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.
See also Netflix House of Cards. Being a brilliant schemer doesn't mean you can predict with 100% accuracy how everyone else will act and plan accordingly, it means you're smart enough to adapt to what you can't predict and keep moving toward your goals.
Just remembered another one, the villain in Skyfall. Able to predict everything up to and including a train smashing through a wall preventing him from being pursued.
I don't know that Oldboy is a good example, because the villain there is specifically using hypnosis triggers to ensure that everything unfolds as planned.
That might be dumb, and I'm pretty sure hypnosis doesn't actually work that way, but it does have an explanation beyond "this guy is just a really smart 4th dimensional chess player".
That’s fair; I seem to remember the hypnosis was just to make him fall in love and stuff like the dumplings were his own initiative, but years since I saw it so I’m very probably wrong.
Other good examples are the Joker in Dark Knight and Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman. The sheer amount of dumb luck and omniscience needed for their plans to work are beyond ridiculous.
I tried to warn about spoilers! I don't think I give anything away about the final resolution of the book (which may not be the final resolution of the series anyway).
Oh nothing was spoiled. I meant I am enjoying it and now this will be the lense in which I watch the finale through. My own fault for reading the title and proceeding to read it anyway.
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.
I almost forgot. Thanks for the uconn pick. I did not win my family pool. We do this thing where you submit picks round by round but you submit an envelope with full bracket predictions. I lost because I had an awful envelope. Which I'm relieved because the winner need to run the pool the next year.
Can’t really be true to the book it’s adapting without a near-omniscient Toranaga, the book itself describing one of history’s great schemers.
Maybe I don’t see it because I’ve read the book a few times and am not in ignorance of the ending but I don’t get the “Toranaga is a champion of freedom and/or democracy” take, he’s just not gratuitously malign like Yabushige, but he’s clearly a warlord sacrificing friends and family for his own purposes. He’s the prime mover but I don’t see how he reads as the “good guy”.
I have been afraid to watch the show for exactly these kinds of reasons. I read the book years and years ago and really enjoyed it. But while well researched, and really, really long, the core story is a fish-out-of-water adventure yarn. It raises some interesting ideas about the nature of cultures and exchange betweem civilizations but I never read it as having some kind of deeper meaning. It certainly doesn't require nor is it improved by trying to finagle in a bunch of very modern obsessions.
I overall agree with the criticism. I still like the show. As far as why Toranaga is better than Ishido, I feel like it indirectly explains why in the show... At least when looking at it from the Japanese culture perspective of the 17th century.
Ishido is of a filthy peasent background, Toranaga is a Minowara.
The Taiko and his Queen Dowager wife, both felt closer to Toranaga and wanted him as the person to protect the heir of Japan. At least the scenes we see.
Toranaga didn't take people hostage. Ishido kept people's families hostages in Osaka... while Toranaga let the Taiko's wife leave Edo and come back to Osaka early on in the show.
Well, the hero's gotta hero, right? I don't think it's a problem that the hero is the cleverest, or that he wins (I'm gonna assume he wins). I think the problem (as Freddie notes) is in the inevitable dependence on chance, which is played as if he instantly adds every random, odd, unforeseen occurrence to his master plan, modifying as necessary. While I like Sanada as an actor (and my wife looooves him), he has played Toranaga as just that; a man who is always absolutely in control. I see little in the way of wavering confidence, hesitation or discomfort in fitting a new circumstance into the puzzle. Perhaps the book made him more human, but in the show he's invincible.
Kudos to Anna Sawai, who in addition to being beautiful, does very well in transmitting an intelligence and awareness of what's going on around her. She seems the standout in the cast to me. Jarvis plays Blackthorne as a bit of a knucklehead, which I hope is his intention . . .
You don't want your hero to be so ahead of everyone else that it ruins the tension, though. In comics, both Black Panther and Batman run into this problem from time to time. It's satisfying to have the hero reveal that he's secretly been five steps ahead of everyone else once in a while, but if it's consistent, it gets boring.
Dumbledore is a tricky case, and if a particular reader finds that he drains the tension from the books or movies, I can't argue. He definitely has things he regrets, and he has access to a lot of prophesies, but he does usually end up being several steps ahead of everyone else. And some of Harry's arc of maturity is learning to trust Dumbledore, but yeah, at the end of the day if he ruins the story for you, I can't argue.
(FWIW, my reading is that Dumbledore takes several very risky chances, including putting Harry in phenomenal danger and trusting Snape, and that they very easily could have gone wrong but thankfully didn't.)
I liked the first few seasons of Fargo because they avoided the issue that Freddie's complaining about here. In Season 1, Lorne Malvo seemed to always be in control, but I never felt like that was because he was omniscient. Instead, it seemed like he had prudently set up contingency plans and was able to adapt quickly when other characters acted in a way he couldn't predict. Sure, it seemed "convenient" that he had an alibi as a Lutheran minister when he the cops nabbed him, but I got the impression that he multiple false identities set up that he used when needed, not that he had predicted exactly what would happen. Maybe he was messing with Lester to develop him as an exploitable resource later on. His briefcase full of recorded conversations made it seem like he had a dozen of these relationships going at any time. When something completely unexpected did come up, like Glenn Howerton's blackmail scheme, he just changed his plan.
Fargo season 5 didn't seem to have this going on. It seemed more like Dot just being better than people and John Hamm being dumb/evil.
Are you talking about when she calls him a selfish baby? That entire scene was nonsensical to me. John Hamm's character constantly described himself as a servant of God, inheriting obligations from three generations of sheriffs. The insult would have bounced off of him as a complete non sequitur since he sincerely believed that he was a defender of freedom. The central conflict was that he had an obligation to God to preserve his marriage. Telling him that he has "freedom with no responsibility" right after he called himself a protector of the common man was bizarre.
I was really disappointed in that relationship. There could have been an interesting contrast between Hamm's small-town tyranny, motivated by a twisted sense of paternalism and Leigh's banally evil debt collection, justified by cold Darwinism. Instead, she calls him a baby.
That scene was really popular though. I think it's because everyone disagrees about what liberties and obligations they have. Jon Hamm could have also called Leigh a baby, since she wants freedom without fulfilling his view of what her responsibilities are. Similarly, you can use that same line in real life if you want. Some veterans could call me an entitled baby since I want freedom without the responsibility of serving
I'm not a great student of history or anything, but of what I have read, perhaps this is just a story of one of those times that things go right.
History is full of stories where rulers get everything wrong, overestimate themselves, and their plans fall apart in spectacular fashion. But it also has so many stories of plans going exactly as the ruler expects, even though from an outside perspective there is no reason it had to be that way. Some people look like they were full of masterful schemes that they pulled off without a hitch, when in fact so much of that success was dependent on luck beyond their control. It is not necessarily a fault to portray that scenario, because it has happened in real life many times.
I somewhat disagree because Toranaga's schemes seem more seat-of-his-pants than recognition. He almost got caught escaping from Osaka, and I don't think he predicted the Anjin's distractions! But he clearly is a level above every other character, and that doesn't really bother me more than Paul Atreides being the kwisatz haderach and such.
IIRC Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Shogun. Presumably someone who was able to unify feudal Japan did have an uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.
I haven’t read a biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu but it’s certainly possible that he was Never Wrong and able to Explains It All - or at least able to a significantly greater degree than other people.
Maybe that’s why the show runners have Toranaga almost perish in that earthquake. They needed to show at least one instance where he “did not see that one coming” for the critics ;)
“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.”
I…..what? That’s…..fair?????
Lord of the Rings is set in the third age of Middle Earth. Dune is set in the distant future on a different planet. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is set in 44 BC. The Seventh Seal is set in the 1300s, Wolf Hall is set in the 1500s, and Ben-Hur is set in 33AD.
Nothing to say about the modern human condition, none of them.
If that’s fans’ best defense it’s actually a stunning indictment.
Agree that this is an intolerable trait in a protagonist. What’s funny is that I love this trait in a villain. It was one of my favorite things about watching Daredevil!
Because I only know the show by reading Freddie’s piece lol! I was deciding whether or not I wanted to watch the show and I never mind spoilers so I figured I would read what he thought of it.
Since studios are taking the approach of adapting novels as miniseries now (instead of two hour movies that inevitably have to cut material) what's the point of dumbing them down other than to cater to the lowest common denominator?
I actually read Shogun years and years ago and it was pretty much mass market fare. But it didn't make the mistake of trying to impose some framework of ethical behavior/sympathy onto the Toranaga character. From what I recall he deliberately burns the protagonist's ship at the end of the novel to trap him in Japan, leading one of the other survivors to stroke out and die.
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.
See also Netflix House of Cards. Being a brilliant schemer doesn't mean you can predict with 100% accuracy how everyone else will act and plan accordingly, it means you're smart enough to adapt to what you can't predict and keep moving toward your goals.
Just remembered another one, the villain in Skyfall. Able to predict everything up to and including a train smashing through a wall preventing him from being pursued.
AND, all so he could have a 10 minute conversation with M! He accomplishes nothing else than that!
I don't know that Oldboy is a good example, because the villain there is specifically using hypnosis triggers to ensure that everything unfolds as planned.
That might be dumb, and I'm pretty sure hypnosis doesn't actually work that way, but it does have an explanation beyond "this guy is just a really smart 4th dimensional chess player".
That’s fair; I seem to remember the hypnosis was just to make him fall in love and stuff like the dumplings were his own initiative, but years since I saw it so I’m very probably wrong.
Other good examples are the Joker in Dark Knight and Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman. The sheer amount of dumb luck and omniscience needed for their plans to work are beyond ridiculous.
"I’m not looking forward to being told that I’m just a hater and let people enjoy things blah blah" basically me with the Fallout TV show right now...
Agreed, I'm about halfway through and it's not doing it for me. It's just a little too corny.
Thats the whole point of the Fallout setting
I think Freddie would "pick a fight with the sky if he didn't like the shade of blue" to quote another series he shits on lol.
Good analysis, I just should have waiting until next week to read it.
I tried to warn about spoilers! I don't think I give anything away about the final resolution of the book (which may not be the final resolution of the series anyway).
Oh nothing was spoiled. I meant I am enjoying it and now this will be the lense in which I watch the finale through. My own fault for reading the title and proceeding to read it anyway.
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.
The Harry Potter movies fumbled Dumbledore completely. He's not the same character as in the book.
Great article. You sure sound bitter about the God you don't believe in... :)
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget
I almost forgot. Thanks for the uconn pick. I did not win my family pool. We do this thing where you submit picks round by round but you submit an envelope with full bracket predictions. I lost because I had an awful envelope. Which I'm relieved because the winner need to run the pool the next year.
Can’t really be true to the book it’s adapting without a near-omniscient Toranaga, the book itself describing one of history’s great schemers.
Maybe I don’t see it because I’ve read the book a few times and am not in ignorance of the ending but I don’t get the “Toranaga is a champion of freedom and/or democracy” take, he’s just not gratuitously malign like Yabushige, but he’s clearly a warlord sacrificing friends and family for his own purposes. He’s the prime mover but I don’t see how he reads as the “good guy”.
I have been afraid to watch the show for exactly these kinds of reasons. I read the book years and years ago and really enjoyed it. But while well researched, and really, really long, the core story is a fish-out-of-water adventure yarn. It raises some interesting ideas about the nature of cultures and exchange betweem civilizations but I never read it as having some kind of deeper meaning. It certainly doesn't require nor is it improved by trying to finagle in a bunch of very modern obsessions.
There aren't really any modern obsessions finagled into the series.
I overall agree with the criticism. I still like the show. As far as why Toranaga is better than Ishido, I feel like it indirectly explains why in the show... At least when looking at it from the Japanese culture perspective of the 17th century.
Ishido is of a filthy peasent background, Toranaga is a Minowara.
The Taiko and his Queen Dowager wife, both felt closer to Toranaga and wanted him as the person to protect the heir of Japan. At least the scenes we see.
Toranaga didn't take people hostage. Ishido kept people's families hostages in Osaka... while Toranaga let the Taiko's wife leave Edo and come back to Osaka early on in the show.
Well, the hero's gotta hero, right? I don't think it's a problem that the hero is the cleverest, or that he wins (I'm gonna assume he wins). I think the problem (as Freddie notes) is in the inevitable dependence on chance, which is played as if he instantly adds every random, odd, unforeseen occurrence to his master plan, modifying as necessary. While I like Sanada as an actor (and my wife looooves him), he has played Toranaga as just that; a man who is always absolutely in control. I see little in the way of wavering confidence, hesitation or discomfort in fitting a new circumstance into the puzzle. Perhaps the book made him more human, but in the show he's invincible.
Kudos to Anna Sawai, who in addition to being beautiful, does very well in transmitting an intelligence and awareness of what's going on around her. She seems the standout in the cast to me. Jarvis plays Blackthorne as a bit of a knucklehead, which I hope is his intention . . .
You don't want your hero to be so ahead of everyone else that it ruins the tension, though. In comics, both Black Panther and Batman run into this problem from time to time. It's satisfying to have the hero reveal that he's secretly been five steps ahead of everyone else once in a while, but if it's consistent, it gets boring.
Dumbledore is a tricky case, and if a particular reader finds that he drains the tension from the books or movies, I can't argue. He definitely has things he regrets, and he has access to a lot of prophesies, but he does usually end up being several steps ahead of everyone else. And some of Harry's arc of maturity is learning to trust Dumbledore, but yeah, at the end of the day if he ruins the story for you, I can't argue.
(FWIW, my reading is that Dumbledore takes several very risky chances, including putting Harry in phenomenal danger and trusting Snape, and that they very easily could have gone wrong but thankfully didn't.)
Spoilers so not going to read the article yet. But what’s the consensus? Is the show worth watching?
I liked the first few seasons of Fargo because they avoided the issue that Freddie's complaining about here. In Season 1, Lorne Malvo seemed to always be in control, but I never felt like that was because he was omniscient. Instead, it seemed like he had prudently set up contingency plans and was able to adapt quickly when other characters acted in a way he couldn't predict. Sure, it seemed "convenient" that he had an alibi as a Lutheran minister when he the cops nabbed him, but I got the impression that he multiple false identities set up that he used when needed, not that he had predicted exactly what would happen. Maybe he was messing with Lester to develop him as an exploitable resource later on. His briefcase full of recorded conversations made it seem like he had a dozen of these relationships going at any time. When something completely unexpected did come up, like Glenn Howerton's blackmail scheme, he just changed his plan.
Fargo season 5 didn't seem to have this going on. It seemed more like Dot just being better than people and John Hamm being dumb/evil.
Are you talking about when she calls him a selfish baby? That entire scene was nonsensical to me. John Hamm's character constantly described himself as a servant of God, inheriting obligations from three generations of sheriffs. The insult would have bounced off of him as a complete non sequitur since he sincerely believed that he was a defender of freedom. The central conflict was that he had an obligation to God to preserve his marriage. Telling him that he has "freedom with no responsibility" right after he called himself a protector of the common man was bizarre.
I was really disappointed in that relationship. There could have been an interesting contrast between Hamm's small-town tyranny, motivated by a twisted sense of paternalism and Leigh's banally evil debt collection, justified by cold Darwinism. Instead, she calls him a baby.
That scene was really popular though. I think it's because everyone disagrees about what liberties and obligations they have. Jon Hamm could have also called Leigh a baby, since she wants freedom without fulfilling his view of what her responsibilities are. Similarly, you can use that same line in real life if you want. Some veterans could call me an entitled baby since I want freedom without the responsibility of serving
Yes, I think definitely
Good - I’ve been on the fence. I’ve heard some great reviews, but from disreputable friends.
I'm not a great student of history or anything, but of what I have read, perhaps this is just a story of one of those times that things go right.
History is full of stories where rulers get everything wrong, overestimate themselves, and their plans fall apart in spectacular fashion. But it also has so many stories of plans going exactly as the ruler expects, even though from an outside perspective there is no reason it had to be that way. Some people look like they were full of masterful schemes that they pulled off without a hitch, when in fact so much of that success was dependent on luck beyond their control. It is not necessarily a fault to portray that scenario, because it has happened in real life many times.
I somewhat disagree because Toranaga's schemes seem more seat-of-his-pants than recognition. He almost got caught escaping from Osaka, and I don't think he predicted the Anjin's distractions! But he clearly is a level above every other character, and that doesn't really bother me more than Paul Atreides being the kwisatz haderach and such.
IIRC Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first Shogun. Presumably someone who was able to unify feudal Japan did have an uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.
I haven’t read a biography of Tokugawa Ieyasu but it’s certainly possible that he was Never Wrong and able to Explains It All - or at least able to a significantly greater degree than other people.
Maybe that’s why the show runners have Toranaga almost perish in that earthquake. They needed to show at least one instance where he “did not see that one coming” for the critics ;)
Got distracted from the main point exactly here:
“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.”
I…..what? That’s…..fair?????
Lord of the Rings is set in the third age of Middle Earth. Dune is set in the distant future on a different planet. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is set in 44 BC. The Seventh Seal is set in the 1300s, Wolf Hall is set in the 1500s, and Ben-Hur is set in 33AD.
Nothing to say about the modern human condition, none of them.
If that’s fans’ best defense it’s actually a stunning indictment.
ETA after reading the rest! lol.
Agree that this is an intolerable trait in a protagonist. What’s funny is that I love this trait in a villain. It was one of my favorite things about watching Daredevil!
Why do you think Toranaga is a protagonist and not a villain?
Because I only know the show by reading Freddie’s piece lol! I was deciding whether or not I wanted to watch the show and I never mind spoilers so I figured I would read what he thought of it.
Fair. Toranaga is neither hero nor villain. It's a very good show.
Since studios are taking the approach of adapting novels as miniseries now (instead of two hour movies that inevitably have to cut material) what's the point of dumbing them down other than to cater to the lowest common denominator?
I actually read Shogun years and years ago and it was pretty much mass market fare. But it didn't make the mistake of trying to impose some framework of ethical behavior/sympathy onto the Toranaga character. From what I recall he deliberately burns the protagonist's ship at the end of the novel to trap him in Japan, leading one of the other survivors to stroke out and die.