Despite all its hallmarks of a real nail-biter — an escape in disguise, a firefight in a forest, a heroic last stand, a race at sea — this episode fails as action filmmaking.

The director Charlotte Brandstrom, late of the tepid fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” chronicles various exciting things going on. Ishido, Toranaga and the Christian forces fight a three-way battle in a forest by firelight. Buntaro makes his brave stand against dozens of goons on the dock. Blackthorne races against his foul-mouthed Catholic frenemy Rodrigues as they steer their ships into and out of danger. All of these incidents seem, on paper, to be the stuff of crackerjack action filmmaking.

Unfortunately, pointing a camera at action, while necessary for action filmmaking, is not the only criterion for success. Too much of the nominal excitement is filmed at a remove — medium-wide shots that neither give the full lay of the land nor immerse viewers in the physicality of combat. There’s no actual surprise in the surprise attack in the forest, no attempt made to root us in the experiences of the besieged, no fight choreography that communicates the peril of battling two enemy forces at once, as Toranaga, Blackthorne and the surprisingly well-trained Mariko do.

You don’t feel the arrows whizzing by, the way you do in, say, the battle scenes in Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” films. You don’t feel the chaos of that nighttime battle. You don’t feel Buntaro’s blend of desperation and terrifying skill as he holds at bay a dock full of assailants. You don’t feel the risk of that game of chicken Blackthorne and Rodrigues are playing, not when your primary view is two guys with their hands on the rudder. You don’t feel much of anything.

The lighting is a persistent problem in this regard. Both the blue-gray of the nighttime scenes and the blinding haze of daytime at sea make the show feel not so much surreal as unreal, like action taking place in a digital no-man’s-land.

I reviewed last night’s mixed Shōgun for the New York Times.

Of the two episodes in this initial offering, the former is by far the weaker. For one thing, it falls victim to a bad case of first episode syndrome: a tendency to front-load shows with attention-grabbing material that is much blunter and broader than what follows. (I always think of “Billions,” which opened with a bound and gagged Paul Giamatti being used as a human ashtray and toilet.)

Here, the voyeurism and torture had something of the air of “This ain’t your average samurai story”; the very expensive but rather staid look of the series, with all the usual medieval peasant grime and aristocratic splendor, gives lie to that claim, at least visually. At any rate, when you’re killing babies in side plots and boiling men alive onscreen in your very first outing, where do you go from there?

You go in an entirely different direction, as it turns out. It’s not that the second episode lacks for spectacle: the murderous rescue of Blackthorne by Yabushige’s “bandits,” and the genuinely shocking rampage of a maid-turned-assassin through Toranaga’s quarters on the hunt for Blackthorne, provide plenty. What does the trick is exposition, of all things. The multiple scenes in which characters are given the lay of the land — Father Martin and Blackthorne explaining to Toranaga their nations’ conflict; a Franciscan prisoner describing Toranaga’s rivals to Blackthorne; Blackthorne outlining the Spanish/Portuguese conspiracy for world domination to the court — may be inelegant, but they sure are engaging.

These expository dialogues add much-needed density to the comparatively airy first episode. Suddenly, a straightforward adventure story about a cool lord and a fish out of water is a complex latticework of countries, religions, underlings, rivalries, assassinations, alliances and conspiracies — all on top of the basic culture clash that drives Blackthorne’s narrative. Threats can come at any character from any direction. Simply staying alive requires both Blackthorne and Toranaga to bob and weave like they’re making their way through razor wire, and one wrong move will slice them to ribbons.

I reviewed the double series premiere of Shōgun for the New York Times.