The Man in the high castle

[FaxModem1]

I finished season 2 a few weeks ago. I rather enjoyed it. I'm curious to see where they'll go with this, as the book really had an inevitable conclusion, and the show seems to want to avoid that.

[Thanas]

Season 2 was very well written, showing the horrors of both systems.

Also there were a lot of different little things, like the digital recreation of Germania and the evolution of Nazi medals....horrifying yet very stylish.

[Phantasee]

Season 2 was very well written, showing the horrors of both systems.

Also there were a lot of different little things, like the digital recreation of Germania and the evolution of Nazi medals....horrifying yet very stylish.

Digital recreation of what? What about the Nazi medals stood out to you?

[Thanas]

Season 2 was very well written, showing the horrors of both systems.

Also there were a lot of different little things, like the digital recreation of Germania and the evolution of Nazi medals....horrifying yet very stylish.

Digital recreation of what?

Germania. Speer's plans for Berlin.

What about the Nazi medals stood out to you?

Well, some of them are clearly new inventions but combine the war merit cross with the knight's cross, the implications of which are pretty interesting. For example the neck order seems to have displaced the Knight's cross as the highest order. As it is awarded to people who could not have fought on the Nazi side in the war (like Smith) it seems to have been awarded for a later role. Smith was the commander of concentration camps and thus we can conclude that the award is either boilerplate (unlikely) or was awarded for efforts supporting the succesful conclusion of the holocaust and/or racial purity.

[FaxModem1]

One thing I found interesting was that there was Fascist reasoning for environmentalism in the younger generation, keeping a perfect planet for perfect people, etc.

Another thing was the Lebensborn, and their seeming role in society. They seem rather analogous to trust fund babies who have had the world handed to them, and are against the direction their parents are going, but still being fascist in outlook. A 1960s counter culture movement, but one completely unlike ours.

[LaCroix]

Sooo, I was in Sopron to do some official business ...

Had a real WTF moment when I saw the Mayor's office...



Only then I noticed the camera equipment getting set up.
(I had no phone on me, but I found somebody who posted a picture of what it looked like on 9gag...)

[Phantasee]

DUN DUN DUN

Season 3 should be interesting, I expect a focus on John Smith and maybe flashbacks about the initial occupation in the Greater Reich.

[K. A. Pital]

I've been watching this from the start. It suffers from the same things as the book, although the book is much better due to the unfinished-ness of the whole thing. Dick is a good crazy writer (Ubik is still among my favorite novels), but Man in the High Castle is not a particularly strong work. But this show has been underwhelming when compared to both source material and other shows currently running.

[FaxModem1]

Could you expand on that?

I enjoy the show, but I honestly feel like something is missing, but I'm not sure what it is.
Spoiler

I think it's potentially the lack of options the characters have with saving the world, with a growing realization that they're inevitably doomed, as they start to realize in the book.

The show doesn't really seem to have that, when it was a key theme of the book.

[K. A. Pital]

The shows misses the key point of the book (it is impossible to change such a bad reality; in the end they also discover that the reality is a fake one, as I remember). Because of that every plot twist seems a bit weakened in comparison to the original. I mean, by the end of the book some of the characters died and there was the realization that the book was only meant to show what could have been (at the same time as it dawns on the character that the reality is not what it should have been - clever Dick, pitting the character and the reader in the same type of situation at the very same moment )...

The film is nicely made, good if not great cast, but it misses the above point - the pointlessness of it all, the nonexistent mystery of the "man in the high castle" who can't change anything anywhere.

It also feels a bit irrelevant to the current-day problems, unlike other shows. I remember people joked about New BGS being "Battlestar America" becase it touched on many relevant problems of the US society at the time, and of course Westworld is brilliantly on-time with the whole "robotization for fun" thing, but "Man in the High Castle" seems out of place and out of time...

[FaxModem1]

Maybe they're saving that for season 3?

[FaxModem1]

For those interested, they also have 'Resistance Radio', broadcast from those in the Neutral Zone, fleshing out what happened and how their world became what it is.

Resistance Radio

[FaxModem1]

Season 3 is premiering in about a month, and Amazon has a season 1 and 2 recap:



They're clearly going a different direction than the books, perhaps in reaction to how real life is progressing.

[PhoenixKnig]

iI wonder what they have in store for us in season 3 looks interesting so far

[FaxModem1]

Just finished the first episode of season 3. Some general world building stuff. George Lincoln Rockwell is in charge of the North American Reich, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as his head of Intelligence. Not really a surprise that either one would decide to fall in with such a crowd, let alone prosper in it.

At the same time, we're seeing how time seems to be running out for the German-Japanese Cold war. The Japanese are successfully building the A-bomb. They plan to have parity with the Germans when it comes to atomic weapons, but the cost of doing so would bankrupt the Japanese economy. They're doing so anyway, because they're competing with the freaking Nazis.

On the personal front, it's ghastly to see how their respective cultures treat those who sacrifice, who are capable but not pure(the 'Hapa' being considered unworthy because of his half-white heritage for instance), and everything in-between. The show seems stronger than it did in season 2, like it actually has a direction it wants to take, which I think it was lacking in season 2. We'll see though.

[lordroel]

Have watched the first episode of season 3, and i like it so far.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I might try to get into this again, because I'm such a fan of ol' Philip K., but honestly I couldn't even get through the first episode of the series. I turned it off about half-way through. I thought it was just one of the worst episodes of television I'd ever seen, and just very sloppily made. Maybe it's because it was the pilot and the production of the show gets smoother as it goes on, but it was terribly directed and edited. It felt very amateurish to me. Mid-conversation you'd have random cuts from medium shots to close-ups from different angles that made no sense within the context of the scene, it felt like when filming they had so few good takes they had to cobble every scene together in post.

[FaxModem1]

Having finished season 3, they've introduced some interesting thoughts about what they call Travelers...
Spoiler

Travelers are people who are capable of traveling from one Earth to another, in order to do so, you have to detach yourself mentally and emotionally from the anchors that hold you to the Earth you're currently on. It's revealed in the season finale that siad Travelers can only go to worlds where there's a space for them. This means that they can only go to worlds wherein they were never born, or in worlds where they're already dead.

On the plus side, if this is true, it means that the Nazis probably can't blitzkrieg their way across the multiverse from one Earth to another conquering worlds, unless they can find a way around the problem. Unless most of their soldiers are already dead in the worlds they invade.

On the other side, John Smith now has this information, and has the possibility of taking an alternate Thomas to Man in the High Castle Earth to be his son again.

I'm curious where they're going to go with this in season 4.