The penultimate episode of foreign exchange‘s shÅ gun It is simply titled “Crimson Sky”. The phrase, of course, refers to Toranaga’s (Hiroyuki Sanada) top-secret battle plan to conquer Osaka in one massive coup. It’s intended to be the last resort for the tactical genius, and it’s been hinted for weeks that Toranaga would need an army, a ton of firepower, and a lot of luck to pull it off.
shÅ gun Instead, episode 9 “Crimson Sky” reveals that all he needed was Mariko (Anna Sawai).
Mariko travels to Osaka, where she tells the reigning lord Ishido (Takehiro Hira) that Toranaga has demanded that he escort his two favorite consorts to Edo immediately. Ishido understands that she is disobeying her unspoken rule that everyone in the city is her hostage and attempts to intimidate her into staying still through words and force. However, Lady Ochiba (Fumi Nikaido), the real power player in Osaka, immediately recognizes the power of what Mariko is attempting.
“Toranaga and Mariko’s plan for Crimson Sky is not a battle. “It’s not like this big assault on Osaka that everyone anticipates it will be.” shÅ gun The co-writer of episode 9 “Crimson Sky,” Puente told Jugo Mobile during a Zoom call last week. “It’s like this battle of wills and words and that’s Ochiba and Mariko’s domain.”
“They are the two teachers. That’s how they’ve been fighting all this time. “This is how they have carved out their place in the world and how they have maintained their status and their power despite all the things that have happened to them.”
shÅ gun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” was co-written by Puente and shÅ gun co-creator Rachel Kondo. Jugo Mobile learned during our Zoom conversation with them last week that Episode 9 went through many permutations throughout the production process, including a version that didn’t No ends with the dramatic death of Mariko. However, Puente and Kondo’s north star was their obsession with Lady Ochiba, one of the most enigmatic characters in James Clavell’s 1975 novel. Just like in the show, we hear about the formidable heir to characters like Toranaga and Ishido, but we don’t meet her until much later in the story.
“This is an incredibly powerful person, but we don’t really get his perspective until very, very late in the game,” Puente said, noting that she only gets to the last part of the 1,000-plus page novel. “I feel like both Rachel and I were like, ‘Who is this character?’”
Lady Ochiba is based on Yodo-dono, or Lady Chacha, a real historical figure from feudal Japan. Both Ochiba and Yodo-dono were consorts of the formerly ruling TaikÅ and rose to power by producing an heir to the TaikÅ. After the TaikÅ’s death, Ochiba’s only role in her life is to keep her young son, the TaikÅ’s heir, Yaemon (Sen Mars), alive. She is “aided” by the council of regents, five rival lords who must balance each other, thus ensuring that none of them can seize power and become the all-powerful ShÅgun instead of the heir.
During our conversation, Caillan Puente noticed that there is a scene in shÅ gun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” where Ochiba “tells Mariko, in this moment of frustration, that she only exists to protect her son. As if she no longer existed as the person Mariko knew.
The person Ochiba has become at that moment. shÅ gun takes place is a kind of antagonist of Toranaga. His obsession with maintaining control over the council and protecting his son creates a situation that endangers Toranaga and his vassals. Throughout Clavell’s book, Toranaga bitterly thinks that Ochiba is a “treacherous tigress.” It was a representation that Rachel Kondo said they started with in the early days of making shÅ gun.
“She was never a twisted mustache [villain in FX’s ShÅgun], but I think she was a less complicated villain in our opinion,” Rachel Kondo said. “Like she was some kind of villain who was going over history.”
Kondo also revealed that it was a woman who worked in props who mentioned to Puente that the Ochiba they were preparing for the screen did not quite fit with her reputation in Japanese culture.
“He was a highly revered character in Japanese culture. He would be like us and, I don’t know, Eleanor Roosevelt or someone we all know,” Kondo said. “We had to rethink. We couldn’t just apply whatever history of her we wanted to her because we wanted to be respectful of the consciousness inherent in her.”
“It actually taught us to think about it in really complex ways and I think it evolved in a more interesting way.”
shÅ gun Fans probably already know the big change Puente and Kondo made to Ochiba’s backstory: they made Mariko her childhood best friend. It was a flashback they included in the script drafts for Episode 9 before it ended up as the cold open for Episode 6.
“This is what I don’t think the book had, which were these girls. A childhood in feudal Japan where it is very much a patriarchal society and you are a pawn of your father and do his bidding. I think in that scenario, naturally, you search, right?” Kondo said in a separate conversation Jugo Mobile had with her and series co-creator Justin Marks. “Or if you were lucky to have found it, you hold on to the brotherly camaraderie, the brotherly affection, the brotherly safe haven, right?”
Kondo revealed that the writers talked about how that closeness would manifest on screen, which sparked the idea for the shot where the younger versions of Mariko and Ochiba sleep in the same bed with their backs touching.
“Talking about these two women who are so alone in the story, we wanted to bring them together and see what it would be like to explore politics, through their perspective,” Puente said.
As it happens, the real battle for Osaka plays out entirely through the perspectives of these women. Toranaga and Ishido may technically be in charge, but Mariko has never focused on the low-born bureaucrat.
“Ochiba is clearly who Mariko is up against,” Puente said. And Ochiba knows it.
“[Ochiba]is the one who sees the dangerous [Mariko’s] “The words are and she realizes the political position she is putting them in. This is like a trap that she set,” Puente said before explaining that Ishido is not only blind to the actual battle that is occurring, but that he foolishly thinks he can use “blunt force” to stop Mariko.
Kondo went on to explain that “the power that Toranaga also has, above and beyond someone like Ishido” is that Toranaga actually takes the time to study the relationship between these two high-born women. He questions Mariko about her past with Ochiba.
“It’s storing information, right? As for how she can take everyone by surprise and base everything on this girl friendship,” Kondo said. “And I think that’s what he has about someone like Ishido. “It wouldn’t even occur to you to understand that these relationships are powerful and have an effect.”
In the end, as fans of shÅ gun You’ll see when you watch Episode 10 “A Dream of a Dream” on Hulu today or on FX tonight, Toranaga’s idea that Mariko and Ochiba’s relationship is important will be the deciding factor in this whole power struggle.
shÅ gun It is not reduced to cannon fire, samurai swords or even a duel between two men. The ending hinges on the love two girls once shared and the stubborn women they became.
