Shōgun will jump forward a full decade in season 2

If you’re looking for spoilers in the original James Clavell series on which the show is based, you won’t find any. Season two will be a “wholly original new chapter to the first season… [which] continues the historically-inspired saga of these two men from different worlds whose fates are inextricably entwined,” FX shared. Shōgun was originally conceived as a limited series based on a single novel of the same name from Clavell’s “Asian Saga,” but creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo felt “there were a lot of questions… still unanswered in the story,” as they told Variety in an interview last year. “That’s really when you have history on your side, what you don’t have on your side is this wonderful book moving forward. There are no roads where we’re going,” Marks explained. The characters of Toranaga and Blackthorne don’t appear in any other book in Clavell’s series, so there’s a very real chance Shōgun is headed into late-season Game Of Thrones territory whenever it returns. While the characters are both fictional, however, they’re heavily inspired by real-life figures Tokugawa Ieyasu and William Adams, so season two will have some grounding outside of total fan-fiction.

The new installment has a high bar to clear. The now-first season of Shōgun shot through the ranks to become FX’s most viewed program ever. It also went on to win 18 Emmy Awards, the most any show has ever received in a single year. We’ll see how it all goes down soon. Marks and Kondo just wrapped their writers’ room, and the season is slated to begin production in Vancouver (where the first season was shot) in January.