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?
I did watch a few episodes. Couldn't start caring enough to go on. I only cared about the premise and its implications, I realized after the second episode's end. The screentime was nothing unusual, nothing really interesting, and I guess I didn't last long enough to witness how interesting the bigger arc is; thankfully, TV Tropes filled the gaps about what I cared to learn for me. What was it that you liked about it? What caught your attention from this series?
I was too drunk to watch the pilot. My thoughts about the book : it was very straightforward for a PKD book. But what if the twist is Abendsen is writing from one world and Dick from another. Phil Dick is also the man in the high castle. They're the same character from different perspectives.
Wow... more glad than ever that I don't read reviews! Here's why you should watch it: Not since West Wing has there been a show with such a large cast of characters who are also incredibly deep, have their own stories, and are not cardboard cutouts. Every episode of MitHC is as dense as a full-length feature film, with multiple intertwining storylines, deep characters with actually consequential decisions to make that are non-obvious and have surprising repercussions down the line... That particular review is the only one I read of MitHC, and I just can't imagine how they didn't see the depth and complexity of the story. The weakest character, to me, is the lead, Julianna Crane. Life kinda throws her around, and she adapts, but ... there is something flat about her. Fortunately, there is no actual "lead" character, because EVERY character has a fascinating story and set of triggers/goals that they pursue in logical ways. Trade Minister Tagomi is such a brilliant character, brilliantly played, that he could support an entire spinoff series. He is born and raised in the Japan of empire, not the Japan that was beaten and humiliated by the US, and then outsourced to as cheap labor. He is proud, almost Edo-era Samurai, and stiff, and formal, and constricted to Japanese expectations and decorum. But he is a Buddhist. Who meditates. And finds a way to teleport to OUR timeline, and out of his own... a timeline where his family survives, and he has been a bad father, angry with his son's marriage to a gaijin and disowning his grandson for being a half-breed. But the Tagomi WE know - from the Nazi timeline - is a tragic figure, whose son died in battle and his wife died in the war. He mourns their passing and misses them deeply, praying to their altar every night at home. When he finds the way to teleport back to his family, he is elated - he gets to see his beloved family again!! Who can't stand him... the Tagomi they know from THEIR timeline. So we see him wrestle with rebuilding his family in the alternate timeline, while also being one of the key people in his natural timeline capable of stopping WWIII. And he has to make the choice between being with his family in post-WWII San Francisco, or stopping WWIII in his timeline. The role is acted masterfully, the story is deep and compelling, and BOTH decisions are the "right" one to make. So when he choses one over the other, it is a truly powerful moment, and completely surprising and completely right. And the characters who go through similar journeys are John Smith, his wife, the Kempetai Chief Inspector Kido, the weasel antique store owner Childen, and even tertiary-level characters like the lebensborn of the Reich who are the parallels of a Germanic version of the Andy Warhol crowd of experimental young ones... Really, I think the series is worth it. Yeah, I started watching it when I was sick, so I binged on like the first three episodes and then got into the fourth and fifth tentatively, but it definitely rewarded my initial patience. Hence this thread. I wanna talk about this more... and that hasn't happened since Battlestar Galactica.