Shogun, review: historical epic shows others how it’s done with a finale of grace and guile
The original 1980 Shōgun mini-series was a romping epic featuring gratuitous beheadings and a hunky Richard Chamberlain wandering around looking confused. Disney+’s new adaptation of James Clavell’s best-selling chronicle of dynastic rivalry in 17th-century Japan is far more sparing in its use of violence. The only ones likely to be stumbling around perplexed, meanwhile, are viewers who failed to give this dense but ultimately gripping historical drama the necessary attention.
As such, the finale was a slow-cooked feast to savour – and will reward the patience of those who have stayed with a show which started sluggishly and demanded a lot of its audience. All that hard work paid off as Shōgun wended its way to a meditative closing episode in which Cosmo Jarvis’s Brit abroad, John Blackthorne, was revealed to be a bit-player in a grand chess game played with deadly subtlety by Lord Yoshii Toranaga (an imperious Hiroyuki Sanada).
Toranaga has undermined his nemesis, Ishido Kazunari (Takehiro Hira), not through force of arms but by quietly convincing his enemy’s allies to turn on him. The previous episode had culminated in the shocking death of Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), Blackthorne’s love interest and, as a Christian Japanese woman, the connecting tissue between East and West. She was the show’s most compelling character – a woman torn between two radically different worlds. Sawai is a star in the making, and the finale suffered from her absence. Yet it was nonetheless a powerful ending – and without the noisy set-pieces which we have come to expect of a prestige epic taking its final bows.
In that respect, there are lessons here for other showrunners. Game of Thrones, for instance, pumped up the spectacle in its final episodes - with results that, if visually impressive, were emotionally hollowed out. Shōgun has followed a very different trajectory. By out-foxing Ishido, the way was clear for Toranaga to unite Japan under a single Shogunate (Shōgun tells the true story of the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which would rule Japan for more than 200 years).
The clever part was to reveal this not in an epic confrontation but in a simple final conversation between Toranaga and his former loyal underling, Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) – who had entered a secret alliance with Ishido. He’d bet on the wrong side and would now have to commit ritual suicide. What a punch to the guts - or a sword through the belly, in the case of the naive Yabushige.
Meanwhile, a delicious ambivalence hangs over the fate of Blackthorne. In a flash forward, we saw him as an old man on his deathbed, back in England with only an antique ritual sword and Mariko’s tightly-gripped crucifix to remind him of his time in the East.
However, it was unclear whether this was his fate or simply how he imagined the future playing out. Having ordered Blackthorne to rebuild his sunken ship, Erasmus, Toranaga remarked that he anticipates Blackthorne will spend the rest of his life in Japan. The credits rolled with Blackthorne’s final destination unknown (a second series, perhaps).
There were further surprises. Bashful fisherman Muraji (Yasunari Takeshima) was actually a samurai spy in Toranaga’s service. Meanwhile, Blackthorne’s former guide, Fuji (Moeka Hoshi), decided to enter a convent. She can’t kick the habit.
The best historical epics blend barnstorming action with deftly drawn human-interest stories. That’s why people still care about the movies of Akira Kurosawa or David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Shōgun hasn’t been perfect. When it was slow, it was practically stationary. But the moving finale more than paid off all the time and patience demanded of its audience.
All episodes of Shōgun are available now on Disney+
