The penultimate episode of ShÅgun ends in a nail-biting “Holy shit†of a cliffhanger. I won’t spoil the details of “Crimson Sky†right away (I’ll wait a few paragraphs for that; many spoilers to follow), but any fan of the FX series should be used to their white knuckles by now. ShÅgun has been teaching us how to watch it from the start — using each episode to slowly rearrange its array of 17th-century Japanese characters and alliances by way of tonally perfect performances, suddenly explode those coalitions (many times literally), and leave the viewer with a heart-wrenching final moment. Over its nine aired episodes (with one to go), ShÅgun has steadily made its case for why it’s the best thing on TV right now: It’s weekly episodic television with a reliably fantastic landing every time.
ShÅgun established its simple storytelling rhythm by the second episode, “Servants of Two Masters,†when captive English sailor John Blackthorne surprises himself and Lord Yoshii Toranaga, his captor and one of the five remaining leaders of a fractured Japan, by saving the man from an assassination attempt in the episode’s final minutes. And it became most pronounced by episode four, “The Eightfold Fence,†when Blackthorne; the designing lord of Izu, Yabushige (who boiled one of Blackthorne’s fellow sailors alive); and his ambitious nephew, Omi (who urinated on Blackthorne the first time they met), realize they must put grievances aside and work alongside one another as vassals to Lord Toranaga — only for Toranaga’s son Nagakado to fire cannonballs upon their opponents, murdering them with no preamble just before the episode’s credits.
This is the essential ShÅgun structure. Each episode explores the contours of a certain political alliance that is then figuratively and/or physically dismantled as the country’s rival lords march closer toward all-out war. In episode five, “Broken to the Fist,†an actual earthquake wipes out most of Toranaga’s recently trained army. In episode six, “Ladies of the Willow World,†one of Toranaga’s fellow regents is massacred when he tries to flee Toranaga’s main adversary, Lord Ishido. In episode seven, “A Stick of Time,†Toranaga is tasked with convincing his half-brother, Saeki, to join his uprising against the Council of Regents, only to learn that Saeki has already made a pact with Ishido. And in episode eight, “The Abyss of Life,†Toranaga’s general Hiromatsu kills himself via seppuku in what we didn’t know then was carefully choreographed misdirection.
These storytelling choices force us into confusion and uncertainty — a real “How are our friends going to get out of this one?†concern — that ShÅgun sometimes assuages with tender, revelatory post-disaster denouements. The quieter moments provide context and closure, helping us get past the initial shock to understand its far-ranging effects. Essentially, they operate as a reset for the next week, even if it’s just Blackthorne righting the boulder that fell over in his garden as an homage to a gardener he inadvertently sentenced to death, or Toranaga leading his surviving followers in a chant after the earthquake decimated his ranks. Of course, ShÅgun wouldn’t be so enjoyable if every chapter concluded this serenely. The series needs its stunning cliffhangers, too, like the assassin attack of “Servant of Two Masters,†when a maid in Toranaga’s employ reveals herself as a hired killer and slices her way through his household staff, splattering blood on shoji panels. Or Nagakado’s accidental death in “A Stick of Time,†when he tries to ambush Saeki at a brothel and ends up slipping on a wet robe and smashing his head in on a boulder. These final minutes are jarring and shattering enough that they require days of absorption, not just a few seconds of breathing time before the next episode starts. This is TV Structure 101, but in a flailing binge era of more-more-more TV and the now-now-now pacing of its installments, ShÅgun feels like a throwback and a path forward.
All of that brings us to “Crimson Sky,†in which Mariko’s death is the final moment — for the episode, for her character, and for all the parts of the ShÅgun story that her arc touched upon, including her romance with Blackthorne, her complicated relationship with Lady Ochiba, and her antagonistic marriage to warrior Buntaro. There was inevitability to her death, given that so much of her story has been about destruction, starting with her Kingslayer-like father’s murder of the TaikÅ’s predecessor and ending with her own desire to join her father and family in seppuku — a desire Buntaro annually refuses. The question with Mariko was never really if, but when, and “Crimson Sky†uses ShÅgun’s established formula, its ability to deliver cataclysmic action at any time, to keep us guessing.
The episode starts with a flashback to when Mariko attempted to kill herself while pregnant and, thwarted once again in her efforts to die in honor of her father, found solace in Catholicism. Anna Sawai’s mammoth performance has been a joy to take in, all of her minute acting decisions coming together to construct a woman whose sense of self is defined both by service to her lord and a zealous need to die on her own terms: the facetious little smile she puts on whenever she unleashes a “So sorry,†her hardened eyes when she rejects her husband, the pauses she sprinkles throughout her translation of Japanese and Portuguese as she searches for just the right word. In “Crimson Sky,†she adopts a Maximus Decimus Meridius–style intonation when she declares “I am free to go as I please … as is anyone.â€
The episode returns to present day to track her arrival in Osaka, where she publicly spars with Lady Ochiba and her new fiancé, Lord Ishido. It’s a calculated interaction, meant to rouse the other regents and their families to stand up against a brutal usurper, and it opens up myriad narrative avenues. Will Mariko die in the middle of the episode, like Toranaga’s army, as she tries to walk out of her Osaka meeting? Will she actually go through with the seppuku she announces when she is barred from leaving the city? Will the assassins who arrive after her seppuku ceremony is interrupted end up killing her? “Crimson Sky†dances Mariko through a minefield of danger, the episode written and structured so well that all of these possible deaths feel like anything but predetermined plotting.
Compared with some of the series’ other episode endings, Mariko’s actual death — a result of her voluntarily stepping into an explosive attack from Ishido’s assassins — doesn’t come out of nowhere like Nagakado’s cannon attack or Toranaga’s treacherous maid, and it’s certainly not as optimistic as Blackthorne and Toranaga’s swim race to shore in “Tomorrow Is Tomorrow,†and it doesn’t give us the heartwarming feeling of a bond beginning to bloom as Blackthorne and his consort Fuji’s clasped hands signal in “Broken to the Fist.†But it feels just as thrilling and as affecting as those other culminating moments because of how cleverly ShÅgun has reinvigorated fundamental TV-storytelling principles in each episode’s final minutes, recognizing in them and their lingering week-to-week impact the ability to clarify themes and crystallize character motivations. With Mariko’s last words — “By my death†— the series lands on a phrase fitting for the agency she sought all along and an axiom for ShÅgun’s flawless structure, too.
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