Shogun Has a Dumbledore Problem
Toranaga is never wrong and explains it all
Spoilers through the ninth and penultimate episode of Shogun.
The final episode of FX/Hulu’s Shogun limited series airs on Tuesday. The show has proven to be a sensation and is currently enjoying that special “everybody is enjoying this so don’t you dare spoil the party” period where criticism is forbidden. (See also the first season of True Detective and the season one-season two turn of Lost, among others.) I’ve been enjoying the show for its production values, stellar cast, and generally restrained approach, though the last has faltered at times, such as in the pre-combustion engine high-speed boat chase. The show has collected a great deal of praise for its approach to Japanese identity and its diverse cast and crew; that diversity is great, although talk of cultural appropriation makes me chuckle, given that the Japanese are some of the most gleeful and shameless cultural appropriators in the world. Which is awesome, as that disregard for the self-negating notion of cultural appropriation helped the Japanese creative industries produce a vastly disproportionate amount of the great narrative art of the past half-century. (Remember friends: there is literally no alternative to cultural appropriation.) In any event, Shogun is stylish, engaging, and obviously the product of deep investment and care.
So why, nine episodes in, has it come to leave me so cold?
Maybe part of the reason is that it feels thematically inert to me. I’ve been trying to get people to talk about what the show is saying, as distinct from what it’s depicting, and I haven’t been inspired by the responses. A lot of the talk about “prestige TV” has always concerned the medium’s turn towards more symbolic and political depth, and I’m not seeing a lot of that here. But not all narrative art needs to have rich thematic messages; the world needs shows that simply aim to entertain while remaining smart and ambitious, both of which Shogun achieves. And anyway I think the built-in response that a show that takes place in 1600s feudal Japan can’t have that much to say about the modern condition is fair enough. Another quibble is that there’s a weird sense in which the show is trying to make Toranaga some sort of beacon of freedom (?) and democracy (???) when in the book there are no such trappings. He’s a warlord in a zero-sum fight for power and should be understood that way. But that’s a minor complaint. The trouble is that from a pure narrative entertainment standpoint, I’m also feeling unsatisfied. I recognize that the creators of the show are adapting a book that made many of these narrative choices, but my job as a TV viewer is to evaluate the show as a show, and it has a particular aggravating quality that’s dulled my enjoyment of a well-made labor of love. And I think the Harry Potter series is a productive comparison, as odd as that may sound.
I never read the Harry Potter books, just watched the movies, but just about everyone else in my family devoured them. This proved to be useful to me as I tried to digest the later films. I enjoy most of the series well enough - Goblet of Fire is by far the best, don’t challenge me on this - but as they tried to adapt longer and longer books in two-hour chunks, the cracks started to show more and more. I remember my utter confusion when Snape said “I am the Half-Blood Prince!,” a reference to a plot point that’s introduced in the first twenty minutes of the movie and then utterly ignored for two hours in favor of endless romantic shenanigans. Turns out it makes sense in the books! After the last movie, I was talking to my older brother about some of my dissatisfaction with the story as a whole. For one thing, the books felt at war with themselves, as Rowling had manhandled the series in a self-consciously dark direction, leading to the deaths of multiple major characters at the end, but could not escape the fact that these were fundamentally children’s stories. My biggest beef, though, was that the stories just felt trite and, despite the endless explicit threats, never really had stakes. And my brother nodded and said “Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All.”
As he laid out, a (apparently fairly common) complaint with the series is that Dumbledore is such an all-knowing sage, and is so consistently revealed in the end to have predicted everything and been on top of everything, that any sense of real danger evaporates. Again and again and again, Dumbledore knew. Oh you thought Harry and his friends were in danger? Wrong! Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All! You thought Dumbledore was losing? Haha! You fool. Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All! The gang has gotten up to some whacky mischief and they’ve been able to keep the truth of their adventures hidden from the adults at Hogwarts. They’re sure they’ve gotten away with it. But, whoops, here’s an arch comment from Dumbledore (while he’s in the process of giving them a completely inappropriate number of house points) that reveals that he knows all about it already. Because Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All! In Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore is being cold and distant, and we think, could it be? Could Dumbledore have a flaw? Could he be… wrong? Nope! Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All! He always had some deeper purpose, silly, and shame on us for thinking otherwise. Snape kills Dumbledore? Looks like he wasn’t able to wriggle his way out of that one. Hey, dumbass! Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All! He planned that, all along. Like Jesus, his betrayal was preordained. Dumbledore is Never Wrong and Explains It All from beyond the grave!
All of which a) makes me root against Dumbledore, that fucking smug prick and b) just murders stakes and risk. When a saintly grandfather figure inevitably reveals that he knew everything that was going to happen (including in the afterlife!), it just makes everything trite and boring.
I think you can predict where I’m taking this - the problem with Shogun is that Toranaga is Never Wrong and Explains It All. The narrative has this exact, exact, exact flaw, and though I totally understand why people love the show, I find it quite glaring. Every time there’s some danger, in the long run, we learn that it’s no danger at all and that Toranaga predicted everything. Whenever it feels like “the good guys”1 are in danger, it turns out that it was all just part of Toranaga’s plan. Whenever he seems flawed or mistaken, it turns out it was all part of his act. He plays Blackthorne, he plays the Portugeuse, he plays the regents. His various displays of weakness are all calculated to manipulate his rivals. He knows that Blackthorne will offer his services to Yabushige, despite Blackthorne being a man from an alien culture he barely knows. Toranaga knows Yabushige will betray him, but that’s OK, because of course he predicts exactly how Yabushige will betray him and use it to his advantage! He didn’t force his idiot son to die in a pointless attack, but doing so fits in perfectly with his plans and in fact proves integral to the intricate cathedral that is his long con to take power. A barbarian ship captain washes up on the shore of one of his vassals and becomes immediately an essential chess piece that he plays masterfully. He wants to make people believe that he’s giving up, so he perfectly manipulates a Portuguese monk who has been steeped in Japanese aristocratic culture for decades, then compels his lifelong best friend to ritualistically disembowel himself in order to send a message to Ishido. That last bit, truly, was where the show lost me. “Haha, all of this bad stuff was really part of my devious plan” is a card you really can’t play that often. Was there no way to send that message without compelling the suicide of his most loyal lord and oldest friend?
(We could, incidentally, locate Toranaga in the long history of the scheming Asian character trope, if we were looking for identity sins to complain about, but… why would we do that?)
I don’t care for Toranaga is Never Wrong and Explains It All, personally. It feels cheap and unearned and makes me resent the character in exactly the way I resent Dumbledore. And I think it speaks to a far broader modern dependence on plot convenience, the constant mining of unrealistic turns of events to move a narrative forward, as well as characters who are able to predict outcomes with utterly improbable levels of accuracy. All throughout the series there are inflection moments where a single event breaking in a slightly different way would ruin all of Toranaga’s careful planning, but it all goes his way, conveniently. Just a bit more of a stretch than I can make for the show, which is lovely to look at and well-paced but which lacks the kind of deeper messaging that would help me look past all the times when the narrative stitches show. It’s definitely good television overall, and I get why people are going gaga for it. (And I’m not looking forward to being told that I’m just a hater and let people enjoy things blah blah.) But I’m surprised that more people aren’t as put off as I am by just how much depends on an omniscient character who’s never wrong and always explains it all.
I cannot stress enough that there is no in-universe reason to believe that Toranaga is a better guy or fairer ruler than Ishido; they’re both just power-hungry warlords.
Not trying to be a fanboy here but if I'm remembering the long denouement of that series correctly, one of the more important elements to Harry Potter was that Dumbledore was, in fact, often wrong, that he bungled and fumbled several major critical elements of the war against Voldemort, and that Voldemort himself was only defeated because the protagonists had several virtues and innate qualities that Dumbledore himself lacked.
I dunno what this means for Shogun since I've never seen it. And it's been a long time since I read Harry Potter. Plus, you'd only get this fully if you read the books. All of which is to say, as is usually the case, the books were better. Why am I even writing this comment? Happy Friday.
Haven't seen Shogun, but this is a trope I despise. Oldboy is a good example, where every move the protagonist makes once released from confinement – which surely would have shattered his mind, and made the outside world so alien to him, to the point it could never be predicted – is predicted exactly by the villain. 'No it isn't' is the only rational response.
See also the bit where Negan was introduced in The Walking Dead (the TV show) where his entire plan depends on exactly where Rick and crew would run in an world that's largely wilderness. They could have shot him in their first antagonistic encounter and that's the plan fucked. But they don't and they can't because the show needs to show he's omniscient, with lazy writing.