Shogun S1E10 Watch A Long
Added 2024-04-24 20:00:05 +0000 UTCHey Peaches! We've reached the end of a truly remarkable series. Toranaga proves his strategic genius, and see where all of the main cast lands after the struggle for power is over. This has been quite the ride, and we appreciate all of you being apart of it.
Comments
I had the same reaction to the end. And then I saw they greenlit TWO MORE seasons.
Matt Newmark
2024-08-04 19:54:52 +0000 UTCThe framing device is a bit confusing, but the creators explained it JM: Yeah, no, we invented it. So if you don't like it, it's all our fault. We had this faint idea that we wanted to start with a moment where it was about an old man looking back on his life. We've seen this structure before for finales. Instead, you get to later realize it was actually the projection of a young man looking forward onto a version of his life that he no longer wanted. Blackthorne, in this moment of seppuku, is deciding to kill that self, that possible self. He then follows through on it when he drops his cross into the water—which makes it so that future is not possible, because he had the cross in that scene. We really love the idea that he's staring into that abyss of himself—the version of himself he would have become had Episode 1 Blackthorne just aged. It would have been someone who lives in a grand house: here are my heirs, they're doing all these things, but I'm empty. To quote Mariko in Episode 5, 'I am not free of myself and never have been.' This is the final liberation he achieved. We really love that motif coming through. It was key for us to put the readers of the book on their heels from the very beginning of the final episode, and to get them to think, 'Okay, well, this is new. Where are they going with it?'
Tay Schumaker
2024-04-24 23:12:20 +0000 UTCSPOILERS FOR ANYONE NOT SEEING THE EPISODE YET. 1) Lashy is correct. The mission of the Ninjas was to capture Mariko. Once they realized they had killed her in the explosion, (probably by what the people were saying in the room that they could hear.) they realized they messed up and both Yabushige and Ishido were going to be pissssssed so they left instead of risking the lives of more nobles. Remember Yabu wanted them to go another way that would have allowed her capture, but Mariko directed them towards the storehouse because it had a heavy door they could barricade. 2) I had a problem with the "john leaving the island" thing at first too. Because in the book series, it is heavily implied he never left. Toranaga has the same kind of monologue where he states Blackthorne will never leave the island. In a subsequent book (Noble House) the main character meets a Japanese woman with blue eyes and he remarks on it. She states that there is a family legend that there was a British Samurai as an ancestor. So Blackthorne certainly was around long enough to have children. But what that was at the beginning was an hallucination. He is seen on his sick bed clutching Mariko's crucifix. But he can't have done that in the future, because in reality he gave up the cross with the ashes of Fuji's family. He only sees this (at least that we are told) 2 times. At the beginning of the episode, when John is concussed and injured. And towards the end, when he is ready to die. he is remembering that hallucination and "giving up" on ever having that. This is all a (loosely) true story. John Blackthorne is based off of a real person (William Adams) and Yoshii Toranaga is based off of Tokugawa Ieyasu.
Ryan Weishaar
2024-04-24 22:34:48 +0000 UTC
