John Blackthorne's Fate In Shogun Series Finale After Flash-Forward Scenes Explained By Co-Creator

Summary Blackthorne's fate in Shōgun episode 10 is a powerful commentary on ambition, colonialism, and personal growth.

The flash-forward scenes reveal Blackthorne's inner struggle with the version of himself he does not want to become.

The finale episode showcases a transformation for Blackthorne as he lets go of his past ambitions and embraces a new life.

Shōgun co-creator breaks down John Blackthorne's fate in episode 10 after the flash-forward scenes. After nine acclaimed and moving episodes, FX's new historical drama came to an end this week, concluding the story of Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis). The episode features what appear to flash forwards to Blackthorne as an old man, but it's then revealed that these scenes are the character's own visions of a future that he does not want to come to pass.

In a recent interview on FX Network's Shōgun: The Official Podcast, both Marks and Jarvis share their thoughts Blackthorne's Shōgun series finale fate.

While Marks touches on the impact of Blackthorne's visions of himself as an old man, Jarvis offers more insight into the character's crucial decision when he attempts to commit seppuku. Read their full comments below:

I think Blackthorne’s journey in this episode to the place where it lands in such a beautiful and powerful scene between Blackthorne and Toranaga on that hill, where he offers up his own life, is the journey that I hope all of us who are trying to understand how we interact with cultures we don’t understand and people we want to forge relationships with but don’t necessarily speak the same cultural, spiritual, or literal language. Which is to say that Blackthorne, through this entire story, has been a prisoner of his own ambition, which one might call the disease of colonialism, or even capitalism almost, too. But this idea of a man who is so bound by his ambition and his own sense of where he belongs in this world, and what is owed to him that he is the worst prisoner of all. So is Yabushige, they’re both like this… But for Blackthorne, it revolves crucially around this idea of what we call the false dream. We wanted to open this episode with what feels like the beginning of a flashback structure where we jump forward into the future and we meet Blackthorne as an old man and we tell the story of an old man looking back with regret on the life that he led. Only to realize that that was not the dream of an old man looking back, it was actually the dream of a young man looking forward to one possible version of his life. A version of his life that he has to draw to an end by killing that path. What Blackthorne is trying to kill there is not himself, it’s the version of himself that he’s always been. And when Toranaga knocks that knife out of his hand and then looks down at him, he’s looking at a man reborn now to completely different life.

Jarvis: When we first meet him, he’s totally obsessed with the possibility of control. But after months of trying to achieve something significant in Japan with regard to his English persona and position in English society and being sort of subdued by the people around him, some aspect of the country and its customs, and the peripheral sense of greater honor and duty and the impermanence of life and the futility of fighting fate and the possibility of meaningful death allowed into him by Mariko’s death and the destruction of his ship. In episode 10 he, for the first time, is compelled to attempt something that is objectively purposeful in an honorable sense and totally selfless and has nothing to do with his long-established aims. So, I don’t think he saw his arc coming, but he does arrive at one. He’s sort of liberated by being forced into a situation where he no longer has anything that he is attached to. And when that happens, he is then capable of trying something else, so he does.

More to come...

Source: FX Networks