Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” ended with a literal, tragic bang. Convinced that Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) was cooked, Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) partnered with Ishido (Takehiro Hira) to let Shinobi (aka ninja) assassins into the lord’s Osaka camp. Mariko (Anna Sawai) and Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) are able to fight many of the warriors off, but when they lead Yabushige and Toranaga’s consorts into a food storage shed, they are trapped. The Shinobi have explosives designed to blow up the shed’s door to kill everyone inside.

Mariko takes his moment to sacrifice herself. Using her birth name — Akechi Mariko — she steps in front of the door and protests the violence…and dies.

At least, that’s what is sure seems like. The episode cuts immediately from the explosion to the end credits, leading some fans to hope that maybe Mariko is still alive??

However, as Decider has confirmed, Mariko is dead and her death was not intended to be ambiguous. (Although it almost didn’t happen in Episode 9…)

“I always felt like it would be inevitable. Mariko has been plagued by this wish for death…we hear her say it a lot,” Shōgun Episode 9 co-writer Caillan Puente told Decider during a Zoom conversation yesterday. “So I think for the story, it really makes sense that it has to end with her death. Like I couldn’t really see it ending in any other way.”

That said, both Puente fully understands why fans are in denial about Marikos’s death.

“I can see people kind of just hoping that it wasn’t real because they don’t want her to die, which I think is a lot of the reactions I see: ‘Maybe it’s ambiguous, maybe she’s okay,’” Puente said. “Which I totally agree [with]. Like, yes, I would love to keep Mariko for another episode.”

Ironically, Mariko almost was going to be around for another episode of Shōgun. During Decider’s conversation with Shōgun Episode 9 co-writers Caillan Puente and Rachel Kondo, the scribes revealed that an earlier iteration of the script ended in an entirely different way. The original outline for Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky” ended simply with Yabushige letting the Shinobi into the castle.

“You don’t know what’s gonna happen. It ends with Mariko and Blackthorne in an embrace and outside their window is kind of this encroaching danger,” Puente said. “It was kind of fun and we had this like horror movie element of the Shinobi infiltrating and Yabushige finally betraying Toranaga. That was the big scene at the end.”

Rachel Kondo shouted out a creepy detail that would have ended Puente’s original version of the episode. “The Shinobi, the hands, right, Caillan? There was more attention paid to the Shinobi crawling up the wall.”

“Yeah, a lot of the Shinobi tools and stuff. We wanted it to be a like a very ‘Jaws‘ horror feeling of like you don’t see the Shinobi. You see the effects of the Shinobi,” Puente said. “Which also [during] production, it was a little too dark to play it that way.”

“But beautifully written, though,” Kondo said. “Beautifully written on the page.”

So instead of dying in Shōgun Episode 9 “Crimson Sky,” Mariko’s sacrifice would come in Episode 10.

“They wrote a version of her death scene [for Episode 10], and then right after that, I think [Shōgun showrunner] Justin [Marks] had us write our version of the same scene because he was like, ‘I think maybe we need to end with her death for this episode to feel complete,’” Puente said. “So we had two versions of it in Episode 9 and Episode 10. And then we ended up realizing it really fit in Episode 9.”

Nevertheless, both Puente and Kondo wanted to make it clear that the end of Shōgun Episode 9 was never supposed to tease the audience in any way. Mariko is dead.

“We did not mean it for it to be ambiguous at all,” Kondo said. “I mean, anybody who could survive that would kind of be nonhuman?”

“Superhero Mariko,” Puente said.

Alas, Mariko is quite the hero, but she’s not bouncing back from death, Wolverine-style, in next week’s Shōgun finale.