I think it’s a fever dream, because he’s holding Mariko’s cross in those scenes, but we know he leaves that in the water.

I read them as a false flash-forward, a vision of what he’s ultimately letting go by accepting his place in Toranaga’s retinue.

Yeah, but Yabushige is a sicko about death. He seems to have lots of weird ideas about it.

We can program a bot to generate this sort of snark.

Just make 11 movies you boring bastard.

as with ep 3, i will once again shout out that this episode was written by Emily Yoshida, an AV Club alum from the site’s heyday

I thought we’d get more of a real battle than we did, but the more I thought about it, the more this finale felt appropriate, especially for the kind of schemer Toranaga is. Like Yabushige, I was expecting a great battle; like Toranaga, the show revealed that Mariko’s death was the true climactic action, and…

He appeared to realize that he had misjudged and  chosen the wrong side last episode.

Ishido was beheaded IRL after losing the battle of Sekigahara. he was captured by some villagers trying to run away 

Well, just that Yabushige had it right: Toronaga wanted to be shogun the whole time. So all his protestations that he didn’t were indeed just lies, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way. The “he has other sons” line seemed damn cold after Nagakado died... until Toronaga said the same thing this ep.

It’s odd to want more seasons of an adaptation of a book with no sequel. The episode ended so well with a sense of the surviving characters on the cusps of their next journeys. Toronaga with his new city and shogunate, Blackthorne in his new career as shipwright.

Oddly, I was just watching Dune 2... and both Paul and Toronaga... kinda the villains by the end?

After immediately hating and then quickly loving Yabushige, I was crestfallen at his outright villainy in the last ep, and I didn’t think they could bring him back. But his catfish-catching madness and his death poem... man, just one of the best characters in recent memory. They really nailed it, and as with much of…

He just sort of predicts behavior correctly in many cases by really getting to know the people involved. What do you think?

Exactly. He does not bend the wind to his will. He only studies it.

This was a very good finale. I loved the cliffside scene with Toranaga and Yabushige.

In Fallout 4 one settlement is a mansion, where the owners survived in basement. All of them were ghoulefied, and the youngest son who apparently knew to expect this was initially stoked because he figured it meant they would all survive the post-nuclear world. However, while he retained his faculties, his family went…

Best reaction from a friend: “I tried playing. I went the wrong way and got killed by some giant bug before I even had a weapon. Like, five times. I can’t stop watching the show.”

Two hypotheses: 1) there’s a wider spectrum of ghouls in the show universe than what the games have shown us; 2) we can presume Moldaver has had her captive since whenever she went feral (unlikely she just went out into the wild and found her now), so maybe she’s been unfed and wasting away to nothing. It would be…

Thanks for a nice set of recaps/reactions—some of the best and most actually thoughtful writing I’ve seen on this site in ages, and from someone who actually has history with the Fallout franchise, even.

pretty good show, man. lots of little things they can improve in season 2, but for a first season with that kind of baggage i think the team did a tremendous job.