Amazon's The Man in the High Castle is one of those shows I wish I knew some people who watched it so I could talk about it. As it is, like other shows like House of Cards--when that was on--I talk about it once a year when the new season dropped and no one really gives a shit. And so we continue that tradition!
The fourth and final season dropped in mid-November and I watched it pretty much right away. For a quick recap the show is based loosely on the Philip K Dick novel about a world where the Nazis and Japanese won World War II and split the USA between them with the Nazis taking the Eastern half up to the Rockies and the Japanese taking the Western part up to the Rockies, with the mountains serving as the "neutral zone."
Season 1 introduced these films from "the man in the high castle" that showed basically our world, one where the Nazis and Japanese were defeated.
Season 2 introduced the idea of some characters being able to travel between worlds, notably Japanese trade minister Tagomi. And we also meet the flesh-and-blood "man in the high castle," played by veteran character actor Stephen Root.
Season 3 introduced a Nazi project in the Poconos in Pennsylvania to build a portal connecting the two worlds. The hitch is that you can only go from one world to another if you don't exist in one of the worlds. Like in season 3 the main character Juliana's sister was able to come visit her because she died in that world back in season 1. If you try to go from one to the other while existing in both worlds, you'll be vaporized.
Season 3 ended with Juliana being captured by the Nazis while trying to sabotage the portal. Going into a trance Tagomi taught her, she's able to leap between worlds without needing a portal, but as she does so the evil Nazi collaborator John Smith (played by Rufus Sewell of the underrated Dark City and other things) shoots her.
So when she leaps into our world she's hurt and winds up in the road where who should find her, but John Smith? Only in this world John Smith isn't evil and so he takes Juliana to a hospital to get healed.
Meanwhile in the show's main world, Trade Minister Tagomi is assassinated off-screen, which was strange since he was a main character through the first 3 seasons. So I imagine there must have been real-life issues that prevented him from appearing in this season. (And apparently he was killed too suddenly to leap like Juliana did.) The somewhat evil Inspector Kido starts to investigate the murder but his superiors want him to just pin it on some random black guy.
Previous seasons had a few black characters, but this final season really puts a focus on the plight of the African-Americans. As you'd expect, things were not really great for black people when the Nazis took over 2/3 of the country. Blacks were herded into camps and those who didn't escape were eventually killed. Treatment in the Japanese Pacific States was a little better; while they had to live in ghettos at least they were allowed to live.
In the Japanese Pacific States a new resistance group rises in the final season: The Black Communist Rebels or BCR. They're supplied with weapons from Red China, who are also at war with the Japanese. It's basically like in the American Revolution the French supplied the Americans with guns to help destabilize the British Empire. In this way the Chinese are supplying Americans to destabilize the Japanese Empire.
The founder of the BCR is named Equiano Hampton (played by Martian Manhunter on Supergirl) as sort of a mash-up of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. He's obviously more militant like Malcolm X but he's got the speaking style and charisma of MLK. While the mostly white resistance in the first 3 seasons had some success, the BCR has far better success, enough that the Crown Princess of Japan wants to meet with them to discuss peace. But of course it's a trap! Not by the Crown Princess but by other forces inside the Japanese Empire. Equiano is killed but the movement lives on thanks to a woman named Bell Mallory, who was originally from Alabama and escaped the camps.
It's Bell who comes up with the masterstroke to blow up oil pipelines from Alaska all the way down to San Diego. Not the entire pipeline, but at key spots. Part of the reason the BCR is so successful in this is that nobody thinks the black people capable of any coherent military strategy. The Japanese high command sees them only as savages and brutes, so it never occurs to them that the BCR might launch a bunch of coordinated strategic strikes.
Facing a shortage of oil and a war on several fronts, the Japanese make the decision to pull out of America. It's all a little sudden, about as sudden as Donald Trump abandoning the Kurds in Syria, which I guess was because by that point there were only like 3 more episodes left. Had they had more time they probably could have strung it out a bit more. It's like Game of Thrones where the battle against the White Walkers and destruction of King's Landing felt rushed after building it up for 8 years. Though there had been seeds planted in prior years, it still felt rushed to me.
It was nice the show addressed some of the racial issues though. At one point we see Bell and her boyfriend in "our world" when they go to a Virginia diner and demand to eat at the counter but are turned away. So while black people weren't being rounded up and put into death camps, things weren't exactly peachy in the other world either. Later someone brings Bell an old American flag and she refuses to let them fly it because that America didn't really do much better for her and other African-Americans than the Japanese. And, yeah, really, I can't disagree. It really made me wish they'd worked the BCR into the series a couple of seasons earlier.
Meanwhile there's a lot of intrigue going on in the Nazi half of the country. Near the end of Season 3 John Smith's wife took off with their two daughters. It turns out they went to her brother's house in the Neutral Zone. They basically live the simple farming life for a year while John Smith has some of his henchmen watch them from a distance. But eventually he has them brought back to New York. While his wife and oldest daughter chafe under the Nazi regime, the youngest daughter is so brainwashed that she'd rat the other two out for the good of the cause if her father didn't intervene.
In "our" world Juliana has taken up teaching kids karate, including John Smith's son who died in the other world, and is with some guy and everything seems fine until some Nazi goons try to abduct her. But the good John Smith comes to her aid and is killed in the process. Which means the evil John Smith can now use the portal. He visits our world and talks with his wife and his son--they only have the one kid in that world. His son is eager to sign up for the war in Vietnam; Smith tries to stop him but the kid is 18 so he has to let him go to join the Marines. Smith goes back to plot how to get his son back.
At the same time, Juliana uses her Jedi power or whatever to come back. She hooks up with her resistance buddy Wyatt Price and they start making plans to take down Smith and the portal. All of it hinges on making contact with Smith's wife Helen and getting her to help them.
Meanwhile Smith is facing pressure from the ailing Fuhrer in Berlin. Smith helped Himmler take power in Season 2 but after an assassination attempt at the end of Season 3 left Himmler with a bullet wound, Smith has fallen out of favor. There's a new rival in Berlin who seems ready to take Smith's place as the head Nazi in America.
If anyone were actually reading this I'd worry about a spoiler alert.
But like Cersei in season 7 of Game of Thrones, just when it seems Smith is going to be destroyed, he turns the tables and goes all Michael Corleone in destroying his enemies in one fell swoop. He smothers Himmler in his office while his goons kill most of the remaining Nazi leadership. Then he stabs Nazi spymaster J Edgar Hoover, twisting the knife for good measure. And then makes a pact with the seeming rival that like the Roman Empire long ago they'll basically split it into two with Smith getting North America and the other guy having the rest of the world. Thus Smith basically becomes the Fuhrer of America. Not bad for a guy who started at the bottom when the Nazis took over in 1946.
While Smith is like Cersei, at the point of victory he's also like Dany the Mother of Dragons too. Once he takes over America and the Japanese have fled their territory, he makes plans to annex the Pacific too. Part of this means setting up more death camps to finish what the Nazis started. Like when Dany suddenly destroyed King's Landing and turned into a brutal warlord it seems like a sudden shift for him to be creating plans for genocide, though maybe not as much of a shift.
Just to throw another reference in, when his wife finds the plans it's like Vader in the Emperor's throne room as Luke is being tortured. Or going back to GOT it's like when Jon sees how brutal Dany has become and decides he has to kill her. In this case Helen doesn't outright kill him, but she gives his train schedule to Juliana so the resistance can destroy the track to derail the train. Smith isn't killed in the wreck, but like Hitler he kills himself shortly thereafter when Juliana tracks him down. The Nazis were launching an attack on San Francisco, where Bell and the rest of the BCR are preparing their defenses, but hearing that Smith is dead the guy in charge calls off the attack and takes off his Nazi epaulets.
The end of the series is kind of odd. The portal starts to come to life as the resistance is going to blow it up. All of these people start coming through, presumably people who died during the Nazi occupation. It's like a whole weird Field of Dreams thing, except this isn't a baseball game. Or a theme park. What the hell are these people going to do? There are still a lot of Nazis with a lot of guns, tanks, and planes plus a whole war machine in Berlin so it's not really a good time to go sightseeing.
I guess the show didn't have the budget to bring back some of the people who had been killed off in previous seasons like Juliana's old boyfriend Frank, his gay friend played by DJ Qualls, the Nazi double agent Joe, Juliana's sister, or Trade Minister Tagomi. Seems like a lost opportunity.
The end didn't feel as empty as Game of Thrones but it wasn't exactly Return of the Jedi or Return of the King either. I think like other shows, The Tick for instance, this was probably a casualty of a change in Amazon's leadership for its TV division. And like network sci-fi shows like The Orville, it was probably more expensive than something like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I don't think it got the awards buzz either, though I'd certainly give Rufus Sewell a nod. They could easily have stretched this show out longer, but oh well. It is what it is, I guess.
One interesting thing I don't think they really addressed as much as they could have was the idea of the Nazis raiding other worlds and like the Borg acquiring technology to add to their own. That explained why they had Cobra attack helicopters in the early 60s or why they had VTOL cargo/passenger planes, something we don't really have even in the 21st Century. Maybe if the show had gone on longer they could have addressed that more.
A lot of times the show was kind of slow, so I can understand why it might not have had the biggest viewership, but the slow burns would usually lead to some good payoffs. It was the kind of show where you had to be patient and usually that patience was rewarded. Overall it was good, especially if you're a fan of alternate history or multiverses.
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