Thanks. This was the commentary I was looking for.
I watched the second episode and simply could not get into it, so I am done. I don’t have time to waste on another “The Event” or “Flash Forward”.
It happens that I watched the pilot just after I finished rereading the book. And noticed that pretty much everything that happens in the book was given away during this first episode (the reels depicting an alternate reality where the allies won the war, the fact that the guy from the east coast was in cahoot with the nazis, the reason why the German intelligence officer is paying a visit, etc…)
Basically, 90% of the book (except for the lenghty consideration about the Yi Chin and American pre-war memorabilia, which I expected to be completely excised from the series anyway) was in this first episode (presumably to make it more intringuing/compelling so that the series would be produced).
I wondered how they would fill up the remaining 9 episodes. I probably won’t see them unless they’re widely acclaimed, and it doesn’t seem to be the case.
I thought the show started off weak, eventually got pretty good, then got weak again towards the end. There were some tense, interesting moments. But there were also idiotic clichés - for example, a man with a gun is chasing our protagonists. They knock him down / out. Not only do they not kill him (even though he was clearly going to kill them), they don’t even take his gun! This is a world where guns are very rare.
The world-building is pretty good, but not as fleshed out as I would have liked.
I think Frank and Julia are too bland to be very interesting. Joe too, for the most part. In my opinion, the most interesting character by far is Obergruppenführer Smith. He’s smart and capable enough to be a good villain. And while he’s clearly evil (he’s a Nazi, after all) he’s given enough depth to avoid being cartoonish. I think it’s a failure of the show that the resistance is rather dull, while high-ranking Nazis are charismatic and watchable.
The show touched on some interesting territory, but didn’t have much follow-through. What’s going on with the films? Why does everyone seem to think they’re so important? Why is it so important to not watch them? I assume that Hitler was the “Man in the High Castle”, since he’s depicted as living in a literal high castle. Is the resistance working for him? Why? It’s not that the show is a mind-fuck; it’s just frustratingly unexplained, even after all ten episodes. I’m sure Amazon wants to stretch it out to as many seasons as possible, but this is a show that seems like it would benefit greatly if it was told as a finite-length miniseries instead of an ongoing series.
I would not recommend the series except to people who (1) really like alternate history speculative fiction and (2) already have an Amazon Prime membership.
Well, it could actually be a multiple universe style of revelation (that’d be something Philip K. Dick would be fine with, I think). The films may actually come from alternate universes - while the first film in the show is from our universe, the second film is one where the Nazis nuke San Francisco.
I don’t necessarily think Hitler was the Man in the High Castle, though I definitely had that notion when seeing Hitler’s Austrian castle (and what a well cast elder Hitler as well).
I think this season was dedicated to establishing the world and the mood. Next season may be willing to explore deeper plots, or the multiple universes. This was more of an expository season (Dick is more of mood & atmosphere writer than a plot driven or character based writer to begin with - but the showrunners have to move past that).
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I felt the point of the Necklace was that he knew all along Juliana was part of the Resistance but he was allowing her to continue to work because he thinks the Empire is going down a bad path. The necklace was a symbol of his conflict of loyalty.
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Joe was a Nazi spy who fell for a Juliana. He was never really in the resistance.
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He was only going to kill Hitler because he was being blackmailed into it to protect his family. He knew doing it would start a war with Japan. In the end he couldn’t do it.
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I don’t think we know enough to say where exactly the films come from. As far as why Hitler was interested, even in our world he was always interested in the Occult
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I don’t think we know exactly what happened at the end there.
In hindsight I think I wish the Parallel world stuff was less literal. I would have preferred a straight forward story set in that world and have the film that shows the Allies winning be a fiction in that universe (and of course doesn’t have what happened at the very end at all).
It did not seem worthwhile. It was too vague and self-important - it insisted upon itself, etc. Too many slow-motion shots lingering on mundane items held by mundane people, too many narrow-eyed (in the non-racist sense) glances and knowing looks about unknown thoughts. Too many characters acting to serve the drama instead of to serve themselves, making illogical decisions and taking nonsensical actions.
It had potential, but it just never seemed to come together. Which is very Philip K. Dickensian.
I finished episode 4 after fast forwarding through most of it. I won’t bother with the others.
I tried to like it. The premise is promising, though it pases by some obvious questions. The sets were great and I especially liked the attention to detail there.
But I guess they ran out of money for the story. The clichés forced into the story could work if it were a black comedy or tongue in cheek. But now I found myself laughing at times were it clearly wasn’t the intention.
The Frank story: they end up killing his sister and her children because they’re jewish and thus enemy of the state, but they don’t shoot him at the last moment because they found Trudy’s bag on another woman. Cmon ! “Hmm, it looks like Juliana went camping to the neutral zone after all, off you go!”
That co-worker of his is really annoying and can spot a real gun vs a replica from 3 meters away. Also firing a gun in a small apartment in the middle of a city of totalist regime is possible without consequences.
The people of the “lawless” neutral zone weren’t exactly briefed what lawless means I guess. They weren’t in the least prepared to stand up for themselves.
With the fight with the origami guy at the dam, blackbelt-equivalent aikido master first forgets her training but then throws the dude over a chesthigh railing.
Instead of taking off right then, they hang around, go through the bother of disappearing the guy and his car.
Marshal guy happens to stop at EXACTLY the spot where origami guy was killed and by sheer “coincidence” Juliana’s portret which fell out of her pocket is still around despite the wind.
Not taking the marshal’s gun or even disabling/killing him was a real mistake.
Juliana takes off with origami guy’s car and has a head start of about 30 seconds in which she manages to: 1. crash the car, 2. place tortured girl on the driver’s seat, 3. pour gas on it and set it on fire. When Marshal guy arrived at the crash scene, the fire has already stripped the paint from the car.
I’ll give the original book a spin.
Did this show actually advertise itself by plastering Nazi imagery all over public transit? I saw a photo that claimed it did that, and I couldn’t believe it. At the very least, it would be kind of tacky.
Case in point: Juliana. People continue helping her and doing what she wants despite her bringing disaster on everyone around her. Frank, in particular.
They did it and in NYC subways. No Swastikas at least but the it was indeed tacky. Though the uproar about from some was also overstated. Most New Yorkers being good New Yorkers did not actually care at all about the silliness.
The point of the necklace was the same as the necklace that Frank made for the antique dealer to sell to the japanese couple, the trade minister kept it because he could feel its “woo” or whatever that was that signified the owner felt great sadness and loss.
Going back to this:
In the book, there was no resistance. I mean there were people reading the book (it was a book in the book) and Juliana wanted to go find the Man in the High Castle in the Neutral Zone, but most people just basically fell in line. Though, IIRC, Smith wasn’t really fleshed out in the book either - but I guess it is far more interesting to explore the cutthroat politics of the Nazi regime than GI Joe like resistance. And even then, having hitmen pose as resistance for interparty fighting.
All that is saying that I think the show would do good to go back to Dick’s vision and not even a damn about the resistance. Focus on Nazi politics (Smith telling the Colonel “you were just following orders” before pushing him over was pretty hilarious) and their attempts to get the Japanese in a war.
I thought the scenes with Smith and Wegener were fascinating. The reveal that they were both involved in the Holocaust in death camps around Cincinnati shocked me a bit, even though, duh… they are Nazis, of course they may do that. Wegener’s guilt about it, while Smith believed it was necessary was an interesting contrast.
When they were watching the last video Julianne asked Frank if he recognized the man kneeling next to him because he looked familiar to her, was that someone we should’ve recognized?
I very much enjoyed it. The sets and attention to detail were fantastic. The premise that the Allies lost the war was very cool and I’d have loved to have gotten more detail related to the actual end of the war and the timeline of events. A few details were tossed out here and there (FDR assassinated for example), just enough to really make me more curious. Haha.
My biggest complaint was the Julianna character. Scumpup conveyed my thoughts exactly.
Other than that, I really enjoyed it.
I have a similar problem with the show. The actual visuals of the show are fantastic. The detail, the sets, the incredibly rich picture. Looks slightly better in 4k, even.
But it just kind of feels like the point of the show is to be “in” this setting, with a relatively slow plot. And the plot has stupid elements.
- Not taking the Marshall’s gun. A man who just murdered someone a short while ago. He just fired that shotgun several times at our protagonists. Anybody with any intelligence at all would have picked up the shotgun, and fired a round into the Marshall’s head with it.
The whole concept of the films making any difference. So people in the show watch the films. Wow, sure would be nice if the world could be different.
So what? I could create a film (given a massive budget) that shows the world of 2015 if we as a society had increased the amount of resources going to science and engineering 10x for 50 years. It would be a pretty cool place - a lot of robots and probably a lot of healthier people from better medicine.
Wouldn’t make a hill of beans difference. All the entrenched special interests would just call my film science fiction, unrealistic, and would move to block any possible legislative or societal changes needed to make my film a reality. Even if I had a camera that could image a parallel universe these people would still act to block it, even knowing it was factually true that things could be different.
Ditto in this case. I assume these “films” are somehow made with super-science equipment (radioactive german optics!) and actually are from our reality. But still, even if everyone *knows *that this is how things could have been, it doesn’t change the fact that the Reich has millions of soldiers and agents keeping order, and have coopted many locals. That’s a big part of the show - many of the Nazis are people who were born in America and have voluntarily decided to be Nazis.
My favorite background detail was JFK Airport in New York being called George Lincoln Rockwell Airport.
I thought that it was clear the films don’t make much difference. Sure, they’re a bit compelling for a few of the characters, but overall they aren’t influencing the world much. As far as the resistance is concerned, 99% of their value is not in the content but rather that they’re traded for information. Smith’s route to work was one such piece of information.
At any rate, I like the ambiguity. Maybe Hitler is TMITHC–certainly a lot of the pieces fit–but that just raises more questions.
Also, I liked the kid reading Ranger Reich magazine.
Also the American Reich TV show with the Dragnet style.
I just finished it. I think it reminded me too much of “Lost” in that it set up a major mystery (why are there films of an alternate reality, our reality, in this world) and then just said, well it’s a mystery, innit? As the final episode moved towards its conclusion I started singing to myself, “Repeat to yourself, it’s just a show you should really just relax.”
I had been considering rushing 8-10 to see if I could finally get an answer. I mean, that’s the only thing that has kept me watching. In any plausible scenario, our protagonists are just going to have to deal with the occupation. Don’t make waves. Hope they don’t murder you because you happened to be the family member of someone else who is causing problems for the regime. Hope you are the preferred race of the occupier in question.