Warning: spoilers ahead for the episode 10 finale of Shōgun.
The Shōgun finale concludes one of 2024’s most renowned TV series.
Starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai, and Cosmo Jarvis, the FX and Disney Plus drama has been nothing short of spectacular, taking audiences to Japan’s chaotic feudal era in the year 1600.
As fans prepare to say goodbye to this gem of television, co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks stated that the last episode had an alternate conclusion that was removed due to being ‘fake’.
In the concluding scene of Shōgun, the newest adaptation of James Clavell’s novel, Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki) shares meaningful glances with John Blackthorne (Cosmo) and looks out into the distance.
Toranaga had just disclosed his future plan to Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano), a future that his real-life counterpart Tokugawa Ieyasu had previously attained.
Toranaga tells Yabushige: ‘Don’t you see what’s coming next? In just one month, we will meet our enemies at Sekigahara. Five armies squaring off on the field of battle.’
He goes on to say that his ‘dream will be achieved’ in the battlefield, with Edo, the previous name for Tokyo, becoming his ‘centre of power’ during ‘an period of great peace’.
Justin, the showrunner, revealed that the ending of Shōgun was initially planned to have a Blackthorne sequence, but this was later changed.
Meanwhile, another scene portraying Blachthorne in his old age was removed from the series entirely.
‘We tried a number of things, because the final episode deals with indeterminate futures. The book ends this way very beautifully in this ambiguity and almost like there’s an ambivalence towards the future, in every way,’ Justin said.
‘Toranaga is certain in his mind of what’s going to happen at Sekigahara, but even the way we chose to shoot that, the way Sam McCurdy lit it, the way Michael Cliett built the field, there’s a sort of hyperreality or unreality to it in a certain way that we were after there, where it feels like it was more like a dream. Whether it occurs that way is anyone’s guess.’
Rachel added: ‘If we have done our job, I think we have presented characters like Toranaga who believe so wholly and passionately and almost obsessively in their vision that you too believe that this will come to pass. How he’s seeing what he’s envisioning is in fact what happens.
‘It’s tough too because we know that his vision did come to pass. So there’s that trickiness of well, we do know that it worked, but I hope that you see just the passion or the conviction. This is why I have lost everybody close to me – because that comes second to what I’m seeing.’
As for Blackthorne, Justin revealed that they ‘shot a number of different ideas’ when it came to the Shōgun finale, as sometimes in TV ‘you’d like to choose, especially when it comes to endings’.
‘One of the scenes is actually in the cut in the show, which was this beautiful moment of Blackthorne striding out into his garden, sitting down and meditating, which we originally intended to be several months after the events of the show,’ he shared.
‘With Cosmo that day, we even played around with a callback to this wonderful line in the book where he looks at the rock and he says, “Alright, you bastard now grow.” It was really sweet and really funny.’
The episode’s director, Frederick EO Toye, devised a means to move the moment earlier in the tale, with the team subsequently applying visual effects to restore bruises and scars to Cosmo’s face.
Another possible ending was not utilised in the programme, and it depicted an older version of Blackthorne staring out at the sea in the same location where the narrative began in episode one, with Toranaga’s spy Muraji (Yasunari Takeshima).
‘We wanted to do old man Blackthorne, to definitively say that he, like William Adams, stayed in Japan,’ Justin said, referencing Blackthorne’s real-life counterpart, who became an advisor to Ieyasu, became a Western samurai and settled in Japan.
The screenwriter added: ‘And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the determinism of it. It felt ordained in some way and false. Like everything we’re saying, we wanted that the future could exist in the haze and the cloud and that it shouldn’t be something we ever give satisfaction for.
‘So we never ended up using it. I remember the day we shot it and it was a great job and beautifully done, but it just felt dishonest to the characters in the moment.’
Blackthorne’s journey takes an uncertain turn in the last episode, which opens with him as an elderly man in bed in England, being questioned by his grandkids about his exploits in Japan while clutching the rosary given to him by Mariko (Anna).
This, of course, differs from what occurred to William Adams, as well as the fictionalised version of the character’s story in the 1975 novel.
In the Shōgun finale, Blackthorne is encouraged by his former consort Fuji (Moeka Hoshi) to drop Mariko’s rosary into a body of water. As a result, the scene with his elder self could not have taken place exactly as represented.
‘Everything’s open to interpretation. For us, it was pretty clean cut,’ said Justin.
‘We wanted to do something where the story would start with a theoretical, in a very classic structure, where things are just a memory of an old man looking back, and here we are, now we’ve come home to England.
‘But what you realise you’re looking at as the story goes on is kind of the nightmare of a young man looking forward and looking forward to a possible future and a future that he has to sever himself from in the key moment of the show in the finale,
‘So here he is at the end, and he says, I don’t want it. I want to be free of it. Kind of like what Mariko says to him in episode five of being free of yourself. If all you’re ever after is your own free will… We as Westerners see that as a very liberating thing. Free will! The horizon, choose our destiny… but Backthorne is very imprisoned by that horizon until the end.’
However, co-creator Rachel had a different interpretation of the scene.
‘Now that we’re talking about it, I think it is a little bit open to interpretation, because I don’t know if he was consciously choosing to cut off the possibility of that future,’ she remarked.
‘I think more than anything, that’s what happened by releasing the rosary. I don’t think he’s consciously choosing, I think that’s what happened.
‘In the moment I don’t even know if he was intending to release it. It was meant to be for Fuji, the cross.’
Justin chimed in to add: ‘Yeah, the cross was this impulsive… he was so moved by Fuji.’
Producer Eriko Miyagawa agreed that the old man Blackthorne scene – which was shown before viewers witnessed the younger version of the pilot holding Mariko’s dead body after an explosion – was ‘very much hypothetical’.
‘It’s one of those things when you’re sort of in front of the door of death, the door to the other side of life,’ she outlined.
‘I think you tend to have these kinds of flashbacks or what ifs. I think it’s one of those moments when he was hovering, and what it could be.’
FX’s Shōgun is available to watch on Disney Plus.
