Review: The Man in the High Castle
Mar. 26th, 2021 10:49 pmI just finished watching the series.
tl;dr -- dayum, that's a good story.
You can find my interim review, from the middle of Season 3, here. Picking up where that left off...
Suffice it to say, this is a series fond of its twists and turns, and things take a sharp turn not long after I wrote the previous review. What I said before is largely true, just moreso.
Don't assume that you know who will live, and who will die -- because yeah, some of the main characters will die, and not all wait until the end. Don't assume which characters will be the ones who matter at the end of the story, because some of them are likely to surprise you.
This is a story with heroes, and monsters, and you won't necessarily know which are which. Indeed, the only simple monsters tend to be the historical characters -- Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, J. Edgar Hoover. (Yeah, the story really doesn't like Hoover.) Some of the key heroes and monsters aren't entirely clear until the last episode: everyone is continually figuring out who they are.
Mostly, it's full of people who are doing what seems like the thing to do -- some for loyalty to nation, some in the name of freedom or justice, many simply for survival. That's why it works: pretty much all of the major characters are doing what they feel they must, and while it's sometimes easy to disagree with them, it's also usually easy to sympathize.
It's pretty clear that season 4, besides being the conclusion, was also a bit of a retrenchment. They address a gaping flaw in the series up to there, namely Where Are All the Black People? The answer isn't pretty, in a North America run by Nazis, but it's essential to the story -- suffice it to say, this world's equivalent of the Black Panthers (remember that this is the 1960s) turn out to be pivotal.
And the morality of the story gets a bit less grey in season 4. The series mostly plays at a pretty personal level, so it's hard to see the enormity of the horror. There's no ambiguity in the final season, though: in the background, you can see what has been happening over the past 20 years in North America, and it's every bit as terrible as you might think. The beautiful suburban Aryan New York has been built on top of a lot of blood. (The horror of war generally becomes a through line in season 4.)
And yes, this is a weird little science fiction story, and that winds up being absolutely centric at the personal level, even while on the large scale this is the more straightforward story of a cold war played out by Germany and Japan. For some of the key characters, The Road Not Taken is a dominant trope.
I will say, they don't really stick the landing IMO. There are things that happen in the last few episodes that feel a tad out of character, which seem to be there to clarify the difference between Good Guys and Bad Guys in what has otherwise been a rather shades-of-grey story. The ending is quite woo, and there are a couple of details that I think simply don't make sense. That said, it's neither a damp squib nor a non-ending, and doesn't ruin the series.
Highly recommended. This series made a big splash when it started, and then everyone seems to have forgotten about it. But it's a tight, suspenseful novel, with a considerable cast of strong characters trying to make the world they want. I found it steadily more gripping as it went along, and finally binged the last three episodes today. Still some serious content warnings for wartime/espionage violence and All The Swastikas, but it's worth finding the time for it.