The central question of this show hinges upon a collision between American and Third Reich ways of life, so giving us characters who are morally compromised or hazily in-between - rather than, as many are, firmly situated on one side or the other in an intractable war - will allow the ideas of the show to reach their potential. What would make the show more watchable in the long run? The twist at the end of the pilot is a good sign: Prior to that, the characters had behaved exactly as we might expect them to. With characters as schematic as the ones in High Castle and a plot so reliant on shoulder-tapping obviousness, it’s hard to imagine tuning in for that long. What it can only do far more effortfully and over a longer period of time is convey a complex society very different from our own. TV can give very obvious information very quickly, through exposition. But the mechanics of how the Germans and Japanese conquered and then divided America are easily hopscotched over. The mechanics of a bus trip to a free zone are straightforwardly stated by a character whose function is largely pure exposition. Luke Kleintank, Alexa Davalos, Arnold Chun, Carsten Norgaard, Bernhard Forcher, Joel de la Fuente, Rupert Evans, Daniel Roebuck Lee Shorten, Steve Byers, Macall Gordon, Rufus Sewell, Michael Gaston, Chelah Horsdal, Aaron Blakely, Yuki Matsuzaki. In The Man in the High Castle, the popular movies and songs of Nazi-controlled America are lingered upon, as though they’ll be important later. Those last two shows are but two easy examples of an irritating phenomenon: when they did parcel out information about the world in which their characters found themselves, it was heavy-handed in a way that only emphasized how much the rest of the show was wheel-spinning. When Julianna allows Joe to flee from the hands of the Resistance, she is questioned on her loyalty, Obergruppenführer John Smith returns with news on the event that almost led to his death and Trade Minister Tagomi is overwhelmed by the vision of life if the Nazis had failed to win World War 2. We want to know how America ended up overrun with German and Japanese soldiers - just as how, in Under the Dome, we want to know how the town ended up under a dome, or how in the late ABC reboot of V we wanted to know the alien’s plots. Subtlety isn’t television’s strongest trait, but shows like The Man in the High Castle, which exist in a wildly different universe than our own, only exacerbate the medium’s problems with obviousness. What would it really be like to live under Nazi rule in America? We don’t get a strong sense, aside from a vague feeling that the police would be far more aggressive. In Amazon’s Man in the High Castle pilot, when the camera pauses on a movie theater marquee or poster of a Third Reich soldier, it feels as though we’re being nudged in the ribs: This will be important later! The important stuff that’s actually interesting gets withheld to a frustrating degree, in favor of fairly dull characters who are on quests we don’t get enough information about to care. The streamer on Tuesday announced that the upcoming fourth season of the adaptation of Philip K. In a book, a mention of a popular current movie or song, or a quick description of a poster or work of art, can be easily absorbed in the flow of information. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle is coming out of its nest. When television attempts to do the same, it feels sledgehammer-level unsubtle. Each one of the people from another reality who comes through the portal, presumably from a place where the Allies won the war, provides their own living frame of reference which, once they intermingle with the population of the GNR, should help the latter also realize that the reality they are living in can be different.The power of books that imagine the apocalypse (or a far worse alternate present) is their power to parcel out information about the state of the world we’re witnessing through context. In the book, Hawthorne (also known as The Man in the High Castle) is called "an external frame of reference," whose work allows readers to realize that the reality they are living in is not the only possible reality. A particular fear in the case of The Man in the High Castle, which streams its second run on Amazon from today, is that this drama is a prime example of a TV show that, in the past, would have. However, the themes that are revealed by the conclusion of the book match those of the series. In contrast, the book ended with Juliana Crain (played in the series by Alexa Davalos) discovering that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a forbidden book written by Hawthorne Abendsen (Stephen Root) that depicts a world where the Allies won World War II, is real and that the characters are living in a false reality.Ĭlearly, these two endings are very different and show some more differences between the show and book-for example, in the series, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a forbidden film reel rather than a novel. Read more What's Coming to Amazon Prime Video in November 2019-Full List of Releases
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