Shōgun’s Lost ’Ship
Major spoilers follow for Shōgun’s ninth episode, “Crimson Sky.”
Alas, it was never going to work out between John Blackthorne and Lady Mariko. How could it? She is bound to honor codes dating back to long before she ever existed. He longs to return to his boat so he can get back to slapping around Catholics. Both are pieces on a chessboard they’re not allowed to see. From a pure logistical standpoint, there was no clear pathway to a happy ending. Where would they run off to, anyway? Macau?
In any case, Shōgun is not that kind of show. The FX series is a dark, violent epic about grand political warfare and the weight of history where individual people routinely give up their lives for the bigger picture. That the penultimate episode, “Crimson Sky,” culminates with Mariko’s own sacrifice is the natural outcome of her arc within the stoic framework of the show. Where Blackthorne’s story will end remains to be seen, but you can bet it’s probably going to be bittersweet at best.
Still, it hurts to say good-bye to the sweet romantic fantasy of the Blackthorne-Mariko relationship. (Blariko? Mackthorne?) As impossible as it may have been, the pairing brought a hopeful flair that helped balance the series’ innate heaviness. This is especially impressive when considering the many ways their relationship could’ve crumbled into a mess of painful clichés: A strapping white man swoops into feudal Japan, encounters a native woman suffering from the burdens placed upon her by her society, and offers himself up as her means of liberation. But again, Shōgun isn’t that kind of show. Their romance works because it flows organically from Shōgun’s specific tone, which excels in finding improbable pockets of delight within its grim universe.
Consider the show’s unexpected expressions of humor, mainly of the gallows variety. Yabushige, the Sengoku-era rock-star warlord? Funny. Lord Toranaga’s fail-son dying after slipping on a rock? Pretty funny. Blackthorne, in general? Very funny. There’s a reason Shōgun generated so much memetic energy across its run, and it has a lot to do with how comfortable the series has been finding muted laughs in the middle of the abyss.
Blackthorne: Everything that happened on the Island, really happened. They were NOT dead all along. The flash-sideways world in season 6 does exist in a kind of purgatory but everything else happened as Christian Shepherd clearly explains -
— Anna H. (@annaliezard) April 19, 2024
Mariko: the Anjin is upset about LOST pic.twitter.com/HhzMN4vY4T
Blackthorne and Mariko’s relationship is a concentrated dose of this tonal mix. In the hands of Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis, who are both excellent, it’s hard not to find these obviously doomed lovers charming and worth rooting for, which is partly a by-product of old-school television magic. After all, their chemistry is essentially that of a will-they-won’t-they workplace romance: They connect, they bicker (“What’s going on with you and the Anjin?” asks an annoyed Toranaga, after one such argument in his presence), they’re kept apart by all sorts of obstacles (including a back-from-the-dead Buntaro and, eventually, death itself). The hot-spring sequence in “The Eightfold Fence,” where Blackthorne describes a hypothetical date he’d take Mariko on if they ever end up in London together, is utter catnip for saps like myself.
The pairing also makes emotional sense; we can easily see what draws them to each other. They share the bond of the outsider, him the Western barbarian, her the ostracized remnant of a disgraced samurai family. They aren’t alone in being outcasts; Fuji, for example, was slotted into Blackthorne’s orbit earlier in the series after losing her family as a result of her husband breaking decorum. But Mariko’s connection with Blackthorne is further deepened by the two sharing a language — Portuguese, though represented to us as English — that they can mostly keep for themselves. In Mariko, Blackthorne finds safe harbor in a world he barely understands. Gradually, she also becomes his means to accept the possibility of “the Japans” being where he could spend the rest of his life. In Blackthorne, Mariko finds someone who’s able to see her for who she is, even as he’s unable to fully understand her. After all, this is a dude who enters the picture with little context for her familial sins and what they mean within the society around them. “That allows her to become very vulnerable with him,” Sawai recently explained to Vulture. “The fact she’s being accepted for who she is, that’s very refreshing.”
It also allows them to have substantive debates that contribute to Shōgun’s thematic heft. Take their differing outlooks on the idea of freedom, for example. Back in “The Eightfold Fence,” Blackthorne shares his calling for life on the high seas, a life where he’s free from the restrictive bonds of any society. (He’s a man-child, in other words.) Her response to this notion, at first, seems to contain a twinge of envy, but in the next episode, “Broken to the Fist,” when Blackthorne expresses haughty puzzlement over her willingness to give up her life as the political heat amps up, she challenges him: “If freedom is all you ever live for, you’ll never be free of yourself.” Neither offers a clear vision of freedom, itself a proxy for the deeper question of why we live, that’s acceptable to the other. But within the argument, the two hover at the edges of finding their own answers. Being each other’s dialectic — now that’s sexy.
Also sexy: the sex! The doomed lovebirds get three major instances of carnal fireworks over the course of Shōgun, and not only are they superhot, they are each emotionally intense and complicated in different ways. The two first “pillow” in the fourth episode when Mariko believes her husband, Buntaro, is dead, but her lack of acknowledgment to Blackthorne the morning after, and the way the scene was shot, leaves us with a little uncertainty as to whether it was actually Mariko who visited with Blackthorne that night. Later, in “Ladies of the Willow World,” they engage in what can be clinically described as intimacy-by-proxy, where Kiku, the courtesan, functions as an emotional and physical conduit between the two budding lovers, who are held back from consummating by their circumstances. Finally, in “Crimson Sky,” Blackthorne and Mariko have their most direct union in a love scene that in any other context would feel like a giddy payoff for a season’s worth of slow-build sexual tension.
But as we all know, Shōgun isn’t that type of show, so any excitement we may feel at their union is tempered by the fact that it comes sandwiched between Mariko’s near-seppuku and, ultimately, her death. This is, after all, a hyperintelligent series that’s eminently conscious of the world it depicts, never wavering from the all-consuming nature of its political drama. In “Crimson Sky,” Blackthorne’s appeal to Mariko to “live for him” is a swooning gesture, but the proposition was never going to be an adequate answer for her existential struggle. That she eventually decides to sacrifice herself — that is, to accept her place in the grand plan — feels like a fascinating rebuttal to the simple fantasy of two people running away together. Blackthorne and Mariko’s romance was a big part of what made Shōgun really fun television, but the show’s commitment to its doom is yet another reflection of what makes it great.