Review of The Man in the High Castle
This is a review of the TV show The Man in the High Castle. SPOILERS
Based on the book by Phillip K. Dick, the show went four seasons on Amazon Prime. I initially enjoyed it because if you've ever read any of my books, the show followed my standard plot formula: Nazi villains, alternate history, weird technology, and lots of drama.
The writing wasn't predictable. Each episode generally left me surprised and wanting to find out how the characters got out of their new predicament. I especially enjoyed how the character Juliana wasn't just some feminist bad-ass that kicks butt because she's a strong social justice icon. The first episode established she was skilled in judo, so when she throws a Nazi agent off a bridge a couple episodes later, it's totally believable. Her trauma and remorse then for having just killed someone was also very realistic and believable. Given her experiences, that she later gradually developed into a female Jason Bourne was equally believable.
To someone like myself, who grew up in the 1960s, the show was more like a horror flick—a terrifying vision of my country under Nazi occupation. I think the writers did an excellent job of showing what America would have been like.
The show did an exceptional job of dressing the sets. The only thing I noticed that was out of place or unrealistic was the size of Hitler's office. While large, the set didn't compare to his real supermarket-sized palatial office. Also in the show he had a picture of President Hindenburg on the wall when the real Hitler had one of Henry Ford. Hitler hated Hindenburg but adored Ford's book about eugenics.
I found it interesting that Occupied California didn't look like anything had been fixed or updated since 1945. Everything is dirty, backward, and broken. The streets are filthy and the non-Japanese live in poverty. In contrast, Nazi-occupied America is clean, organized, and prosperous. They showed without telling that while the Japanese have exploited and plundered their zone, the Nazis rebuilt their half. Except for an ominous complete lack of Blacks on the streets, the Reich looks like the real 1960s America.
The show vaguely follows the plot of the book, at least for the first two seasons. The only weird thing is that while there are Jews in the story, the show makes little use of them. Frank, a secular Jew, comes to religious faith in the end with a small group of Jews hiding out in the Neutral Zone. But the show didn't really make much of them. One would think given history that more use would have been made of the dramatic potential of their faith under the ultimate persecution.
The only people in the show who were family-oriented were the Nazis. Other than Juliana, the other characters didn't really have close family relationships and hers were strained. This seems strange in a world torn apart where you'd need support from your family—who else is there to count on? In real life, the Nazi Party was not family oriented. The Party was supreme. You swore total allegiance to Hitler and only him. Children were routinely encouraged to spy on their parents and turn them in for deviation. I don't think the writers understood totalitarianism. More likely, they wanted to showcase the idea that anyone who is conservative, works hard, appreciates order, and is family focused is just a white supremacist Nazi. These days social justice is the theme of all "entertainment" and a big budget production like this isn't going to get funded, especially by Amazon, without kowtowing to it. Even so, the first two seasons were exceptional.
But the third season seemed as if they switched writers. Or perhaps a memo came down from on high to ramp up the propaganda. All of a sudden two characters turned out to be homosexual who heretofore had displayed no evidence of it. Ed, Frank's friend, who was shown earlier as being a secret admirer of Frank's girlfriend Juliana, turns out to be a closeted homosexual. This makes no sense given the fact he'd been attracted to Juliana, as shown in the show. She met Frank first, or Ed would have tried to date her, but he left her alone because she was his best friend's girl. That's from the book. But it makes no sense if he's homosexual, which the character in the book is not. It's as if the producers suddenly realized there were no homosexuals in the show and had to retcon some in.
The similar lesbian subplot is also unnecessary. The character had been previously shown as a slutty Bohemian filmmaker. Absent current political correctness, she could have continued as such and had basically the same effect on the plot through a relationship with the married advertising executive, rather than his wife. The lesbian angle was only included to show that Nazis persecuted homosexuals, therefore anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly endorse the LGBTQZ agenda therefore is also a Nazi.
Late in the third season they bumped the Progressive propaganda up another notch by introducing the Black Communist Resistance. The regular resistance had been fighting the Japanese for eighteen years since the end of the war with no success. The BCR, led by a woman, then undertakes a campaign of terrorism that in a matter of months convinces the Japanese to abandon California and evacuate all the way back to Japan. Obviously the Patriarchy can only be brought down by minorities, especially if led by women. Go Antifa!
The Japanese remark of their determination, "They fought for 400 years and will fight 400 more if necessary." I wasn't aware Blacks fought for their freedom for 400 years. They were originally sold into slavery by other Blacks in Africa. For the next 400 years, except for Nat Turner, there were no major slave uprisings. Other than a few regiments of freed slaves—organized and outfitted by White abolitionists—Blacks got their freedom handed to them after half a million Whites died fighting for it in the Civil War.
To really understand the magnitude of the propaganda, one needs only to compare the treatment of Blacks in the show with Jews. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years. The Nazis weren't the first to practice genocide on them. The show could have mentioned that for millennia their persecutors have come and gone yet the Jews continue. But no mention is made of this in the show—because of course, social justice warriors are anti-Semitic, Jew-hating Israel bashers and only included them in the show because of the source material and only as far as the source material went.
The show makes a big deal out of films smuggled from alternate realities where the Axis lost World War II and their effect on the occupied peoples. But at the end of season three when the characters mass produce one showing the Allies winning the war, season four begins with the regular non-Black resistance immediately being defeated and the films being captured and burned, the message of the show being that the only thing that can defeat the racist White-supremacist Patriarchy is minorities, because the regular resistance is certainly ineffectual—too many toxic White males, I suppose.
In the final episode, with a Nazi invasion of Communist-liberated California imminent, one of the Blacks suggests fighting under the old American flag, the idea being that the invading Nazi army, made up primarily of Americans now, many of whom were old enough to remember what it was like before the war, would switch sides. But the other Blacks refuse because "everybody knows" that America was no good for Blacks. Apparently, the writers thought the Jim Crow laws were some kind of Federal statute, not an actual violation of the existing 14th Amendment. Those laws only existed in a few Democrat controlled ex-Confederate states, but that doesn't matter because "Stars-and-Stripes-bad" is the only point they want to make here, even if the suggestion to fight under the old flag has merit even if that was true. Who cares if Blacks had it bad in the old America if rallying under its flag gets the invading armies to join you instead of wiping you out? Because America bad, that's why.
Another complaint I have is that while there are some male supporting characters, all the show's important "good" characters are female. Juliana, her sister, the lesbian filmmaker, Smith's wife, his "woke" older daughter, the head of the BCR, even the Japanese Crown Princess who wants peace—they're all female. Meanwhile, all the villains are male except for one kick-ass Gestapo agent who beat the crap out of and would have killed Liam except for Juliana Bourne saving his mediocre male candy-ass. Male supporting "heroes" include a pornographer, a black marketeer, a smarmy art dealer, and the Man in the High Castle himself who turns collaborator until his "heroic" wife is able to kill herself to give him a spine. The only decent, honorable, trustworthy, self-sacrificing real male heroes are Gay Ed and his Brokeback Mountain cowboy lover.
In the end, Reichsmarshall Smith is betrayed by his own wife who for some inexplicable reason after driving him to sell out his country and comrades to become a Nazi collaborator in the first place, suddenly grows a conscience about his plans for a Final Solution to the Black problem. He became a monster to save his family, but in the end his son is murdered by the Party. His oldest daughter rejects Nazism and him. His youngest becomes a Nazi fanatic. His own wife betrays him and is killed. But just as Smith is about to commit suicide out of remorse, Juliana shows up and shoots him—can't have the Evil Patriarch atoning for his sins. Nope. He's got to die at the hand of the Strong Female Protagonist literally a half-second before he shoots himself.
Then at the very end of the episode, for some utterly inexplicable reason the portal opens on its own and a mob of people shamble through it from other realities. Who are these people? Why are they here? We see The Man in the High Castle heading into them as if looking for his dead wife. Are these people who died fighting the Nazis? But the show already established that the portal opens to alternative realities, not the Afterlife. Are these people invaders from other realities where the Nazis were defeated, coming to put an end to them here? No, because they're all in civilian clothes and shambling around with no apparent purpose or direction. The show's ending makes no sense.
The show established that the portal opens onto an infinite number of other realities where anything that could have happened did. Himmler planned to use it to invade and conquer the other realities until it was discovered that you can only enter a reality if no living version of you already exists there. A much better ending to the show would have been if the portal opened up and Allied troops from another realities pushed through to liberate the world from the Nazis. The army would have been made of all the multiple millions of people murdered by the Nazis in this reality, an ironic consequence of their genocidal policies. This ending would have been especially ironic if we saw Smith's son from the alternate 1964 in his US Marine Corps uniform with them. The producers could have even had Juliana be the catalyst for this. She had escaped to an alternate reality 1964 until Smith sent an assassin to kill her. What if instead of then returning to her home reality to try to assassinate one of the most powerful political leaders in the world singlehandedly, she had instead stayed where she was and convinced an alternate reality President Kennedy to intervene by liberating her reality of the Nazis?
Nah. That would have meant presenting a "racist White-supremacist Patriarchial" 1960s America as something good.
* * *
If you're looking for good stories about Nazi alternate history, try my seven volume Agarthi Conspiracy series, which starts with The Fist of God: https://www.amazon.com/Fist-God-Agart...
Based on the book by Phillip K. Dick, the show went four seasons on Amazon Prime. I initially enjoyed it because if you've ever read any of my books, the show followed my standard plot formula: Nazi villains, alternate history, weird technology, and lots of drama.
The writing wasn't predictable. Each episode generally left me surprised and wanting to find out how the characters got out of their new predicament. I especially enjoyed how the character Juliana wasn't just some feminist bad-ass that kicks butt because she's a strong social justice icon. The first episode established she was skilled in judo, so when she throws a Nazi agent off a bridge a couple episodes later, it's totally believable. Her trauma and remorse then for having just killed someone was also very realistic and believable. Given her experiences, that she later gradually developed into a female Jason Bourne was equally believable.
To someone like myself, who grew up in the 1960s, the show was more like a horror flick—a terrifying vision of my country under Nazi occupation. I think the writers did an excellent job of showing what America would have been like.
The show did an exceptional job of dressing the sets. The only thing I noticed that was out of place or unrealistic was the size of Hitler's office. While large, the set didn't compare to his real supermarket-sized palatial office. Also in the show he had a picture of President Hindenburg on the wall when the real Hitler had one of Henry Ford. Hitler hated Hindenburg but adored Ford's book about eugenics.
I found it interesting that Occupied California didn't look like anything had been fixed or updated since 1945. Everything is dirty, backward, and broken. The streets are filthy and the non-Japanese live in poverty. In contrast, Nazi-occupied America is clean, organized, and prosperous. They showed without telling that while the Japanese have exploited and plundered their zone, the Nazis rebuilt their half. Except for an ominous complete lack of Blacks on the streets, the Reich looks like the real 1960s America.
The show vaguely follows the plot of the book, at least for the first two seasons. The only weird thing is that while there are Jews in the story, the show makes little use of them. Frank, a secular Jew, comes to religious faith in the end with a small group of Jews hiding out in the Neutral Zone. But the show didn't really make much of them. One would think given history that more use would have been made of the dramatic potential of their faith under the ultimate persecution.
The only people in the show who were family-oriented were the Nazis. Other than Juliana, the other characters didn't really have close family relationships and hers were strained. This seems strange in a world torn apart where you'd need support from your family—who else is there to count on? In real life, the Nazi Party was not family oriented. The Party was supreme. You swore total allegiance to Hitler and only him. Children were routinely encouraged to spy on their parents and turn them in for deviation. I don't think the writers understood totalitarianism. More likely, they wanted to showcase the idea that anyone who is conservative, works hard, appreciates order, and is family focused is just a white supremacist Nazi. These days social justice is the theme of all "entertainment" and a big budget production like this isn't going to get funded, especially by Amazon, without kowtowing to it. Even so, the first two seasons were exceptional.
But the third season seemed as if they switched writers. Or perhaps a memo came down from on high to ramp up the propaganda. All of a sudden two characters turned out to be homosexual who heretofore had displayed no evidence of it. Ed, Frank's friend, who was shown earlier as being a secret admirer of Frank's girlfriend Juliana, turns out to be a closeted homosexual. This makes no sense given the fact he'd been attracted to Juliana, as shown in the show. She met Frank first, or Ed would have tried to date her, but he left her alone because she was his best friend's girl. That's from the book. But it makes no sense if he's homosexual, which the character in the book is not. It's as if the producers suddenly realized there were no homosexuals in the show and had to retcon some in.
The similar lesbian subplot is also unnecessary. The character had been previously shown as a slutty Bohemian filmmaker. Absent current political correctness, she could have continued as such and had basically the same effect on the plot through a relationship with the married advertising executive, rather than his wife. The lesbian angle was only included to show that Nazis persecuted homosexuals, therefore anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly endorse the LGBTQZ agenda therefore is also a Nazi.
Late in the third season they bumped the Progressive propaganda up another notch by introducing the Black Communist Resistance. The regular resistance had been fighting the Japanese for eighteen years since the end of the war with no success. The BCR, led by a woman, then undertakes a campaign of terrorism that in a matter of months convinces the Japanese to abandon California and evacuate all the way back to Japan. Obviously the Patriarchy can only be brought down by minorities, especially if led by women. Go Antifa!
The Japanese remark of their determination, "They fought for 400 years and will fight 400 more if necessary." I wasn't aware Blacks fought for their freedom for 400 years. They were originally sold into slavery by other Blacks in Africa. For the next 400 years, except for Nat Turner, there were no major slave uprisings. Other than a few regiments of freed slaves—organized and outfitted by White abolitionists—Blacks got their freedom handed to them after half a million Whites died fighting for it in the Civil War.
To really understand the magnitude of the propaganda, one needs only to compare the treatment of Blacks in the show with Jews. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years. The Nazis weren't the first to practice genocide on them. The show could have mentioned that for millennia their persecutors have come and gone yet the Jews continue. But no mention is made of this in the show—because of course, social justice warriors are anti-Semitic, Jew-hating Israel bashers and only included them in the show because of the source material and only as far as the source material went.
The show makes a big deal out of films smuggled from alternate realities where the Axis lost World War II and their effect on the occupied peoples. But at the end of season three when the characters mass produce one showing the Allies winning the war, season four begins with the regular non-Black resistance immediately being defeated and the films being captured and burned, the message of the show being that the only thing that can defeat the racist White-supremacist Patriarchy is minorities, because the regular resistance is certainly ineffectual—too many toxic White males, I suppose.
In the final episode, with a Nazi invasion of Communist-liberated California imminent, one of the Blacks suggests fighting under the old American flag, the idea being that the invading Nazi army, made up primarily of Americans now, many of whom were old enough to remember what it was like before the war, would switch sides. But the other Blacks refuse because "everybody knows" that America was no good for Blacks. Apparently, the writers thought the Jim Crow laws were some kind of Federal statute, not an actual violation of the existing 14th Amendment. Those laws only existed in a few Democrat controlled ex-Confederate states, but that doesn't matter because "Stars-and-Stripes-bad" is the only point they want to make here, even if the suggestion to fight under the old flag has merit even if that was true. Who cares if Blacks had it bad in the old America if rallying under its flag gets the invading armies to join you instead of wiping you out? Because America bad, that's why.
Another complaint I have is that while there are some male supporting characters, all the show's important "good" characters are female. Juliana, her sister, the lesbian filmmaker, Smith's wife, his "woke" older daughter, the head of the BCR, even the Japanese Crown Princess who wants peace—they're all female. Meanwhile, all the villains are male except for one kick-ass Gestapo agent who beat the crap out of and would have killed Liam except for Juliana Bourne saving his mediocre male candy-ass. Male supporting "heroes" include a pornographer, a black marketeer, a smarmy art dealer, and the Man in the High Castle himself who turns collaborator until his "heroic" wife is able to kill herself to give him a spine. The only decent, honorable, trustworthy, self-sacrificing real male heroes are Gay Ed and his Brokeback Mountain cowboy lover.
In the end, Reichsmarshall Smith is betrayed by his own wife who for some inexplicable reason after driving him to sell out his country and comrades to become a Nazi collaborator in the first place, suddenly grows a conscience about his plans for a Final Solution to the Black problem. He became a monster to save his family, but in the end his son is murdered by the Party. His oldest daughter rejects Nazism and him. His youngest becomes a Nazi fanatic. His own wife betrays him and is killed. But just as Smith is about to commit suicide out of remorse, Juliana shows up and shoots him—can't have the Evil Patriarch atoning for his sins. Nope. He's got to die at the hand of the Strong Female Protagonist literally a half-second before he shoots himself.
Then at the very end of the episode, for some utterly inexplicable reason the portal opens on its own and a mob of people shamble through it from other realities. Who are these people? Why are they here? We see The Man in the High Castle heading into them as if looking for his dead wife. Are these people who died fighting the Nazis? But the show already established that the portal opens to alternative realities, not the Afterlife. Are these people invaders from other realities where the Nazis were defeated, coming to put an end to them here? No, because they're all in civilian clothes and shambling around with no apparent purpose or direction. The show's ending makes no sense.
The show established that the portal opens onto an infinite number of other realities where anything that could have happened did. Himmler planned to use it to invade and conquer the other realities until it was discovered that you can only enter a reality if no living version of you already exists there. A much better ending to the show would have been if the portal opened up and Allied troops from another realities pushed through to liberate the world from the Nazis. The army would have been made of all the multiple millions of people murdered by the Nazis in this reality, an ironic consequence of their genocidal policies. This ending would have been especially ironic if we saw Smith's son from the alternate 1964 in his US Marine Corps uniform with them. The producers could have even had Juliana be the catalyst for this. She had escaped to an alternate reality 1964 until Smith sent an assassin to kill her. What if instead of then returning to her home reality to try to assassinate one of the most powerful political leaders in the world singlehandedly, she had instead stayed where she was and convinced an alternate reality President Kennedy to intervene by liberating her reality of the Nazis?
Nah. That would have meant presenting a "racist White-supremacist Patriarchial" 1960s America as something good.
* * *
If you're looking for good stories about Nazi alternate history, try my seven volume Agarthi Conspiracy series, which starts with The Fist of God: https://www.amazon.com/Fist-God-Agart...
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