Season 2 Man in the High Castle Review

While HBO's large, shiny, humourless new headliner Westworld has hogged all the Twitter acclaim and popular theorising, Amazon's flagship sci-fi show has quietly been getting on with its ain misery-guts Dystopian business organization with dandy balls. Faithful to the framework of Philip K. Dick'southward classic — far closer, in fact, than Blade Runner or Total Recall always kept to their respective texts — ex-Ten-Files alumni Frank Spotnitz has masterminded a second binge-friendly series of many guises: sci-fi period piece (this is a nuclear-powered 1962), political drama (as Hitler ails, it'southward Game Of Thrones with SS factions), espionage thriller (confronting the psychology of a defeated America), and mysto-historical fourth dimension-warp (remember Lost where the entire The states is crackers).

What Spotnitz may not take foreseen — although there's no ruling out Dick's paranoid presentiment in such matters — is how chillingly relevant this vision of a fascist America was going to get. Permit'due south call information technology their Trump bill of fare.

To recap: according to Dick'south alt-history — neatly paraphrased over the opening credits using sinister Dad'due south Ground forces arrows and a decease'southward angel cover of Edelweiss from The Sound Of Music — the Centrality of Evil was triumphant in WWII. With Washington flatted by an A-bomb, the Nazis now occupy the The states from New York to the Prairies, while the Japanese accept annexed the West Coast. Beyond the Rockies lies the Neutral Zone as a buffer between the imperialist conquerors. The deviousness of Dick's book is that he wasn't reconfiguring Globe War II inasmuch equally recasting the Cold War. As S1 closed, the Japanese had come into possession of the secrets behind the German'due south "Heisenberg Device."

A chillingly relevant vision of a fascist America.

Without leaning too heavily on CG swastikas draped over the New York skyline, S1 was a triumph of concrete earth building. A Nazi-compliant Center America proved chillingly easy to imagine, with Apple tree-pie Americans happily swapping "Sieg heils" from their doorsteps and country troopers brandishing those iconic armbands. The series was breathtakingly authentic.

Season Two, luxuriating in an increased budget, expands its global reach to rebuild Berlin according to thrusting, cod-Roman megalopolis of Albert Speer's architectural blueprints and throws in some supersonic Nazi jet liners and monorails, but sensibly sticks to the claustrophobic, film noir interiors and intense dorsum alley shoot outs. The action remains bracing rather than ballsy. The rare explosions sting like a slap.

The compelling spin of Dickian strangeness to what could have been the extended edition of Fatherland is the existence of a series of picture show reels, which once threaded into a projector (a repeated nostalgic motif) reveal history every bit it ought to have been with the Allies victorious. At present, as new reels come to light, so do bloodcurdling visions of a time to come wracked past nuclear devastation. Is this expertly faked propaganda or a true glimpse into other realities?

The new series begins with moody heroine Juliana (a mostly dull Alexa Davalos) gaining an audition with the titular magician responsible for curating these substitute timelines. In a delightfully, hyperbolic Hopper-in-Apocalypse-At present cameo, Stephen Root channels Dick's own paranoiac ramblings equally he reveals a warehouse full of picture show canisters, each its ain possible past or future. The high castle he claims to have in mind is just that — the mind.

One of the on-going challenges in this splendid re-orchestration of history is making satisfying sense of Dick's trippy, alt-consciousness concepts backside it. History, he warns, tin be endlessly rewritten; which, when you think about it, is exactly what Dick and (formerly) Spotnitz are doing. Tagomi, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa'southward I Ching wielding Japanese minister anguished by forebodings of atomic calamity, appears to be able to jump timelines entirely and skulk about a sixties as-we-know-it fraught with the Cuban missile crisis and the news that Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually happened (permit's not fool ourselves our timeline is so much improve, runs Dick's salutary message). Keeping rails of which 'when' you're flashbacking or forwarding to can be tricky. The manifold canisters playfully suggest that this is only ane of many possible versions of the testify we could be watching.

Halfway through S2, Spotnitz bailed over unspecified creative differences, but at that place has been no discernible change of direction, or lag in the retrofitted grandeur. If annihilation it looks ever more impressive, at its all-time in its most straightforward guise as an espionage thriller. In the aftermath of Heydrich'south foiled try to usurp the Fuhrer that climaxed S1, the narrative had effectively splintered into iv locations. Away from Tagomi's loopy-loo meditations, the central dearest triangle has been scattered beyond the history'southward newly posited map.

The activeness is bracing rather than epic.

Juliana has gone undercover into Nazi-occupied New York on behalf of the resistance, listening into the hausfrau gossip, being set upward for something large, and running the statutory excessive risks of caring too much about the local Nazi families. If only Davalos, whose haircut is a good bellwether for which timeline y'all're in, were more expressive. She's still the show'due south weakest link and a droopy beacon of hope, suffering the mistaken apprehension that whispering automatically makes your dialogue more meaningful.

Dorsum in Japanese-held San Fran, her censor-crippled Jewish ex Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), bitter at an assumed betrayed, has been strong-armed into working for an underhand resistance himself, building upwardly to the thrilling bombing of a Japanese HQ. While alt-flame and morally awakened (or nevertheless fooling) Nazi swine Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) returns to Berlin, where destiny steers him in the path of large things in vast offices. Here Bella Heathcote's delectable Aryan laic volition tempt him, equally will the fast-runway to caput office offered by his begetter, a high-ranking cheese in the High german empire. Merely he can't shake the memory of Juliana.

The heroes will variously evade or fall for the obscure plans of the Kempeitai secret police or jackbooted SS (the stereotyped mix of inscrutable Japanese and glowering Germans you have to put down to an occupational hazard of the genre) and unearth the necessary staggering revelations. Television may have cornered the market in decent scripts and daring concepts, only even here at the high terminate there is a growing formula to these things.

We have to trust that there is an ultimate end in sight. The projection began life as a straight movie accommodation for executive producer and Dickian specialist Ridley Scott, before transmuting into a possible four-episode Idiot box specials, and the relatively punchy novel won't stand up to the kind of treading water to which fifty-fifty Game Of Thrones has fallen victim. Midseason, what was taut and moody threatens to sag into the talky and dour. The increasingly sulky Frank takes one-half an episode to dismantle an atomic bomb. When Joe takes an LSD trip with some Nazi richlings trying out Weimer decadence on the tranquillity (that favoured Dickian pursuit) you inwardly despair of more surreal padding.

Nonetheless, past the terminal episodes S2 winds itself up into a deftly handled and devastating end game pulling together the diverse threads with WWIII seemingly unstoppable. Moreover, this is without always losing Dick's bleak irony. Setting out their boxing-plans in a borderline Strangeloveian state of war room, the Nazi hierarchy blithely tot up a potential death toll in the tens of millions. "And generally Americans…" shrugs an ancient Himmler. History and narrative volition inevitably spin on their heads once more, creating some other TV universe where big deaths are no barrier to returning actors. Just, like Lost in its deliriously good first three seasons, The Man In The High Castle thrives in the intimate details: the daze betrayals, knife-edge moral tests, and unforeseen acts of humanity that seem beyond the ken of blockbusters at the moment.

As with the great Westeros saga, information technology is the villains who provide the most compelling through-lines. The stand out is Rufus Sewell every bit the wonderfully named Obergruppenführer John Smith, the scowling Nazi puppet-master gradually revealing a heart by pitiful revelations of his own. More audaciously yet, the show wonders if we tin fifty-fifty feel sorry for a frail, Parkinson's-befuddled Hitler (Wolf Muser) another man in a loftier castle obsessively bingeing on the mysterious alt-movies in the loneliness of his mountaintop retreat as if he's got Amazon Prime number.

• The Homo In The High Castle Season 2 — ten behind the scenes reveals

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Source: https://www.empireonline.com/tv/reviews/man-high-castle-season-2-episodes-1-3-review/

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