Fifth Avenue Forum

The opening scene, after Yabushige prepares his will ("It is our best one yet" lol) and meets with Toranaga and his duplicity is exposed, all the while with Hiromatsu hovering in the background - out of focus, but always in-frame with Yabushige......... my god, I thought I was going to have a coronary. Yabu and Hiro have become my two favorite characters, and I was like "Nnoooooooo, I don't want one to kill the other" haha

I can't wait to see Fuji's comeuppance realized. The scene of Hiro consoling her with the cremains of her husband and child was one of the most effective of show so far, and perhaps the only time in the history of audiovisual entertainment that the Single Tear trope actually felt earned and had weight.

Spoiler avoidance is in effect for me as best as I can (didn't read the book, never saw the original miniseries), but if the story they are telling remains true to actual Japanese history, you sort of already know the broad strokes of what will ultimately play out. Nearly all of the characters are based on real people and the story (mostly) on real events, so if you know like three bits of information in their historical context you already know how Ep 10 will end. But, I mean....... every one went into the theater knowing the ship was going to sink when "Titanic" came out. It's about the journey.

The attack on Toranaga's 'convoy' out of Osaka was very confusing to me, as an action set piece. It was easy enough to follow the switcheroo and all that, but once the battle was joined and the combatants realized Toranaga was in their midst and the fighting became a 2-against-1 affair, I was sort of lost. They've been doing an excellent job with the use of color to help distinguish characters/factions, but with this battle taking place at night, I just couldn't keep it all sorted. The way it was photographed/staged/edited felt a little slapdash. Not in the deliberate sense of "making the audience as confused as the character(s)", but more in the sense "we don't quite know how to photograph/stage/edit big action set pieces". Hopefully the huge daylight pitched battles that are sure to come will be more engaging.

There are some goofy technical things going on with the camera lenses that I'm getting a little too distracted by. They shot some of the scenes with spherical anamorphic lenses, and they are lending a weird optical distortion to some shots that could maybe do with a bit less visual flair. Which is unfortunate because this show is amazing otherwise and looks absolutely epic. The cinematography is stunning; I love the naturalistic lighting - dark is dark, light sources are candles or celestial, etc. So the lens bugeye thing is like Megan Fox's toe-thumbs; now that I've seen it I can't unsee it, and it has become the defining aspect of what I am taking in when there's really quite a lot of good things going on besides the toe-thumbs.

Both of the last two points are very much 'me' problems.

Cops being idiots/incompetent/corrupt, potential FBI conspiracy, media being knuckleheads, and a lawsuit ending in a 7 figure settlement.

The part where the FBI guy interviewed the woman and the subtitles said "The FBI has never made this video public", I said to Mrs Tif "Oh my God they're telling the truth...... that means the video was never used as evidence in a trial."

That writer's room must've been a hoot, spending time concocting verbose insults. It's like the Twitter memes when Trump visited Scotland.

"Milk dribbling f**k stain" lol

I gasped when Fuji-san presented Anjin with her family katana+wakizashi. That whole scene was beautiful, actually, although it was a bold choice to have Anjin-san like natto..... possibly the least believable part of the show so far. haha The entire episode had some fantastic moments of character building all around. Mariko-sama's 'translations' seem to be getting more interpretive. Relating to Toranaga-sama that Fuji would only do six months as Anjin's consort, when she straight up said to Mariko she'd do one year. The way she covers up insults when translating. She's looking out for people.

For the record, Anjin's response to the "baby earthquake" was pretty much how everyone who moves to California as an adult reacts to their first earthquake.