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Every Shōgun Episode Ends Perfectly
The best show on television right now is doing something simple: nailing its final minutes every week.
All of that brings us to “Crimson Sky,” in which Mariko’s death is the final moment — for the episode, for her character, and for all the parts of the Shōgun story that her arc touched upon, including her romance with Blackthorne, her complicated relationship with Lady Ochiba, and her antagonistic marriage to warrior Buntaro. Anna Sawai’s mammoth performance has been a joy to take in, all of her minute acting decisions coming together to construct a woman whose sense of self is defined both by service to her lord and a zealous need to die on her own terms: the facetious little smile she puts on whenever she unleashes a “So sorry,” her hardened eyes when she rejects her husband, the pauses she sprinkles throughout her translation of Japanese and Portuguese as she searches for just the right word. Compared with some of the series’ other episode endings, Mariko’s actual death — a result of her voluntarily stepping into an explosive attack from Ishido’s assassins — doesn’t come out of nowhere like Nagakado’s cannon attack or Toranaga’s treacherous maid, and it’s certainly not as optimistic as Blackthorne and Toranaga’s swim race to shore in “Tomorrow Is Tomorrow,” and it doesn’t give us the heartwarming feeling of a bond beginning to bloom as Blackthorne and his consort Fuji’s clasped hands signal in “Broken to the Fist.” But it feels just as thrilling and as affecting as those other culminating moments because of how cleverly Shōgun has reinvigorated fundamental TV-storytelling principles in each episode’s final minutes, recognizing in them and their lingering week-to-week impact the ability to clarify themes and crystallize character motivations.
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