'Tokyo Vice' Season 2 Finale Explained by Creators

Publish date: 2024-09-19

The Big Picture

[Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Tokyo Vice Season 2]The two-season arc of Max's sleeper hit series Tokyo Vice has reached its conclusion, and as the storylines set up in Season 1 are pieced together, more doors open that can easily carry us into a potential Season 3. In the ever-evolving streaming world, it's difficult for viewers to trust they'll get another season, but showrunner and writer J.T. Rogers planned ahead. Joined by director and executive producer, Alan Poul (Six Feet Under), the two creatives sat down with Collider's Steve Weintraub to break down the biggest plot points of Season 2, that unexpected finale, and more.

Inspired by the real-life memoir of American journalist Jake Adelstein, played in the show by Ansel Elgort (Baby Driver), Rogers explains that the "events and the characters, certainly of Tozawa, are amalgams of real people," but is quick to add much of it is fictionalized. As they forge forward with Tozawa (Ayumi Tanida) no longer in the picture, and Sato (Show Kasamatsu) taking over the Chihara-kai, a new reign is beginning. Rachel Keller's (Legion) Sam is leaving town, Katagiri (Ken Watanabe) is retired (for the time being), and Jake finds his relationships slipping through his fingers.

With Season 2, Episode 10, aptly titled "Endgame," available on Max now, Rogers and Poul share behind-the-scenes moments and discuss their distinctly un-Western approach to a crime thriller series. Check out the full interview below as the duo share their philosophy of depicting realism within a remarkable underworld, the endless challenges faced throughout production, and address some of the questions fans may have ahead of a hopeful Season 3.

Tokyo Vice

A Western journalist working for a publication in Tokyo takes on one of the city's most powerful crime bosses.

Release Date April 7, 2022 Cast Ansel Elgort , Ken Watanabe , Rachel Keller , Rinko Kikuchi Main Genre Crime

I definitely want to go backwards for a second. Years ago, J.T., you thought about doing this as a movie with Daniel Radcliffe. I was looking online, and I couldn't figure out what exactly happened. How did it fall apart?

J.T. ROGERS: I’m going to let you in on a secret few people know: movies often don’t happen.

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[Laughs] Believe me, I know.

ROGERS: No, that's what happened. It was all being set up and then a piece of financing, one of 10 pieces of a jigsaw, fell apart, and weeks before we were gonna start pre-production it didn't happen. Look, like so much in life, it would have been a radically different endeavor, from having written the screenplay and just the different artists connected to it. I'm happy now that it happened, as disappointing, to put it mildly, as it was at the time, because I think the source material, the world we built, it works better in this long-form storytelling. So, it feels almost like a sliding door moment, if you would. That was a different life, and it just took off in a different direction, and I'm glad that we did just for the sheer joy of telling a longer story.

ALAN POUL: And even the fact that, in taking it to television, for various reasons, we were required to fictionalize the story. Because, in the book, Jake names names. He's writing nonfiction about real Yakuza, and that would have proved just daunting beyond belief. So, it was kind of a gift that we needed to not think of the book as gospel source material, but rather as our bible that we bring out of. I think that, in terms of being able to expand the storytelling, that was actually a great help.

There Were "Many Versions" of Tozawa's Season 2 Exit, But No "John Woo-ing"

One of the things that I find so cool is that if the ending of Season 2 was on American television, when Tozawa is cornered in that room, there would be some big shootout, he'd be on the run, but instead, he knows he's done, and he ends up taking his own life. Can you talk about the fact that that's so refreshing, because that's not what audiences are used to?

ROGERS: Well, thank you, because a lot of time was spent thinking about how to write it and then how we would shoot it.

POUL: There were many versions.

ROGERS: Many versions. But there's a couple of reasons. One, I think less sex and less violence means better sex and better violence, right? More meaningful.

POUL: In life as in art.

ROGERS: [Laughs] There is no death in the show that doesn't have moral consequences. So, certainly as the greatest, the most impactful death of the whole season, that's gonna be the case. Also, as we talked about with you last time, our show is rooted in the real, right? So the shootout that you described, the American TV shootout, just isn't possible. It would be like the whole nation would be shut down. It would be the biggest violent act that happened in Japan in a decade, so it's just not possible to have happened. So the question is, as always, what's the most dynamic, interesting Japanese version of this dramatic moment that needs to happen? So that was the thing that led me to how it eventually played out.

You mentioned that you had other versions.

ROGERS: There were versions within the world of what we're talking about. There was never a version where a helicopter came in and then somebody came out with two rifles, and they're John Woo-ing their way out, and it's incredibly beautiful and dynamic. It's so exciting, but not real.

The Final Moments of 'Tokyo Vice' Season 2 Were a Challenge to Write

Talk a little bit about the very end of the episode, where the characters are at, and how you guys figured out this is where everyone is gonna hit the pause button for the end of the season.

ROGERS: Well, I've known all along that Emi’s boss, or almost Emi’s boss's boss, is the one who would destroy the videotape, so I knew that that was gonna sever her relationship with the Meicho in some way to send her off. All along, I knew that Sato would ascend, it was just a matter of how we're gonna get there. I knew that Sam wasn't gonna die. So, in a way, I sort of knew, broadly speaking, and sometimes very specifically speaking, where they were gonna end. It just became a matter of writing the show, and then even making changes in the scripts as we were shooting. As you get deeper into the world, you realize, “Oh, this could be even better,” or, “Oh, we can't get that location. Let's do something else instead that’s even more interesting.”

And also, Mrs. Tozawa — one of my favorite moments is when she says, “I'm the one that sent you that tape.” I also knew that all along. It was about how to get to that moment, and to use Alan's phrase, the backward math where you go, “Oh, oh, oh, that's why that happened.” But really, the very last moment of the episode, which is Katagiri and Jake on the back porch, I knew I wanted it on the back porch. I wanted it to be the full circle because, even though they met in passing at the crime scene in Episode 2 of Season 1, they really meet on his back porch in Episode 3, in which Jake bumbles his way. He's not learned, really, how to do this right. When he truly apologizes, Katagiri, that means something to him, and he says, “Alright, I need to tell you how this world works.” Then, what he tells him is the story for Jake and Katagiri of the next 15 hours of television, and it ends with them having lived unexpectedly what he described as the tension between all these forces. And I did many, many drafts of this last moment. I wanted to end in a way that, again, wasn't like an American cop show. I wanted to end with a sense of, “We did, we did it. Huh. Why is that not completely fulfilling? And what does that mean about me as a person?”

I think that's also one of the reasons why so many people respond to the show, myself included, is that you're portraying real life rather than the magic of Hollywood, or some procedural that's on network television.

POUL: In any other version of this, and especially with the cross cultural encounter aspect of it, there would always be an “aha” moment, where it's like, “Oh, we understand now.” Or, “Oh, they understand us now, and harmony is reached between the cultures.” That’s something we never want to see on this show. [Laughs]

ROGERS: No. [Laughs] We’re not interested in that.

The Guts and Glory of 'Tokyo Vice's Samantha Porter in Her Final Season 2 Moments

Talk a little bit about where Samantha is, making a deal, that finder's fee, and driving away. When you put something like that in the story, do you know where Samantha is going, or is that a finale moment where it’s like, “We'll talk about it if we get a Season 3?”

ROGERS: I know where she's going. But one of the things about this is the trickiness, which seems to have been well received in the way that we want it, so I'm really grateful and excited about that, is I wanted to end this season in a way that if we or the larger forces that be chose to end it, then I could say, “Well, good. We can all walk away from this.” But yet, we could also launch into the next thing. So with Samantha, her journey has been, she's beaten down, it's just such a difficult arc in Season 2, in terms of what she's put through. But also, as we sort of see over Seasons 1 and 2, she really goes to some darker places herself. She's a very complicated character. She’s no damsel and she's no white knight, as it were, which I think is what makes her interesting.

So to see her, in a sense, get another opportunity at agency and use her own wits to go, “Oh, I've got nothing now. I'm free, because of bloodshed and mayhem, and the guilt I'm gonna carry, but I'm free of all my obligations, but I have nothing. Now, I'm gonna get something.” And then she says, and it's not just for the storytelling, but it's for the character, “Now I'm gonna go away and think about this. Now I'm gonna be very smart. I'm gonna go away for a while. I'm gonna think about it, and I don't know what my life's gonna be. I'm gonna come back.” It’s beautifully shot by Josef [Kubota Wladyka], who directed that episode, of her going out and her getting her helmet on, and sort of thinking, “Okay, here we go.” And then the crane shot back to Sato and Gen. It’s one of my favorite moments in the season.

POUL: But also, even more than her riding off, to me, what's so delicious about Sam's final beat is that she's clever. She's been through all this horrible shit, but she's able to resurrect the plot that she and the architect cooked up to sell to Ishida before everything went to shit and replay it for Mrs. Tozawa successfully while clutching the briefcase that the architect spilled his brains on. There's just so much guts and grace under pressure involved in pulling that off and being successful, that to me, that's where we really learn what she's made of.

100%. Will you ever reveal what Hitoshi Ishida (Shun Sugata) told Akira (Shô Kasamatsu) when they were talking?

ROGERS: It's a great question: Maybe. [Laughs] I’m not being coy with you.

Is it a lost in translation thing where we're never gonna know?

ROGERS: I’m not gonna box myself in. Honestly, I'm not being coy. You know what I mean? But there's so much that I'm eager to keep going and to expand and loop back. As Alan knows, sometimes to a fault, I love my callbacks. So, who knows? That's all I'll say at this point.

'Tokyo Vice' Showrunner Reveals Secrets From the Set of Season 2

What were some of the things for Season 2 that you guys came up with that, for whatever reason — budget, shooting schedule, whatever — you just couldn't do? Or was it really not that much stuff?

POUL: I can name one thing. Now that we’re done, I can claim it. We didn't go to Hawaii. We fully planned to go to Hawaii to shoot that sequence for the opening of Episode 8, and that, with the help of a lot of VFX, all takes place in Chiba prefecture in Japan. There, I said it! I ruined it.

ROGERS: Constantly, in all the episodes, we’re like, “Oh, we're not gonna really make our day, so let's condense this location. Let's change.” Two come to mind, one small, one massive. And again, sometimes the most interesting stuff that happens in the show is problem-solving and problem-solving under fire, right? A small, then a big. A small is in Episode 4, there's a big, breathtaking shot where the oyabun are having a summit on the roof of a building for privacy, and all of a sudden Tozawa appears, and then Tozawa and Ishida go stand over the roof and look over. They're sort of taking in all of Tokyo while they're saying, “You're gonna go down. No you're gonna go down.” The impetus of that was the director, Josef, said, “I can't make my day. I know that you really, really wanna shoot the scene in the same location of Season 1,” where there was a summit where they all sat across the table from each other, and Tozawa was forced, biting his tongue in rage, to bow down and apologize, “but I can't do it. But later that when that day, when it's nighttime, I am shooting the scene in this building where Tozawa kills his boss and has him thrown off the roof. What if I just use the actual roof?” And so that was the solution to that.

Now we can say the biggest, most dramatic change, to answer your question, was the building in which Chihara-Kai exists. That building. We always knew, it was a ticking clock in Season 2, that the building was going to be destroyed, and we couldn't get everything done in time.

POUL: To be clear, the building had been sold because it's a very old building. It wasn't in great shape. In Japan, there is no landmarking process for modern architecture, only pre-modern architecture. So, the building was gonna be sold and torn down to make condos. I mean, that's just what happens to all beautiful, old buildings there. Our brilliant location manager, Masanori Aikawa, had been in really intense negotiations with the man who had bought it, just begging for more time, more time, more time so we could finish shooting. But then we hit a wall, where it was, “This is the last day you will be able to shoot,” and that's when we were shooting the shootout from Episode 9.

ROGERS: No, but remember, the shootout in [Episode] 9 is so ingrained in our bodies now that we forget it didn't exist when we started shooting Season 2. There were a whole bunch of scenes that were supposed to happen in [Episode] 9, and then an enormous amount of scenes in [Episode] 10 Chihara-Kai. We ran out of time. The whole shootout, which has become one of the central dramatic moments and character moments for the end of the season, was written on the fly because we knew we could not be in Chihara-Kai in Episode 10. So there had to be a real plot and character reason why no one is in Chihara-Kai.

POUL: The shootout was created so they had to flee the building because the building was about to be torn down.

ROGERS: It became, of course, one of the best parts of the whole season, but only to solve this, “Oh my god, there's an instrumental problem. How are we gonna fix it? And we’ve gotta do it in the next month because we’re gonna be shooting there.”

POUL: And the other– I don’t know. I don’t want to tell you all of our cheats. There’s one more big one.

ROGERS: Go ahead, tell him.

I definitely wanna hear it.

POUL: Okay, but downplay it. No, but it was because of getting kicked out of Chihara-Kai and it being torn down, that when we got to the scene in Episode 7, where Sato is banished from the Chihara-Kai and it all happens up on the roof where Hayama comes up and says, “You said I have no honor,” and beats the shit out of him, we had to find another rooftop that looked like Chihara-Kai, because we were shooting that after we'd already lost it. So we had to find a place. We scoured the whole city to be able to find a rooftop that we could effectively fake as the one we had seen many times on Chihara-Kai.

What I love about all this is that I think people who watch TV think that everything is just so easy, or it's so organized, and it's literally trying to capture chaos, and then in the editing room, make magic happen.

ROGERS: I mean, it's incredibly organized because we have to shoot so much out of order because getting so many of the locations was so hard. As we talked about, every scene in the season that takes place in Tozawa or Mrs. Tozawa’s suite in the hotel has to be shot in one week; every scene at the Katagiri house in the whole season, shot in one week.

POUL: Because that's a nice hotel, and in order to get in there with 150 people on shoot, we have to buy out three floors of guest rooms in a classy hotel. So obviously, we can only do it for a week.

ROGERS: But to what you were saying, what is remarkable is this thing was planned within an inch of its life, thank god. Because even then…

POUL: Everything went wrong. But look at the shootout, being case in point. It's one of the best scenes in the season.

ROGERS: Problem solving.

POUL: And it came out of necessity.

Why 'Tokyo Vice' Could Evolve Its Characters in Season 2

Close

With Season 2, what did you learn from Season 1 with certain characters and their acting that you ultimately leaned into in a way that you did not expect going in?

ROGERS: I'd say the biggest thing, character-wise, was realizing that Tokyo was a character in the show, and that I had to push even more in the writing. To Alan's credit, if I may quote you, the audience response of Season 1 was, “Oh my god, I've never seen so much of Tokyo,” and Alan’s response was, “Why are we always in people's rooms? Why aren’t we outside more?”

POUL: We watch it over and over and over, and I'd be like, “We’ve been inside for 15 minutes. Get out on the street!”

ROGERS: So, that would be the biggest change. I think, in terms of characters, there are a couple of things. One was as Ansel's Japanese got better and better and better, I could lean more into that, taking it more realistic and even further into worlds, and have more of his dialogue in Japanese, and his interaction deeper. So, that was great. I think it was really great to see characters that had small parts — Gen, Sato's number two, or Hagino, who was basically just a foot soldier with no lines in Season 1, working for Tozawa, or let alone, Mrs. Tozawa — and earmark them for much bigger parts.

POUL: And Kaito.

ROGERS: And Kaito, who was just a little cameo at his father's hospital bed in Season 1. I said, “I want all those characters” because I realized they had the chops to do more. By the end of the last third of the season, I was leaning even more into those characters because I wanted to see what they would do. Gen is in lots of scenes in the last couple of episodes when Sato was ascended, where originally in the scripts he wasn't. I was like, “Well, I want Gen in them. I want Gen in the scene.” It would make sense.

POUL: The scene in [Episode] 9.

ROGERS: Where Jake says, “This is just you and me.” Sato nods at Gen and replies, “No, he stays.” I wrote that because it felt character-right that Gen would in all those scenes.

POUL: But also in [Episode] 9 when he says, “Why are you so loyal to me when everybody else is deserting?” And we've seen the entire history, that he beat the shit out of him in Season 1, and then Gen came back and stabbed him at the end of the season. Then basically Sato was asked to kill him by Ishida, and literally saved his life, and he became, really, his backbone inside the Chihara-Kai. Having an actor who could carry that off is not a given.

ROGERS: I don't think you even know this, but when that was being written and rewritten — the whole sequence being written because of losing the building, and so that scene with that line came back — I think the impetus for me to put that line in, “Why are you loyal to me?” “Because you showed mercy,” is because of how moved I was by how Alan and his DP, Corey [Walter], shot the scene in Episode 1 where you think, like a slaughtered pig, that Ishida’s gonna have Gen’s throat cut by Sato, and he doesn't. And it was great on paper — he says vainly — but the execution was so dynamic that it kind of stuck with me in a way that I felt like it needed a reference from the characters that had lived through the experience by the end of the seasons.

How Much Truth Is There to 'Tokyo Vice'?

A lot of people won't realize that the storyline you're doing with the FBI, there's truth to this in terms of a Yakuza going to have liver surgery. Talk about the fact that you are dealing with something that really happened.

POUL: It's fictionalized. There’s a disclaimer at the end credits.

ROGERS: We are legally bound…

Sure. It's a fictionalized version of something that actually happened.

ROGERS: It’s in the book. It's no shock that the FBI and the CIA make deals with sordid people so they can get more quantitatively bad people. This is one of the main processes of law enforcement. So, yeah, it was based on a true thing. I mean, look, those events and the characters, certainly of Tozawa, are amalgams of real people, and then, quite honestly, totally fictionalized elements that I put on to it. But one of the things that drew me to the story from my friend's life, his book, but even more his life, was, “Things like this happen? This is so fascinating.” So it was, I guess, useful in a storytelling way because the audience would never see something like that coming, because it's, in our Western, American non-FBI minds, such a strange idea that it was really delicious to sort of dig into. And that scene at the top of [Episode] 9, when they're sitting around jabbing 100 miles an hour, figuring out what happened, that’s our All the President's Men scene, where they’re talking their way to the light bulb.

I definitely want to touch on Episode 5, which is the shootout in the club. I was not expecting all that to happen. It's so well done. Talk a little bit about how you figured out that was gonna be the thing in Episode 5, and also shooting it.

ROGERS: I knew it was gonna be the thing early on, working in the writers’ room, and coming in with all the building blocks and events that I already wanted to happen before I even started working with my most excellent team. But pretty soon we were like, “Well, what's gonna be the hinge moment of a 10-episode [series]? What’s gonna be the hinge of [Episode] 5?” “Well, it needs to be this.” Originally, I was gonna have it later, but as more and more of the story developed, I thought, “No, the rocket ship will start after we have this shootout.” Takeshi [Fukunaga], our director who shot it, did a wonderful job. He would tease me. He said, “You know, this is only the second episode of TV I've ever made. I've never done a sex scene, a shootout… So a lot of my firsts.” I said, “Well, that's good. You're doing an excellent job.” And it took three days, moment by moment.

POUL: Three full days that had been meticulously storyboarded.

ROGERS: Within an inch of their life. As is always the case, both of us were there to support the director, and just track everything, and it was one of those moments that, like, it gets pretty grueling to shoot something like that, honestly. “And the gun… And five more takes of the gun. And six more takes.” But when you put it together in post, and we get to play with it and play with it, it's really fun.

That’s the reason why I keep on talking about editing with people, because I just don't think enough people understand that when you're shooting, you're literally just collecting puzzle pieces to build the puzzle in the editing room.

POUL: Yes, and case in point, as part of the meticulous planning of that scene, there's a beautiful shot that Takeshi and Corey, our DP, did where we suddenly jump outside the club and we're looking in through the window, and shots ring out, and you see a bunch of bullets hit the window. It was beautifully shot, and really kind of fascinating when the bullets are almost coming at you. But we tried editing it in many ways, and it was a moment that took you out of the action, and you didn't want to give people a breath. They had to stay in the action. So in the end, we felt that we didn't have the liberty to use it. Certain people were very disappointed, but the sequence works better that way.

ROGERS: I'll give you a perfect example of the magic of editing. Alan shot Episode 2. In Episode 2, we have a scene where the audience has been waiting for Sato and Sam to get together, and he shows up at her place. Oh my gosh, there's so much they want to say to each other, and then he has to lower the boom and say, “You've got to bring back Claudine, the woman who’s been stealing from you.” All of a sudden, the budding romance that's soaring is curdling instantly, and it's horrible for all parties. Then we see them at the end of the episode, and she says, “Will you take Erica home?” And we don't realize that that's gonna start a frisson between the two of them. What was scripted, and what was originally shot was he's supposed to look after her as she looks away, and she's supposed to look at him as he looks away, and they missed the moment to look at each other. It just didn’t really land, to no one's fault other than, perhaps, mine as the writer, and so we ended up taking shots from different episodes and concocting them actually looking at each other.

POUL: Not from different episodes. It’s from that scene. We had lots of coverage, we just had to give them eye contact.

ROGERS: Change the narrative.

POUL: Even on the day, the actors were really struggling with it.

ROGERS: We changed the whole narrative.

POUL: And then she chose to break the eye contact and turn around.

ROGERS: It was the opposite of what was written, and it's great. To me, it’s one of the most moving moments in the whole season. It was all put together in the editing room.

At the beginning of Season 2, you have stuff that takes place on Tozawa’s boat, and it goes full circle. So I'm assuming you had all that figured out early on in terms of where everything took place.

POUL: [Laughs] No.

ROGERS: That falls into the “figuring out later” camp. Yes, we always knew the whole issue of the Yoshino and everything that was the cliffhanger in Season 1 was gonna climax in Season 2. But no, the opening we had originally scripted and shot was them watching the TV…

POUL: No, that was, like, scene seven.

ROGERS: What was the first?

POUL: The original opening was the stuff with Sato in the hospital.

ROGERS: Yes.

POUL: We were gonna do all these people rushing around the hospital on gurney, and all this subjective, hazy point of view from someone who's barely alive, and end with a pull-back where we see Sato’s face. He’s still unconscious, and we hear the doctor saying, “We don't know if he's gonna make it or not.” Because they wanted to front load the reveal of what happened to Sato, but it just didn't work.

ROGERS: It doesn't work. And then we were shooting the shit with our DP, Corey, and Corey said, “Well, what if we do a thing with on the boat?”

POUL: And then I had a good way that we could then have it end up at Katagiri’s. But that was all being planned and shot while we were already shooting. It's really three shots stitched together, and we had to shoot them in the wrong order but still assure the continuity. We would have definitely shot it a different way, but we were trapped by location and time at that point, and worked.

ROGERS: What ends up being the scene order after the edit is often very different than how it was written or how it was shot. So sometimes we're like, “Wait, it's the third scene for everybody else, but for us, we're still thinking it's the first scene because that's what it was.” So, it's a slippery beast.

Tokyo Vice Seasons 1 and 2 are available to stream on Max.

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