Review: Shogun, "The Eightfold Fence" | Season 1, Episode 4

Making friends, enemies, and earth-shattering kabooms

Photo: FX

Ah fail sons. Where would modern prestige television be without them? Something about the heady combination of sheltered upbringing, bottomless insecurity, and an inability to understand the full consequences of your actions is simply irresistible to showrunners. This week, Toranaga’s son Nagakado joins the ranks of such luminaries as Kendall Roy and [insert one of maybe a dozen different Game of Thrones characters here] as another male heir so desperate to prove his own worth in the shadow of his fathers’ legacy that he makes a rash decision which almost certainly makes everything worse for everyone. Nagakado hasn’t had enough screentime for us to get to know him that well, but he’s had enough to make sure we grasp the archetype he’s inhabiting, and the climax of “The Eightfold Fence” has him delivering on his promise in a satisfyingly gory and chaotic way. What happens when you give a nervy idiot access to cannons without parental supervision? Nothing good, it turns out.

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