Shogun returns with a devastating penultimate episode as the gang returns to Osaka and Mariko finds martyrdom. This is the best episode of Shogun so far, and likely to be the best of the entire series. Whether or not the show gives us Sekigahara in its finale, or merely alludes to it as in the book, the show’s ninth episode achieves everything the premiere promised with drama, romance, action, and heartbreak.

As the episode begins, Yabushige and Blackthorne approach the Council of Regents in the hopes of allying with Ishido—Blackthorne to find a new patron for his war on the Portuguese, and Yabushige, as Blackthorne’s handler, to keep his head.

This goes nowhere. They are unnecessary to Ishido’s impending victory and Ishido has nothing but disdain for both of them. Soon, Mariko arrives, and the reason for her dispatch by Toranaga begins to become clear. She has come to demand that Kiri no Kata and Shizu no Kata, as Toranaga’s wife and consort, be allowed to depart for Edo.

To refuse her could destroy Ishido politically. If the hostages depart, he has lost all his bargaining chips and must then confront war against the entire Council, all of whom would now gladly ally with Toranaga, given his treachery. If instead he openly kills Mariko or the other Regents, he will admit in effect that he has launched a coup d’état and so destroy his legitimacy all the same, winning allies to Toranaga and fomenting open rebellion. Toranaga has called Ishido’s bluff. He can’t refuse Mariko’s desire to leave, not even in light of her  personally insulting his humble lineage, but he sure as hell won’t let her walk.

With Mariko’s role in Toranaga’s plan now obvious, Yabushige curses his luck and Blackthorne tries in vain to prevent Mariko from going to what he suspects will be her death. But Mariko can’t forsake her mission and so attempts to leave Osaka the next morning with Toranaga’s women and a Yoshii clan samurai escort.

When Ishido’s men impede her departure, Mariko orders her troops to attack and a massacre breaks out as Mariko’s entire escort and the vanguard of Ishido’s forces wipe each other out, one samurai bowing to Mariko in a final profession of loyalty before he is speared through the heart. Unwilling to relent, Mariko has a palace maid bring her a naginata and fights hopelessly to cut her way through Ishido’s spearmen, killing one or two of them before she is disarmed.

With Ishido still unwilling to kill her but her mission thwarted, Mariko declares she has been disgraced and vows to commit seppuku at sunset to protest his tyranny. Sensing that they’ve been outmaneuvered, over the following hours Ochiba attempts to persuade Mariko into surrendering to save her life while Blackthorne remonstrates in vain against her plans for suicide. In a last bit of desperation he begs her to “live for me”, a request she must refuse, however sadly. Resolute but stricken with grief, she goes to Fr. Alvito to make her last confession.

While bound by honor and political need to kill herself, Mariko’s Catholic faith leads her to believe that without a kaishakunin to deal the mortal blow, she will be condemned to eternal damnation for her suicide.

On a somewhat technical note, her plan to elide this fate by being seconded by Kiyama does not entirely work in real-world terms—from a Christian theological perspective this is very much a finesse and the use of a second in a self-chosen death would still likely be viewed in reality as suicide rather than martyrdom.

But if we can suspend that element of disbelief, the plan sets up two particularly beautiful scenes in the episode, the latter of which effectively reconciles Mariko to Blackthorne and belatedly justifies the show’s entire approach to their romance. 

First we are given her confession with Fr. Alvito, who is shown in the cold open to have converted her personally to Catholicism after an attempt at suicide fourteen years earlier. This is a brief, intimate scene, depicting Mariko at her most vulnerable since the Willow World affair in episode 6. As she breaks down in prayer with Martin, claiming she is unworthy of God’s forgiveness, we see the anguish she has held back for years, the personal suffering that led her to seek death from Toranaga in episode 7 and to talk down Fujii from her own near-suicide so powerfully in the premiere. 

Overall, this is a tremendous episode for Anna Sawai, but the three–dimensionality and empathy Tommy Bastow exhibits here, as in the previous episode, also elevates his character above the predictable stereotypes (usually of a colonizer and/or pedophile) one would expect a priest to be reduced to in a lesser production.

While he remains, as a Jesuit and an agent of Western imperialism, a foe of Toranaga and Blackthorne, his role in Mariko’s life has been unequivocally positive. Shogun has demonstrated a remarkable confidence throughout its entire run of rendering even “bad” or antagonistic characters as full human beings—everyone from the lovably sociopathic Surprised Pikachu named Yabushige to even the gutless Kiyama, who we’re reminded earlier in the episode, in a bit of verbal sparring with Blackthorne, can also speak Portuguese fluently. These characters are large. They contain multitudes.

But the highlight of the episode up until its shocking final five minutes of action is Mariko’s abortive attempt at seppuku.

With Ishido forbidding Kiyama to serve as her second, Mariko writes her jisei and then prepares to take her own life before the court, knowing that her refusal to cower will result in her eternal damnation if she is not euthanized but dies by her own hand. And it’s at precisely this moment, when Mariko has been left spiritually abandoned, that Blackthorne does what is bizarrely the most romantic thing in the entire series so far and offers to stand as her second. 

Whether or not he believes in God (doubtful) is immaterial—he knows that Mariko does, and his ability in this moment to subordinate his own personal desire for her to live to her own obligation to herself to die is breathtaking. It is, in all its macabre beauty, the show’s most overtly feminist and mature affirmation of their love, and retroactively affirms the significant changes the show has made to their romance in the original text.

In hindsight, his volunteering in this scene affirms the show’s more wistful and distant approach to their forbidden love affair than in the book, while recontextualizing Blackthorne’s entire character arc from episode 6 onward.

If, at the end of episode 5, he seemed ready to accept his role as hatamoto and the rules of the society to which he was assimilating, his reversion to adventurism and selfishness in the next two installments ruined his relationships with both Mariko and Toranaga. By episode 8, he was outcast. In “Crimson Sky”, Blackthorne’s sacrifice in the service of Mariko, his willingness to do the unthinkable and learn, like Buntaro in the case of Hiromatsu, “what it means to be denied”, represents the second time in two weeks that seppuku has been ironically framed as an affirmation as well as a negation of life.

As Buntaro’s refusal to follow his father into death may offer him his only real chance at redemption in Shogun, so Blackthorne’s willingness to kill the woman he loves may ironically offer him the beginning, in the finale, of a freedom from the selfishness which remains the last Lord he bows to after forsaking all others. 

This is the culmination of their relationship, and when Ishido, realizing the futility of his gambit, intervenes at the last minute, granting her request to leave Osaka with Toranaga’s kin, it creates the hope, however brief, of a happy ending.

Mariko does not stab herself, Blackthorne is not actually forced to decapitate her, and Toranaga’s consorts and the rest of the court are now free to leave. The hostages immediately prepare to depart and that night Blackthorne and Mariko make love, falling asleep in each other’s arms. These scenes remain utterly grounded and yet in itheir operatic force are transcendent in the extreme.

But this happiness won’t last. With nowhere else to turn, Ishido has one last play to run using none other than everyone’s favorite rat bastard.

As the castle celebrates Mariko’s life being spared, Yabushige goes into Splinter Cell mode, knifing several samurai before opening a secret passageway through the palace walls to a hit squad of ninja. Their mission: capture Mariko and kill her outside the palace grounds, allowing Ishido to eliminate her threat with plausible deniability.

As the shinobi slaughter their way through the Yoshii clan’s quarters, Yabu raises the alarm to disguise his treachery while Blackthorne and Mariko fight-off waves of Shinobi with knives and pistols. For the second time in one episode Shogun delivers a bloody, economical fight scene as the lovers retreat with Kiri, Shizu, and Yabu into a locked storeroom. As Blackthorne struggles to bolster the door and Yabu, as much from outright cowardice as treachery, freezes in place unwilling to help him, Mariko decides her time has come.

Indicting Ishido with her last breath, she braces herself against the door and is killed mid-sentence as the shinobi’s bombs obliterate it, the last shot of the episode an instantaneous, phantom-like image of Mariko being thrown forward that will forever be sealed in Blackthorne’s memory.

She has died, gloriously, and though her death forms the heartbreaking conclusion to Shogun’s penultimate episode, it just might prove to be the sacrifice laid on the altar of her Lord’s ultimate victory. Surely, this is one of the greatest hours of television ever made. And yes, I am giving it an eleven out of ten. May you rot in hell with Yabushige if you disagree.

All photos are property of FX

Benjamin Rose is a poet from Washington D.C. and the author of Elegy For My Youth (2023) and Dust Is Over All (2024).  He studied English at the Catholic University of America and is the winner of the 2023 O’Hagan Poetry Prize. From 2019 he has edited The Path. Buy his books here.

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NOTES

1. “And we, alas, must die, must die”. From Puccini’s Turandot ︎
2. “Commend my spirit into your hands”. Jesus’s last words as recorded in the Vulgate (i.e. Latin) edition of the Gospel of Luke ︎
3. “O Sun! Life! Eternity!” From the ending of Turandot ︎
4. “Glory to You”. Cf. note 3. ︎

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