The Slow Burn: Season 2 of Man in the High Castle

Amazon's Man in the High Castle, Season 2 has been out since November or December I think, but for whatever reason I just never got around to it until about a month ago.   I binged all 10 episodes over 2 days while recovering from having a tooth extracted.  The season was OK, but it's one of those seasons that's more about building to the future than setting off fireworks in the present.

The premise of the show is taken from the Philip K Dick novel featuring an alternate America where the Axis won World War II and split America between the Third Reich (who control east of the Rockies) and the Japanese (who control west of the Rockies).  It's set in an alternate 1962 where there's an uneasy peace between the Reich and Japanese Empire, though Hitler's health is failing while Japan works to have its own atom bomb.

Much of the first season focused on a reel of film that showed a San Francisco destroyed by an atom bomb and Nazis executing people in the street.  Other films from the mysterious "Man in the High Castle" show an entirely different world--our world.  A Japanese trade minister at the end of the first season was able to somehow cross over into our world.

So the questions this left were:  Who is the Man in the High Castle?  Where Do These Films Come From?  What Do They Mean?  How Did the Trade Minister Enter Our World?

Most of these questions are answered to some extent.  Who is the Man in the High Castle?  Would you believe it's that nerdy guy in Office Space who wanted his red stapler back?  OK, not true, but the eponymous mystery figure is played by Stephen Root, who played Milton in Office Space and has appeared in tons of other stuff like No Country for Old Men and as the voice of Bill Dauterive in King of the Hill.  But who he is and where he gets these films from is not really answered. 

What do the films mean?  Apparently besides just our world there's a whole multiverse covered in the films.  The Man in the High Castle indicates that most people who show up in multiple universes act somewhat differently, but some act consistently.  One of these is Juliana Crane, who was given the first film shown by her dying sister.  She then became a reluctant operative of the American Resistance, which used her to spy on the Trade Minister and others.  In season 2 she defects to the Reich and spies on the Nazis, especially the household of American Nazi spymaster John Smith (Rufus Sewell star of Dark City and other stuff) and their little Stepford Wives-type suburban neighborhood.  It's the kind of neighborhood that's like one of those Twilight Zone or Sliders episodes where at first you think it's nice because it's clean and neat and people are smiling and polite...then you find out all the horrors under the surface like Jews, blacks, gays, and the disabled are all outlawed and executed.  To be allowed a visa, Juliana has to go through a whole brutal examination to test her for ethnic "purity."

Meanwhile Juliana's former boyfriend Frank is joining the Resistance in San Francisco, helping them to salvage an old unexploded bomb and use it on the headquarters of the Japanese secret police.  At the same time he makes a deal with the local mafia (the yakuza) to save his friend from detention. 

After coming back to the show's reality for a couple of episodes the Trade Minister goes back to our world.  It's during the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which in a way parallels the growing standoff between the Reich and Japanese Empire in the other reality.  The Trade Minister is reunited with his wife and son who died in the other world but his wife in our world wants a divorce and his son is a college student protesting against nuclear weapons who decries his father's Japnese-ness.  How the Trade Minister goes back and forth is barely explained.  It's sort of like Somewhere in Time where if he just meditates enough he can go there.  He finds out too his assistant in his world is actually from our world, where his family was killed by one of the A-bombs that ended WWII; to him the reality of the show is the happier reality because his family is alive.

One of the main characters in the first season was "Joe Blake" an American Nazi who worked as a double agent to try to get the film Juliana had.  A lot of unnecessary time is spent with his character in the second season as he goes to Berlin to meet his long-lost daddy who's a high-up mukety-muck with the Nazi Party.  His dad takes him to a facility where in the 30s they were trying to create "pure" babies including Joe.  Joe hangs out with some Eurotrash and is there when his father is promoted to chancellor while Hitler lay dying and then is also there when his father is overthrown by Nazi Party insiders aided by John Smith, who then becomes a Hero of the Reich.  Joe will probably be thrown in prison or something, but who cares?  I mean really that added almost nothing to the story--yet.

On the homefront, John Smith is also trying to keep word from leaking that his son Thomas has early signs of muscular dystrophy.  In the Reich a degenerative disease like that gets you thrown in the ovens so the Obergruppenfuhrer has been trying to cover it up, which he does in part by murdering the doctor who diagnosed Thomas.  And then murdered a couple of subordinates who inadvertently found out.  Will that catch up to him at some point, especially now that he's a big star in the Nazi firmament?  Time will tell.

The season ends with the Man in the High Castle introducing Juliana to her sister, who's maybe not dead after all.  Meanwhile a Resistance agent gives the Trade Minister a box of the Man in the High Castle's films.  Those are a couple of plot points that will hopefully get sorted out (somewhat at least) in the next season.

The problem with this season is as I titled the article, it's a slow burn.  There's no "Battle of the Bastards" like Game of Thrones or anyone getting beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire like The Walking Dead.  Sure plenty of people get killed and there are a couple of explosions but nothing too big and showy.  It's the sort of season that might lead to better things, but probably isn't too memorable on its own.  I hope if there's a season 3 they can ramp up the excitement a little more to make it a bit more entertaining.

I'd give it a solid 3/5

(Fun Fact:  One of the new characters of the season is Gary, the head of the San Francisco Resistance, who's played by Callum Keith Rennie, who played a Chicago detective in season three of Due South, one of the favorite shows of me and my sisters in the 90s.)