I just finished watching the Amazon original series, "The Man in the High Castle", and found it satisfying, start to end. Philip K. Dick is an interesting mind, and managed to hit the bullseye once or twice, but his writing is not elegant or thorough, and tends to frustrate me in book form. I like his ideas... I just like them better when someone else interprets them (in film, or otherwise).

Recap

The basic idea is that it is an alternate-future idea of Nazi Germany winning WWII and having an uneasy truce with Japan, that takes place about 20 years after the war ends. Germany invaded the US and basically controls everything from the east coast to the Rocky Mountains, the Rockies are the "Neutral Zone" buffer area, and then Japan conquered the Western US, and controls it from San Francisco.

A plucky resistance pecks away at the Japanese pretty effectively, but doesn't have as much success in the Reich.

The story focuses on some everyday young people who fall backwards into the Resistance, and get wound up with a bunch of zealots. They are forced to participate with ever-increasingly aggressive Resistance efforts, or face the Resistance outing them, or hurting their families.

Seems pretty straightforward alterna-future sci-fi story... until we find out there are parallel realities that are crossing over in unexpected ways ... a future that is 1960's America as we know it, and 1960's North American continent under the control of the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich.

My Thoughts

I love this show. The ease with which the Reich lifestyle fits into the East Coast, middle-upper class, white American culture is truly eerie. Americans wearing full Nazi regalia walking into their suburban northeast homes on tree-lined quintessential streets is... so totally believable and "normal" looking, it shocks me every time Obersturmbannführer John Smith walks into his perfect 60's middle-america home.

The subservience of the white Americans to the Japanese, and the imposition of Japanese culture - bowing, deference, no eye contact, etc - onto stereotypical Californians is just as right/wrong. While at the same time, being one of the most poignant expose's of our casual racism.

Being deeply shocked and offended at seeing a white, middle-aged man as a butler in a Japanese mid-century California coastal home ... well ... it caused me to think pretty deeply about my internal judgement of what is "right-" and "wrong-" feeling. And what my culture has done to other cultures for centuries, without blinking an eye.

Different worlds is where this show gets deeply weird. There are two parallel futures operating side-by-side, and some characters can move between the two worlds at will, others exist in both worlds without knowing about their "other" self in the other world.

For any other show, this would have to be deeply explored, explained, and we'd wind up with some stupid midichlorian bullshit-handwaving that we would just have to accept.

But MitHC doesn't bother to explain it in any way, at all. We experience it entirely through the characters' own stumbling into their teleportation abilities, as they fumble with how it works, and the limits of the skill.

This is, surprisingly, very effective for me. If I woke up one day and found myself with a skill I never knew I had before, I would explore it cautiously as well. Like poking coals in a firepit with your finger to feel if they are hot, or not.

Season 2 ends neatly wrapping up all of the story lines, and leaving us with a group of characters that are interesting, fully developed, and with wide open futures ahead of them.

I want to be in the writer's room, thinking about these characters, and what they might do next! Season 3 could be an entirely new show about the future in which the world-spanning Third Reich actually does dam the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and genuinely tries to lead mankind forward into some sort of Aryan-perfected future of world-combined effort... the Germans have Big Plans. The Japanese are just trying to hold their Empire together with spit and chewing gum. And the Americans have largely been herded into comfortable complacency and an acceptance of the new normal.

What happens next?

Do you watch this show? What are your thoughts about it?