‘Shōgun’ Co-Creators Reveal the Blackthorne Flashbacks They Nixed From the Show: “We Must Have Him Kill His Mentor!”

Shōgun might be over, but for some of us, FX‘s Shōgun will never end. There are still millions of minute details to pour over, elegant grace notes to uncover, and deleted scenes scrapped on the editing room floor to obsess over for years to come. Case in point: when Decider caught up with the co-creators of Shōgun, Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo, ahead of the show’s finale, we discovered that once upon a time they considered opening Shōgun Episode 4 “The Eightfold Fence” with a John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) flashback.

“I was firmly convinced — and I had the location where we would do it and I had the time blocked out where we could shoot it, we could do it! — to start Episode 4 with a flashback that would be Blackthorne in his long head of hair, but tied back in a nice Elizabethan way,” Shōgun showrunner Justin Marks said, miming exactly how Blackthorne’s historically-accurate high pike ponytail would look. “[He would be] sitting in the offices of the Dutch East India Company doing his spiel. Like getting pitched the mission and pitching back what the mission would be. So you see full hardcore colonialist Blackthorne in the best possible way.”

Marks explained that he thought it would be interesting to show us the unvarnished, completely avaricious Blackthorne at the start of Shōgun Episode 4 because it’s the “beginning of his growth.” That’s the episode he begins to become closer to Mariko (Anna Sawai) and begins to recognize all the things about life he doesn’t know.

This look back at who Blackthorne “really was when all the cards are on the table and the Japanese aren’t looking” was nixed in huge part because by that point in the production, Marks said, “the other characters had also started to take over.” Blackthorne was quickly just becoming part of a larger ensemble.

Although Marks admitted that we already have decades of “American cinematic history to point to the kind of guy Blackthorne was,” he pushed back on the idea that they purposely omitted Blackthorne’s backstory simply because he was a white man in a story set in Japan.

“I don’t feel that we felt particularly compelled to be apologetic about colonialist Blackthorne because I think the story apologizes on its own terms and it doesn’t have to say it,” Marks said.

“How he ends up is his apology,” Shōgun co-creator Rachel Kondo pointed out.

“Exactly. Like where he ends in [Episode] 10 is his apology, right?” Marks said. “But like, you know, just to see that smile on his face? It’s one side of Blackthorne that we never get to see.”

That said, there were even other aspects of Blackthorne’s backstory from the books that Rachel Kondo was interested in arguing for including in the show.

“Meanwhile I’m like, ‘What about his mentor?'” Kondo said, referring to the character of Alban Caradoc.

You know Alban Caradoc, right? He’s mentioned in the earliest pages of James Clavell’s book, Shōgun. He was a pilot and shipwright who essentially adopted and raised young Blackthorne. Everything Blackthorne knows about navigation is thanks to Alban Caradoc. Blackthorne’s wife, Felicity? She’s Alban Caradoc’s daughter. And Blackthorne’s greatest trauma — besides witnessing Catholics burning Dutch Protestants in his mother’s native Amsterdam — is knowing he’s responsible for Alban Caradoc’s death! The old man insisted on joining Blackthorne during the fight against the Spanish Armada. Blackthorne didn’t take Caradoc’s advice and wound up getting his ship shot up. Caradoc’s limbs were blown off in the battle and Blackthorne put the dying man out of his misery with a club to the head.

(You didn’t know any of that? Because it’s only in the book? Read the book! I read the book! The book is fun!)

“We must have him kill his mentor!” Kondo said.

“Believe me, there is a lot going on there [in Clavell’s book] that we really played into,” Marks said. “In fact, I think one of his things that [Cosmo Jarvis] likes to play haunted by is the sight of Albon Caradoc with no arms and no legs. You know, because that’s how he died.”

Ultimately, though, Marks and the Shōgun team decided to omit all of these bits of Blackthorne backstory because “it’s like we get it, we get it.”

We get it through Cosmo Jarvis’s performance and we get it through the subtext of the FX show.