Blackthorne finds himself in a country where he can’t speak the language where the only Europeans who can translate for him are his enemies, where the culture is brutal and martial and completely alien to him. The few surviving members of the crew, dreaming of riches and glory, woke up as prisoners in a country where Portuguese traders and Jesuit priests already had great influence. The Straits of Magellan took a heavy toll, and only one ship, the Erasmus survived to founder in a storm off Japan in 1600. In 1598, ship’s pilot John Blackthorne signed on with a Dutch fleet as navigator, to find a way around the New World, heading to the Japans, while under a letter of marque authorising any plunder from the Catholic enemies, Spain and Portugal. You still get miniseries today, but the seventies and the eighties were when they ruled the airwaves. Whole nations would stop whatever they were doing to watch them. There were novels too big for movies, but limited for ongoing series, brought to life in expensive affairs that would last 10 or 15 hours on television. We’re talking shows like Roots, Centennial, The Winds of War, North and South, The Martian Chronicles and this, Shogun. There’s hours of extra features too, worthy of that particular golden age of television when miniseries were water-cooler affairs. There’s a booklet as well, all in a hefty brick of packaging, back when studios really wanted to sell this stuff. That DVD release is a thing of beauty, 5 discs, ten hours of classic television in a fold out digipack that is long enough to warrant a samurai sword motif.
Introduction I have wanted to review this for years, ever since I selected the DVD release as one of my picks of the year, back when we still used to do picks of the year.
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