Episode 3: ‘Tomorrow Is Tomorrow’
A lovely scene is taking place at sea. After a daring escape, Lord Toranaga and his newfound English associate John Blackthorne are free from captivity. Much has been lost in the attempt. Toranaga’s wife, Lady Kiri no Kata (Yoriko Doguchi), remains in the clutches of the hated Lord Ishido, having fulfilled her part in the ruse that allowed her husband to flee. Lady Mariko’s husband, Buntaro (Shinnosuke Abe), sacrifices himself to prevent enemy soldiers from thwarting the escape. Or at least he appears to: Until we see a dead body, it’s probably wisest to consider this character still in play.
As far as Mariko, Toranaga and Blackthorne are concerned, a lot of people gave all they had in order to safeguard them. There’s much for which the survivors can be grateful. How does Lord Toranaga choose to celebrate? With a diving lesson from the Anjin, the barbarian, John Blackthorne.
Blackthorne rolls with the odd request. He’s becoming increasingly adept at acclimating himself to Japanese customs, and equally adept at knowing when to break them. Throwing a theatrical fit about the propriety of inspecting women’s quarters in light of European chivalric ideals is, after all, what enabled Toranaga to escape Ishido’s clutches while wearing his wife’s clothes. Toranaga names Blackthorne hatamoto, an honorific indicating high status earned through his courage in effecting Toranaga’s escape.
If this lord, who has very obviously taken a shine to him, wants to learn to dive, then John Blackthorne will see it done.
And so the episode ends, with the actors Cosmo Jarvis and Hiroyuki Sanada leaping from the vessel in their skivvies, racing each other to shore. It’s a delightful moment of recreation and repose, in a series driven by physical peril and paranoia. This is the kind of enriching material that makes a show worthwhile.
Would that the same could be said for the rest of the episode. Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.
The director Charlotte Brandstrom, late of the tepid fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” chronicles various exciting things going on. Ishido, Toranaga and the Christian forces fight a three-way battle in a forest by firelight. Buntaro makes his brave stand against dozens of goons on the dock. Blackthorne races against his foul-mouthed Catholic frenemy Rodrigues as they steer their ships into and out of danger. All of these incidents seem, on paper, to be the stuff of crackerjack action filmmaking.
Unfortunately, pointing a camera at action, while necessary for action filmmaking, is not the only criterion for success. Too much of the nominal excitement is filmed at a remove — medium-wide shots that neither give the full lay of the land nor immerse viewers in the physicality of combat. There’s no actual surprise in the surprise attack in the forest, no attempt made to root us in the experiences of the besieged, no fight choreography that communicates the peril of battling two enemy forces at once, as Toranaga, Blackthorne and the surprisingly well-trained Mariko do.
You don’t feel the arrows whizzing by, the way you do in, say, the battle scenes in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films. You don’t feel the chaos of that nighttime battle. You don’t feel Buntaro’s blend of desperation and terrifying skill as he holds at bay a dock full of assailants. You don’t feel the risk of that game of chicken Blackthorne and Rodrigues are playing, not when your primary view is two guys with their hands on the rudder. You don’t feel much of anything.
The lighting is a persistent problem in this regard. Both the blue-gray of the nighttime scenes and the blinding haze of daytime at sea make the show feel not so much surreal as unreal, like action taking place in a digital no-man’s-land.
It’s a shame, because on a plot level there’s much of interest. Lord Toranaga’s maneuver against his rivals on the Council of Regents, for example, depends on the kind of procedural counting error — they can only impeach and execute him if he’s actually present to provide the fifth and final vote — that routinely undoes speakers of the House in the here and now. It’s always fun to watch villains get outfoxed.
The deepening relationships between Blackthorne and Mariko, and Blackthorne and Toranaga, merit discussion as well. There’s a lovely, underplayed erotic exchange between Mariko and Blackthorne, when she explains the Japanese theory that sex workers are vital to maintaining mental and physical health. Her euphemism for orgasm — “the moment of the clouds and the rain” — clearly makes an impression on, and perhaps offers an invitation to, Blackthorne.
Which brings us back to the diving scene. Just a few hours before Lord Toranaga names Blackthorne his swimming instructor, he was ready to sacrifice him to save himself. He fully intended to leave the Anjin behind with Ishido, the Portuguese and the Christian lords, all of whom are out for his blood. Blackthorne’s ingenuity and skill as a pilot are what save him, not any noblesse oblige on Toranaga’s part. The diving ritual feels purgative, then — a way for these two men to shed their suspicions of each other along with their clothes.
The strength of “Shogun” is in these personal moments, not in indifferently filmed sword fights. I’d rather watch Blackthorne and Rodrigues scream-laughing obscenities at each other, the shifty Lord Yabushige switching loyalties from scene to scene, or the continuing emotional ordeal of Fuji (Moeka Hoshi), whose husband and baby were sacrificed to notions of feudal honor. If “Shogun” is to succeed, it’s clear now that its strength is the more intimate material, rather than the large-scale action it doesn’t appear to have in hand.
