Warning: spoilers ahead for the episode 10 finale of Shōgun.
The Shōgun finale has finally arrived, marking the end of one of the most highly-acclaimed TV series of 2024 so far.
Starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis, the FX and Disney Plus show has been nothing short of a spectacle, transporting viewers to the tumultuous feudal era of Japan in the year 1600.
As fans grapple with having to say goodbye to this masterpiece of television, Metro.co.uk recently spoke to the show’s co-creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, who revealed that the last episode actually had an alternate ending that was cut for being ‘false’.
The final scene of Shōgun – the latest adaptation of James Clavell’s novel of the same name – shows Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki) looking out into the distance after sharing some meaningful glances with John Blackthorne (Cosmo).
Moments before, Toranaga revealed his plan for the future to Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) – a future that in history, his real-life counterpart Tokugawa Ieyasu actually achieved.
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 continues, revealing that his ‘dream will be realised’ on the battlefield, with Edo – the former name for Tokyo – becoming his ‘centre of power’ during ‘an era of great peace’.
Showrunner Justin explained that originally, one potential way that Shōgun was going to end was actually with a Blackthorne scene, which ended up being repurposed.
Meanwhile, another sequence featuring Blackthorne in his old age was cut from the series completely.
‘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 director of the episode, Frederick EO Toye, found a way to place the scene at an earlier point in the story, with the crew then adding bruising and scarring back onto Cosmo’s face using visual effects.
Another alternate ending wasn’t used in the show at all, which featured an older version of Blackthorne looking out at the sea in the same spot where the story 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 story takes an ambiguous turn in the final episode, as it begins with him depicted as an old man in bed back in England, being questioned by his grandchildren about his adventures in Japan while holding onto the rosary given to him by Mariko (Anna).
This, of course, is a departure from what happened to William Adams, as well as the fictional version of the character’s tale in the 1975 novel.
In one of the final moments of the Shōgun finale, Blackthorne drops Mariko’s rosary into a body of water with the encourage of his former consort Fuji (Moeka Hoshi)… which therefore means that the scene of his older self couldn’t have happened exactly as depicted.
‘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.’
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FX’s Shōgun is available to watch on Disney Plus.
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