The white guy in Shōgun can't help but fail upward

In developing its new adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun, FX specifically set out to avoid simply rehashing the “whitewashed” 1980 original, which starred Richard Chamberlain and was entirely told from the perspective of his character, John Blackthorne, an English seaman who gets shipwrecked in Japan in the 1600s and must learn their ways in order to survive (while also passing on his knowledge of English romance and warfare). This new take pulls back the focus to center on a larger group of characters and treats the saga as more of a historical epic than one white man’s adventure, which allows it to showcase more of the Japanese perspective and gives it a more mature and culturally coherent story. It also, intentionally or not, turns its new version of John Blackthorne into the most perfect putz, the most lovable dingus, and the most frustratingly endearing dorkus to ever set sail.

New John Blackthorne actor Cosmo Jarvis (who possesses one of mankind’s great names and came up with a voice for the character that sounds like Robert Shaw in Jaws crossed with Solid Snake) doesn’t play the guy as an idiot; it’s that the circumstances of the plot render him an idiot, and Cosmo Jarvis handles it brilliantly. One of the joys of FX’s Shōgun, especially in its early running, is when Blackthorne finds himself present for some kind of political intrigue involving his new steward Lord Toranaga (the eternally great Hiroyuki Sanada) or the suspiciously aspirational Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) and just stands there and watches with a completely blank expression on his face because he has absolutely no idea what is happening.

It’s a delightful conceit—even if it’s not played for laughs all that often—to have one of the leads of a show living in a new place where he doesn’t understand a single syllable of the language, to say nothing of the various rituals and customs in Japan that Blackthorne has so much trouble wrapping his head around. The political intrigue is also so compelling, thanks to the steady hand of Sanada and the more emotional lens put on everything by Anna Sawai’s Mariko, that it’s easy to forget that the Anjin (or “pilot,” as they call him) is even still hanging around. Whenever the camera cuts to him having no clue about how he’s supposed to react to anything until Mariko—who serves as his translator and that’s definitely all she is—patiently explains things to him, there’s a little moment where it’s clear that his very existence is at least mildly annoying to everybody in the whole country. And it’s very funny.

It would be easy for this to rob the character of any agency, a potential overcorrection from making him the central protagonist of the original miniseries, but Jarvis plays Blackthorne as a guy with immense willpower and enough self-awareness to recognize when something is important even when he doesn’t know why or what or who or how or… anything that a person might know about a situation they find themselves in. Better yet, while he presents himself as someone who is confident in himself, if nothing else, the people around him all still react like he’s a uniquely intelligent Golden Retriever. Yabushige goes far enough to refer to him as a dog, even when he’s starting to showcase glimmers of his usefulness.

One of Blackthorne’s best moments comes in the third episode, “Tomorrow Is Tomorrow,” when Toranaga’s men are trying to sneak their leader out of Osaka. Blackthorne doesn’t even know that there’s a scheme in the works, with Toranaga hiding in a box while disguised as his wife. He just waited around until someone told Mariko to tell him they were leaving and then he dutifully tagged along.

But once he realizes what’s happening and sees that guards are about to uncover the hidden daimyō, he flips an internal switch and decides to weaponize how frustrating he is to everyone else around him with an overblown rant about respecting women. It is, without a doubt, a perfect putz move for a man to make a scene by screaming at the top of his lungs about how great of a feminist ally he is, especially when he immediately explains to Mariko that it’s all bullshit and that English society isn’t any more respectful toward women than Japanese society.