That pressure is why Episode 3 finally turns deadly.
How Does Bess Hawkins Die in Treasure Island Episode 3
Long John Silver spends the episode tightening his grip on the Hispaniola. He gathers a loyal crew, gets a new wooden leg carved for him, and spreads word that Bess holds the map. Bess answers by openly insulting him, and Captain Smollett watches the whole confrontation.
Soon after, she opens her cabin door to a visitor we never see. She was expecting Aaron Graham, and the surprise on her face suggests it was someone else. Jim returns to find her dead and the cabin torn apart.
Silver is the obvious suspect, since he had a motive and Smollett saw the argument. He is arrested and sentenced to be executed, and even Jim, who had started to trust the cook, turns on him. I do not think the show wants us to believe it was that simple, especially since the episode also reveals that Graham was sent to seize the treasure for the Crown.
Graham admits it to Bess, insists he loves her, and offers her half of his 20% fee, £70,000. She accepts, which tells me she was playing both sides until the end. At her funeral, Jim glances at a page of the Bible and recites it from memory, and Silver and Graham finally understand the map exists only in his head.
How Does Bess Hawkins’ Death Change Jim’s Story in Treasure Island?
In Stevenson’s novel, Jim grows up by leaving home and standing on his own among adults who cannot be trusted. The series spent two episodes bending away from that, keeping his mother at his side and making their bond the engine of the plot. Killing Bess puts him back on the book’s path, but through grief rather than the call of adventure.
Episode 3 showed how sharp that turn is when Silver tells Jim to stop relying on his mother and think for himself, and he dangles half of Flint’s treasure as a reward. Within the hour, Jim has no mother left to rely on, and Silver’s advice has become his only option.
The death also changes what Bess was for. She burned the map to keep it away from everyone, which made Jim the only copy, and her whole strategy was shielding him while the men around them circled. Now that she is gone, Jim is the walking map with no one standing between him and Silver or Graham.
There is a risk in this. Atwell has talked about the appeal of giving a story that barely had a female perspective a much fuller one, and killing Bess at the midpoint removes that just as it started to matter. If the show treats her death as a mystery with real consequences, it earns the swerve. If it only uses it to clear the board for Jim, it will have wasted its best new character.
The unanswered question is who opened that door, and the series has not confirmed it. Treasure Island Episode 4 titled “San Domingue” should arrive on November 1, with the finale scheduled on November 15.
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