When the season two finale of Amazon’s alternate-history drama, ended, my computer automatically began playing the show’s next “episode.”It was a short “behind the scenes” snippet designed to be watched much earlier, after the season two premiere. In it, executive producer talks about said episode, just as he will for each of the nine episodes that follow.If you’ve left any HBO Sunday night drama running post-closing credits, you’ll recognize this form: the typically empty discussion of fairly obvious character turns and thematic moments, designed to offer talking points about what you just watched. Rating1Percival’s post-episode musings on The Man in the High Castle are especially devoid of anything worthwhile. I watched all 10 installments, and he talked about something that wasn’t a direct recitation of plot points maybe twice.
Based on Philip K. Dick's award-winning novel, and executive produced by Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), and Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files), The Man in the High Castle explores what it would be like if the Allied Powers had lost WWII, and Japan and Germany ruled the United States. Starring Rufus Sewell (John Adams), Luke Kleintank (Pretty Little Liars), and Alexa Davalos (Mob City). Critics Consensus: By executive producer Ridley Scott, The Man in the High Castle is unlike anything else on TV, with an immediately engrossing plot driven by quickly developed characters in a.
Mostly, he made sure viewers knew what they had just finished watching.In and of themselves, these discussion segments are nothing worth getting too upset about, but they exemplify just where the second season of The Man in the High Castle went wrong, and why Amazon, thanks to largely self-inflicted wounds, remains a second-rate pretender when it comes to making quality dramas. (The superlative is produced by the company’s comedy division.) There are still good performances and strong production values, but the series is now uninterested in big ideas or themes — as emptily provocative as the cooks up for it.In short, a once fitfully interesting series about the perniciousness of fascism — because Amazon didn’t seem to believe its biggest show even needed a showrunner — and slowly but surely devolved into plot-heavy Nazi kitsch. Season two looks gorgeous, but it’s dangerous, like a well-designed fireworks display that sets a whole city aflame.It’s the worst TV show of 2016. In changing showrunners, The Man in the High Castle completely lost its sharpest themes Alexa Davalos plays Juliana Crane, around whom whole universes knit themselves, apparently. (Davalos is fine. It’s hard to convincingly play a cipher.) AmazonThe first season of was not great television.
It was poky and ponderous, with a drawn-out first half that too often stranded itself against narrative shoals. It was a little boring.But it was also fascinating conceptually, thanks to showrunner. Spotnitz could have easily set the show in a world where the Axis won World War II, then populated that world with cartoon bad guy Nazis. Instead, he longed to examine both the seductiveness of fascism for those who would be oppressors under it and the ways that most of us are only too happy to go along with horrible things, so long as they don’t rattle our own status quo.When you’ve grown up in any system, be it political or economic or familial, you’re too close to its flaws to truly see them. You might catch glimpses here and there, but familiarity breeds the dulled recognition that if you sink the ship, you’ll probably go down with it.In season one, Spotnitz’s Man in the High Castle argued, repeatedly and provocatively, that if the United States were a fascist country, most of us would probably accept that fact.
This idea was adapted from the of the same name the series uses as a loose inspiration — but to say it was accidentally timely is putting it mildly.Spotnitz and I spoke about these themes at length in an I conducted with him last year; during our conversation, he also touched on how he hoped the series wouldn’t give in to simplistic science fiction questions about the nature of alternate realities and the like. And then, early in the production season two, he left the program. (He’s still credited with writing the script of the season premiere, and the show’s remaining producers that he was present through the writing of the first five of the season’s 10 episodes.) Amazon declined to replace him, believing his various lieutenants could take over, and all would be well. RelatedThat’s not at all the case. By the end of its second season, The Man in the High Castle has essentially abandoned everything fascinating about its first season in favor of a junky sci-fi drama with reality-hopping characters and a bunch of caricature Nazi bad guys.When Spotnitz had you cautiously rooting for Hitler’s survival, because his death would unleash hungry war-mongering from his underlings, the producer understood the powder keg he was playing near.
When season two hits the same note, it blithely suggests some Nazis are worse than others.Mostly, The Man in the High Castle no longer seems interested in challenging its audience, precisely at a moment in political history when we might need to be challenged. A new character, a Japanese woman, is introduced as a fighter for the American resistance, even though she was raised in the and has no real reason to be loyal to the former United States. It’s clear that she’s driven only by her function in the script as one of “the good guys.”Her complexity is lost beneath the series’ insistence on having easily definable “sides,” on flattering viewers into believing they would be resistance fighters and not simply people keeping their heads down and living normal lives in the midst of evil — that they’re not, on some level, already that.
Season 2’s most prominent new storytelling device also undercuts the show’s best ideas Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) investigates a strange alternate reality — ours. AmazonThe Man in the High Castle’s first season concluded with a marvelous tease, wherein Japanese trade minister Tagomi (the wonderful ) left behind the Japanese-occupied San Francisco of his timeline for the early ‘60s San Francisco of our timeline. Baffled by what he saw, he returns in the season two premiere, nevertheless enticed by what’s on the other side of some cosmic divider.At first, this is sort of fun, a nifty jaunt between two realities that adds some compelling metaphysical wrinkles to the series. But the deeper season two’s story gets, and the more time Tagomi spends in our reality (to which he eventually moves for a while so that he can spend time with his wife and son, who are dead in Japanese-occupied San Francisco), the more the series seems almost to use this timeline-hopping as a way to let viewers and its characters off the hook.It’s harder to understand why fascism takes root in a society when a story is constantly contrasting it with other, less tyrannical forms of government.
The Man In The High Castle
The Manzanar mention is a good case in point — the United States is not somehow immune to authoritarian tendencies. But in season two, The Man in the High Castle is less interested in the darker sides we all carry with us and more interested in the simple-minded idea of good and evil.
The Man In The High Castle Season 3
RelatedThe show’s most prominent storyline in Nazi-occupied New York, for instance, involves the son of Nazi leader John Smith. In the first season, Smith was the show’s most instantly compelling character — it was easy to see how he would have been a highly decorated American war hero in our reality but had been only too happy to collaborate with Nazis in the show’s reality.