‘Shogun’ Finale Recap: Mask Off

Season 1, Episode 10: ‘A Dream of a Dream’

Take a look at any of FX’s promotional material for “Shogun,” and one image will stare back: Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), in full samurai armor, his sword drawn as he charges into battle on a white horse. Tattered red banners and a cavalry provide the backdrop. It doesn’t require close reading to determine that he has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

It’s also false advertising. There is no culminating battle in the final episode of “Shogun.” Toranaga does not charge into the fray on a white horse, his katana dealing death on all sides. The regents’ armies do not fight among themselves. Lord Ishido is not beaten down in defeat. John Blackthorne does not prove his battlefield mettle to earn his samurai sword. Instead, the episode mimics the leafless branch in the poem Lady Mariko dictated before her death.

By now, you may be shouting that the book upon which the show is based doesn’t include a final battle, either. But just as James Clavell, the author of “Shogun,” altered, edited and exaggerated real-world people and events from Japanese history to suit the needs of his novel, the creators of the 2024 television version also altered, edited and exaggerated in turn. They’ve changed character names, shifted points of emphasis from Blackthorne to Japanese characters and so on. For this episode they cut the book’s epilogue, in which Toranaga executes Ishido by burying him up to his neck and leaving him to die of exposure. (Toranaga is a tough cookie, but that act seems a bridge too far for the TV version.) The showrunners don’t mind taking advantage of adaptational freedom when it suits them.

Much as I think both the marketing and the writing have deliberately steered audiences to expect an all out action-horror spectacle — in the mode for which the pioneering “Game of Thrones” set a still-unmatched standard on television — the show’s creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, as well as the writers Maegan Houang and Emily Yoshida (not to mention Clavell himself), turn out not to be telling that kind of story.

If there’s a through line for how “Shogun” depicts violence, it’s that it’s almost always dirty pool. A Christian lord’s army ambushing another lord’s forces under cover of darkness. A cannon fusillade launched at men given no warning. A nephew attempting to murder his uncle in a brothel. A squad of palace guards, slowly driving an outnumbered woman warrior to exhaustion and defeat. Ninja assassins slaughtering their way through a sleepy household, not once but twice. The entire plot is driven by Blackthorne’s revelation that even the Christian lords’ European allies are secretly building an army with which they intend to take all of Japan unawares.

When it comes to violence, nobody here moves out in the open. “Shogun” is consistent in that respect, at least if you ignore the picture on the promos.