Paloma

I haven’t seen this mentioned here or in recaps I’ve read, but didn’t Xavier scribble a couple of notes at the beginning of the episode saying something like “Dress your teeth” and “Brush your clothes”? This was after he woke up and before he went running It struck me as something an early Alzheimer’s patient would do to try to remember basic tasks (except he meant to remind himself to do the opposite—brush teeth and get dressed. But there was no follow-up on this. Am I the only one who noticed this?

Do we know what the Black Doves are? Are they British spies (MI5 or MI6?) spying on their own government for some unknown purpose? Or are they British people working for a foreign government to give that government intel on the British government? Or are they like The Americans--deep undercover Russian (or other country) spies who appear to be British?

Watched the first two episodes and think I'm out. The writing and acting seem worse than the first season (and that's saying something), and I don't really know or care what's going on. Also, I had to laugh at the way Peter spilled all the secrets to Rose after only the slightest resistance. He should have taken the advice from his boss when he was about to begin training that there was no shame in quitting at that point.

As a longtime fan of "Wait, Wait," I love that reference. Also love your United Colors of Benetton reference.

I come from the same generation (or maybe younger but still before the "milk carton" generation), but I was a helicopter parent to my daughter born in 1983. Although I applauded what Morgan said to the nasty kid, I would have been afraid to leave him sitting outside unsupervised until his mother came (whether or not Morgan called her).

Maybe it's not relevant to the overall story, but who is Nagakado's mother? If he's late teens or even 20, he's probably too young to be the son of the Toronaga's wife, who looked age 60 or older now. If Nagakado's mother is/was a consort of Toronaga, where is she now? And do we know if Toronaga has any other children? Also, Saeki told stories about his half-brother as if they grew up together, but to me Saeki looks a lot younger than Toronaga. If Toronaga is close to 60, Saeki looks like he is mid- to late-40s, if not younger. So Saeki wouldn't have even been born, or would have only been a baby or toddler, when Toronaga was sent away as a child hostage or even when Toronaga had his first warrior win 46 years ago at age 12.

As someone who studied both Latin and the Romance languages (though it was ages ago, in high school and college), I've always been interested in language history and commonalities. Your comment made me go to Google, and I found a scholarly source about the use of Latin in England in medieval documents: "English was slow to take over as the language of government, law and bureaucracy, despite the fact that by a law passed in 1362 all legal pleadings had to be in English. ... However, most other types of official document continued to be written in Latin.... It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that English began to appear in manorial records, and even then it was often only used to record presentments spoken in that language at the meeting of the manor court. ... Rentals and accounts from landed estates are rare in English before the beginning of the sixteenth century. Most title deeds were also written in Latin until the sixteenth century and even later." There is a lot more information about language use in medieval documents in the full paper: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/medievaldocuments/languages.aspx Other sources also indicate that Latin was the common written language in medieval Europe--especially Roman Catholic Western Europe. So Blackthorne could have used English and/or Latin in his ship's rutter.

In the thread for the previous episode @Chicago Redshirt commented on the weakness of the motive for murder (by the owner of the club), and I have the same feeling about the motive for murder in this episode. Maybe it's because the killer didn't have any dialogue (as far as I remember), but are we supposed to think he would plan such an elaborate crime so that his girlfriend would inherit a ton of money? Despite Morgan's imagined caught-in-the-act romance, I didn't get the impression that the girlfriend was wildly in love with the French guy. I may have missed some dialogue--did she admit she loved him and planned to marry him? She didn't seem too upset about his being arrested for the crime. I agree, it did seem unlikely that the murderer's girlfriend played no role in the murder. Even though she seemed sincere in expressing her feelings for the victim, it's possible that she told the French boyfriend about her inheritance and the feud with the neighbor in the hope that the boyfriend would independently decide to do the murder and make it look like the neighbor did it. But that just seems too complicated. It would make more sense if she asked the boyfriend to kill her employer before he changed the will to benefit his son. Also, this will sound classist and snobby, but the French auto mechanic seemed a bit scuzzy to be the lover of such an elegant woman. How did they even meet? Not that it matters, but I didn't even find him attractive, while she was quite beautiful. I actually suspected the housekeeper who let the detectives in as being the murderer, but there wasn't any dialogue that supported this idea.

Overall your post was great in responding to various people's comments, but I initially disagreed with your age estimate. To me she looks like she's in her 40s--possibly early 40s, which would make it more believable that she has a baby. But I just looked up the actress and she is actually 49, so your estimate is much closer. (As a woman in my 70s, I have a hard time telling how old younger women are.) The way she dresses makes her look even younger to me. In any case, even if the character was early 40s, the age difference between her middle child (he seems to be 9 or 10) and the baby seems odd. The age of the older girl makes sense since she had a different father who disappeared a long time ago. But if Ludo is the father of the younger two and Morgan and Ludo have apparently been separated or divorced for some time (though amicably), it seems unlikely she would have intentionally gotten pregnant by Ludo within the last couple of years. I guess we just have to put the children's ages down to plot device.

This bothered me too, and the scene showing her looking at the pages went by too fast to really make out specific words, but I thought I saw words that were definitely note English on the last page she looked at. The little I could see looked either Portuguese or Spanish. It would be nice if someone could post a screenshot of that page.

That scene was hard for me to watch because I have such a strong gag reflex that I can't even tolerate dental x-rays when they stick something in the back of your mouth and you have to bite down. If I was ever told I had to have an ET camera tube for some diagnostic reason, and it looked like the one in this scene, I think I would refuse the test and take my chances medically.

I agree about the English/Western arrogance (which still exists today especially among a lot of Americans), but for all the elegant discipline, beauty, and tradition we see in the Japanese in this period, to me they are just as savage as the Westerners. No matter how you dress it up, boiling people alive and killing a baby for "honor" are cruel acts that cannot be justified by people claiming to be civilized.

Since I didn't see the previous miniseries and don't remember anything except the boiling scene from the book I read ages ago (that scene gave me nightmares for years), I didn't know why the title of this episode was Anjin. I looked it up and see that it means "pilot" and was presumably what the Japanese called Blackthorne, but did they use that word or name anywhere in this episode?

Did they ever explain how Penny could afford the expensive clothes and accessories in her closet? I think they made a point of showing her credit card receipts and saying that her rich boyfriend from the club was not buying her stuff, but did they say what kind of job she had that might explain where she got the money to buy all that?

@Annber03 Thank you! I can't believe I missed all that. I thought I just fell asleep for a few seconds!