It’s a familiar scene in many Hollywood movies and shows set in feudal Japan: a white foreigner is given a katana and is taught by a samurai how to use it, often in an inspiring montage set to soaring music. He embraces the traditional weapon and proceeds to master it, maybe even eclipsing his humble Japanese teacher. It’s the kind of scene Shogun showrunners Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo were wary of using in their FX samurai epic.

“One of the cliches we wanted to get around is the classic scene of putting a stranger in a strange land, putting a weapon into that character’s hand. We’re just so sick of that scene,” Marks tells Inverse.

No one is more familiar with this scene than Shogun star and producer Hiroyuki Sanada. Though his Hollywood career stretches back more than two decades, and his career in Japan and Hong Kong goes back even further, Sanada has spent much of that time clad in a kimono and playing second fiddle to white protagonists wielding samurai swords. But in Shogun, Sanada is both lead and producer. And it was Sanada that Marks and Kondo, who were keenly aware they were tackling a story they were unfamiliar with, would most frequently turn to for advice.

If Earth had an evil twin, it might look something like the recently-discovered lava-Earth HD 63433d.

HD 63433d is a rocky world almost exactly the same size as our Earth, orbiting a star almost exactly like our Sun. But HD 63433d orbits so daringly close to its star that instead of watery oceans, it is enveloped by seas of lava. Still, this nightmarish landscape might have things to teach us about how our planet became habitable – and what our chances are of finding atmospheres on other rocky worlds around Sun-like stars.