Catch up on Shogun:
I told my wife that Mariko was Crimson Sky so it was interesting and kind of funny to have Toranaga confirm that forty minutes after I said it. I only bring this up because I never know things before a book or TV show tell me.
What we feel in this episode is absence.
The immense loss of Mariko.
She haunts every scene. I said Mariko is the real main character previously, and I think this episode solidifies that. Because the show feels far emptier and lifeless without her. This is a credit to Anna Sawai (give her a dang award!) but also to the writing of her character.
Blackthorne survives because of Mariko and he is now trapped in near silence because of her. She died and now he can only communicate with other people the way a toddler might as they learn to speak.
Short limited phrases while everyone around him speaks in sentences and paragraphs where he catches a few words here and there as they fling past his ears, trying to understand what the torrent of language means at its most bare and essential.
What I imagine most people felt was also the absence of the promised war.
We spent 9 hours leading up to a war and now, in the final hour, we follow Blackthorne’s sad, lonely existence in Japan rather than head off to the battlefield where armies clash.
But this is a strength.
You don’t actually want to watch armies fight. Men swinging swords and sprays of blood.
You think you want that, but you don’t. You really don’t.
No one does.
There’s a reason why Game of Thrones only had a few actual battle scenes over most of its 70 episodes. What we wanted from Game of Thrones was not The Battle of the Bastards or the Battle of Winterfell. We wanted the Red Wedding. We wanted Joffrey’s Wedding and a dozen other episodes where violence is personal and directed rather than widespread.
The big battle episodes are nice. Kind of a treat. But if there were twice as many battles, the show would become tedious and boring.
Think of House of the Dragon and how it succeeds without any wars or even really violence.
So while the promise of war may have kept you engaged, kept you tuning in, the truth is that the show is better without a big setpiece of blood and violence and glory where Toranaga stands atop his enemies.
Because, you see, the moment Mariko entered Osaka, he already stood atop his enemies. He won.
He used people, spent their lives, allowing those close to him, who he loved, to die. And he did it to make the war unnecessary. Which leans back into his statement from many episodes ago when he said he wants an end to the bloodshed. Well, he found a way to end the warring period, to usher in peace, and it required him taking control of the country, consolidating power underneath him.
He had to become Shogun.
Those with a cursory knowledge of Japanese history may be interested in hearing that Toranaga Yoshii is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu , which is who the Tokugawa period is named after. Interestingly, Oda Nobunaga, who may also be familiar to anyone who’s played Civilization, is Ochiba’s father who Mariko’s father assassinated.
Blackthorne is William Adams. Mariko is Hosokawa Gracia.
Anyway, I do quite like this finale. While I’ve been less positive on the last few episodes, I think the ending is landed so solidly that this will be remembered as the best show of 2024 and maybe one of the best shows in years.
I especially enjoyed how they handled Toranaga revealing everything at the end. Tadanobu Asano’s Yabushige is just delicious on screen so anytime he gets to be there is a treat. But having Toranaga explain everything to him and to us makes for a great scene. It also pulls everything out into the open, which is a contrast to the 1980 version, where this is all revealed very rapidly in the final minutes by a sudden internal monologue by Toranaga.
It’s an excellent scene and a far better use of our time than showing us a long battle.
Because one of the real showcases in this show is the acting. The cinematography is interesting, especially the peculiar use of fisheye lenses and the idiosyncratic use of focus, but giving the actors space to just, well, act is what makes this show stand alone in the sea of television mediocrity that we’ve lived with since season four of Breaking Bad or Mad Men (though House of the Dragon is also a great acting showcase).
And I do think this show is a real achievement. I like many of the choices made in this adaptation. But despite everything, I actually think the 1980 version tells this story better, so I encourage anyone interested to check it out now that you’ve finished this newer adaptation.
The 2024 adaptation sort of bookends the show by grounding us in Blackthorne, but because he’s sidelined for so much of it—Toranaga even agrees with me that the show didn’t need him!—we don’t feel the loss to the same degree that we should. That’s not to say we don’t feel it!
But when Mariko and Blackthorne have spent the majority of the series having a passionate romance, her absence feels like a knife in our ribs. When the show is so closely tied to Blackthorne’s experience, we also feel the brutality of his isolation in Japan.
And I’ve been thinking about it since the end of this adaptation on Tuesday night and I think that when I rewatch Shogun at some point in the future, I’ll likely choose the 1980 version over this one.
And part of that is because it has a greater focus on the characters and relationships. The trade off for that is that we understand the politics less. We understand Toranaga almost not at all until the end, when we realize how he has masterminded everything, how he’s used Blackthorne and everyone else like marionettes in his quest to become Shogun.
But I think of all that we didn’t get in this adaptation. Father Alvito is barely in it. Instead, we get a great deal of Lady Ochiba and the Christian Regents (though we also never really come to learn about Kiyama and Ohno). And I like Lady Ochiba! I think the actor did a phenomenal job. But I also don’t think she is as essential to understanding this story as the Catholic Church and the Portuguese are. Instead of getting Rodrigues and the captain of the Black Ship, we get a whole lot more Yabushige (and, man, I really really love this character and especially Tadanobu’s depiction of him—give the man an award!). But, again, I think the Catholics and imperial powers are an important aspect to this story that essentially gets set aside and ignored.
I do appreciate how much better we understand the politics inside Japan in this adaptation. That is undoubtedly good and I think it offers an interesting texture to this adaptation.
But I think we lost a lot of the personal stories and relationships that make a story worth telling. I mean, we have relationships and so on, but we don’t have the depth of relationships here.
Even Toranaga saying that he keeps Blackthorne because he makes him laugh feels somewhat hollow or condescending, whereas in the 1980 adaptation (and real life), the two men seemed to have a real admiration and affection for one another. In this version of the story, we only have Toranaga’s word to take for it, because none of the scenes Blackthorne and Toranaga share include laughter or joy. Instead, Toranaga treats him the way he might treat a yappy dog. Which is interesting in its own way, but you don’t get the sense that Toranaga likes Blackthorne. And since he doesn’t and didn’t need Blackthorne, why does he keep him? What is his purpose for trapping him in Japan?
It feels more like spite than amusement, though I suppose a warlord may find amusement in that kind of spite.
I could go on and on, I suppose, but I do really like this adaptation. I have issues and quibbles and, ultimately, I think the character work suffers here, despite the acting being some of the best I’ve ever seen in a TV show. I mean, seriously, there’s not a weak actor in the bunch. Every single person on screen is putting out top tier performances.
Which is absolutely wild!
I mean, I’d happily watch ten hours of Toranaga and Yabushige just hanging out!
But I think the shift in focus to this larger narrative of Japanese history forces us to lose the tight focus on the characters that would elevate this to one of the best shows of all time.
And, again, this show is great. It’s a wondrous achievement. I loved watching it. Loved writing about it. And so these complaints are more because I see how a few different choices could have made this already great show even better.
We finish on a brutal yet beautiful note, with Fuji and Blackthorne. Every moment between these two in this final episode is heartbreaking and beautiful (give them awards too!).
So while I may wish that this adaptation did more, that it focused more on these people as people and their relationships, I’ll also be thinking about it for a long time. I love it and know that it’s great.
Could it be better?
Couldn’t everything be better?
For what this is, it’s damn good. One of the best. And, sadly, I don’t think we’re likely to see a show this good for a long time.
Over the next month, I’m going to read the novel Shogun because I guess this is what I’m doing this spring. I do think experiencing three versions of the same story over the course of a few months will be an interesting journey. Just watching these two adaptations back to back has been a delight and offered an interesting point of analysis.
So I’m excited to see what I think once I read this very, very long novel from fifty years ago.
Until then, we’ll say goodbye to Shogun. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of weekly reviews. I really do find them fun and sort of an easy way to structure my projects, but we’ll be back to the regular old format here where I write an essay about whatever comes into my little head.
But if you have something you’d like to see me cover like this, let me know.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King
Be sure to let us know what you think of the book!
I have to wonder if Netflix is going to adapt Clavell's other novels now that this was a success. Certainly, "King Rat" and "Tai-Pan", among others, are doorstoppers at the "Shogun" level of complexity.