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The Man in the High Castle Season One

[Spoiler Kitten Says: This review discusses the premise of the first season of The Man in the High Castle, and alludes to events that transpire throughout the first ten episodes, but does not spoil major plot developments.]

What if we lost World War II? Frank Spotnitz’s The Man in the High Castle, a ten-episode series from Amazon based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, asks that question in a grim yet beautiful meditation on chance, fate, and moral ambiguity.

The premise is simple: FDR died in the 1930s, and the US never developed the A-bomb. Instead, Germany did. After the Nazis nuked Washington, D.C., the Axis powers divided the United States: Japan got the west coast; Germany got the east coast and the Midwest. Between those two dominions lies the Neutral Zone, a lawless swath of misery that runs along the Continental Divide. By 1962, tensions between the “Pacific States” and the Reich have increased. Some Germans want to take over the Japanese-governed portions of the former US; the Japanese government is keenly aware that they would not win a battle with the technologically-advanced Nazis.

Against that backdrop, regular people struggle. The protagonist is Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), a young woman who grew up in occupied San Francisco, practices Aikido, and accepts the world as it is. When she discovers a newsreel showing clips of a world in which FDR did not die, in which we stormed the beaches of Normandy, in which Hitler died, her entire perspective changes. Over the course of the first season, she tentatively joins the Resistance.

Her actions have consequences, though. They affect Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), who lives in the Reich and has, shall we say, a complicated system of loyalty. They affect Juliana’s boyfriend, Frank Frink, who is part-Jewish (and therefore in a constant state of about-to-be-killed). As the story unfolds, characters in the Reich, in the Pacific States, and in the Neutral Zone—characters in positions of power as well as characters with no power at all—have their lives irrevocably changed by Juliana’s discovery of the newreel.

Dick wrote the novel while enchanted with the I Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that—in his version and the version portrayed in the show—extracts meaning from the random scattering of sticks (interpreted with the I Ching as a guide). Within the show, the Trade Minister of the Pacific States, Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), uses the system to divine appropriate and just action.

I have not read Dick’s novel, but Laura Miller (my favorite book reviewer) describes it as “a strange, mournful story in which not very much happens to people who have very little control over their lives and even less inclination to do anything to change that. It ought not to be engrossing, yet it is.”

Unlike the novel, quite a bit happens in the ten episodes that comprise Season One. But like the novel, what happens is governed by chance, by luck both good and bad, and by the whimsical nature of history.

The result is "engrossing," but not quite a story: we see events, we see causality, yet the goal is opaque. Are we supposed to root for a complete world-shift, with everything going back to the way it should be? (How could such a thing be possible?) Are we supposed to root for the success of the Resistance? For the maintenance of the uneasy status quo? The Man in the High Castle refuses to answer those questions. Instead, it shows us what is and the power of what-could-be.

Part of that power is the system of objects that take on almost totemic significance for individual characters: The newsreel. A necklace. An origami crane. A gun. Who possesses the objects, who interprets or misinterprets the objects—it’s all chance, with a dash of character thrown in.

That is not a complaint. Rather, it is an attempt to pin down precisely what this show is about. The character relationships recede into the background, then come storming back into the foreground. The Resistance plot, the exploration of the world (especially the Neutral Zone)—it all ebbs and flows. This show is haunting, but very hard to explain.

It’s also beautiful. The San Francisco setting is damp, gray, permeated with a sense—from our perspective—of what isn’t: no incipient hippie movement, no Beatniks, no emergent rock n’ roll. The cars lack fins; the skirts are never as full as they might be. The scenes set in the Reich are sunnier, but that just makes them more creepy.

The acting and writing are all quite strong. Although, like many prestige dramas, The Man in the High Castle lacks even an ounce of comic relief, DJ Qualls does a wonderful job as a truly good-hearted person stuck in a nonsensically terrible world. Rufus Sewell is a Nazi; he’s good at that. And Alexa Davalos, who will always be Electro-Gwen to me, perfectly epitomizes an intelligent woman forced to navigate a world that has suddenly become unknowable.

The result is a show that I definitely recommend, but can’t quite yet wrap my mind around. Amazon has designated these ten episodes as “Season One,” so I assume we will get a second season at some point. I look forward to watching that, but I also wonder if these ten episodes, in all their ambiguity, might succeed most as a melancholy, troubling, and ultimately unanswerable portrayal of what might have been.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

8 comments:

  1. Great review!

    I think you did a great job of describing and capturing the feeling behind the series.

    I really liked the series as well. I thought it was really engrossing. The whole world was fascinating. I also thought it was well-acted and that the cinematography was beautiful. I really hope there's a second season!

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  2. I'll echo what Anonymous said -- great review, Josie, of a sort of amazing series. The way the series looked and felt was its greatest accomplishment, because it succeeded incredibly well as an alternate reality. The world felt so evil, and yet it was an everyday evil. What happened to Frank's sister and her kids got to me. Although I never cared much for Frank himself. As you said, his best friend DJ Qualls was a lot more likable.

    I did like Electro-Gwen/Juliana Crain; she did a terrific job. I was a bit more confused by Joe Blake, but I think he was supposed to be confusing. Loved the Trade Minister Mr. Tagomi. He's such an odd and complicated character, quite possibly a walking plot device.

    Can I talk about the end? SPOILERS BELOW, although I'll attempt to be vague!

    *What* are the films? They are such a fascinating science fictiony thing and I really wanted to find out what they were and what they meant, where they were coming from. Did Tagomi see an alternate present, or did he slip between worlds? Is he really there? Will he come back? Was it because Juliana changed the status quo when she did what she did with Blake?

    If there is a second season, I'll definitely watch it. And hope it answers my questions in a cool way.

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  3. I agree with the above comments and loved the show. My only worry is that it ends up pulling a LOST - all buildup and confusing new mysteries, and in the end unable to pay them off in a satisfying way.

    It also struck me while watching those stunning aerial shots of the castle in the final episode, that the only man in a high castle that we see during the entire season is Hitler himself.

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  4. This show was...weird. The young would-be heroes lacked appeal for me. Their decisions were unfathomable and the performances of their actors dull. It pains me to insult a Whedon alum, but really I didn't care about Juliana or Frank or Joe at all. Instead the characters that engrossed me were the ones whose portrayers had a real sense of gravitas - John Smith (that just can not be his real name), the San Francisco police chief, and the Japanese trade minister. Two of which do pretty damned evil things, yet these were the characters my brain decided to care about.

    I was frustrated by the lack of answers the season provided. My biggest little question was who was Joe's dad? It was intimated that he was someone high up in the Nazi party and I was sure he would turn out to be important. I was even thinking he might be John Smith which would explain a lot between them. Then, of course, there are the films. Do they represent alternate realities? Are these realities accessible? How? How many realities are there? (At least three: ours, theirs, and one where Joe kills Frank, unless that's somehow the future of their reality). And then as the Trade Minister transitioned to a different reality...he didn't look surprised. Which is...you'd think if you closed your eyes and then opened them and life was entirely different, you'd be surprised, right?

    The Man in the High Castle is Hitler, right? I mean, he's a man, in a castle that is high and he's obsessed with the films. So he's somehow using the resistance to his advantage, yes?

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  5. This series has a lot going for it. The world building is incredible, the sets and costumes are great. They must have spent a fortune on extras alone. The streets are crowded with people, and classic cars. Visually, this show is a treat. The characters of Juliana, Frank, and John Smith were very interesting, also DJ Qualms, that actor is always so lovable. The premise is fascinating, what if Hitler really won, shudder. Yes, the show was slow moving, but I'm definitely going to watch season 2.

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  6. The depiction of this world, and the whole look and feel of the show, are its best strengths. But I felt that the characters are boring, and the pacing is too slow.

    ** Spoilers follow: **

    My interpretation is that yes, Hitler is using the resistance, as a means to obtain the films. So far there's no hint where the films come from or how they arrive in this world. Hitler watches the films to gain a unique strategic advantage - glimpses of the future that might be, and so he can act accordingly to his own benefit, and thereby he can control which aspects of the films shall come to transpire, and which shall not. Hitler is supplying the resistance with some info that (in comparison to his having access to the films) is relatively unimportant.

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  7. I just binged this series last week - and what an amazing series it was! Absolutely mind blowing. It's disturbing to think that the victorious in war always write the history afterwards. The victorious are always regarded as the freedom fighters, the cleaners, freeing people from their own inhibitions.
    What a terrible thought it is that this might have been the world we are living in today. Or maybe we are? Just a different terrible world?

    Can't wait for season 2! Great thought provoking stuff.

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  8. I binged this series to take advantage of my free Amazon Prime trial. Overall, I did enjoy it, primarily for its chilling atmosphere, and I agree with Josie's review. Though sometimes I felt the regimes were too crude in their methods--totalitarianism often works best with more subtle coercion and surveillance (see The Lives of Others ).

    It has a very tangential relationship to the novel, taking its setting, characters and ideas, but the plot and relationships between the characters are very different. There was literally no point at which I felt I knew what was going to happen because of having read the novel. The initial pacing is much faster than the novel with characters killed before we get any chance to know them, and the rules of this world and the restrictions it places on the character are introduced very quickly. A difficulty for the show is that so many of the characters either can't trust the people around them or fear to endanger them, so they don't explain their actions. This works well for introducing the milieu, but I can see why some of the viewers here are complaining about not connecting with the characters.

    Still, I'm intrigued to see what they've cooked up for season 2.

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