In the finale of the second year of "The Man in the High Castle", the uneasy peace between Japan and Germany that was disturbed at the beginning of the first year is now restored, and the cause has been explained. However, the world remains divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Juliana Crain has answers to some of her personal questions, too, but the reappearance of someone she is glad to see poses unsettling questions.
Creator, producer and head writer Frank Spotnitz has expanded Philip K. Dick's short novel of the same title into a grand epic. While he has felt the need to deviate from Dick's novel, he has fulfilled its spirit in many ways, preserving some of Dick's inside-out view of the universe.
There are some well-earned dramatic payoffs to several long story arcs. Tagomi-san, the Imperial Trade Minister – as much a favorite character of many viewers as he was for readers of the novel – has returned from his journey to an alternate reality in which the Axis Powers lost World War II and where, to his surprise, Juliana Crain, his former employee in his own world, is his daughter-in-law. Although Tagomi could have remained in this world if he had wanted, the Cuban Missile Crisis has convinced him to return to his own time-line to try to prevent nuclear war. Meanwhile, Crain has been on a journey of her own. After letting Nazi agent Joe Blake get away at the end of the first year, facing an unfriendly interrogation from the Man in the High Castle, and going on the run from both the Resistance and the Kempeitai (Imperial Secret Police), she is in New York, under the protection of Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith. She has been living a double life, used by both Smith and the East Coast Resistance; yet Crain proves to be the link between all the other characters and the fate of the world.
Smith has a secret: his son is incurably ill. Under Nazi law, he ought to be euthanized. Smith also desires to keep his own power, even under Nazi domination, while protecting America, at least in its geographical sense. (In his twisted way, Smith is a tragically compromised patriot.) Joe Blake, whose life Crain spared, has learned that he is not only a child of the Third Reich in a very disturbing sense, but he is the biological son of a powerful and ambitious Nazi official, Martin Heusmann, who has recently become the acting-Fuhrer after the death of the septuagenarian Adolf Hitler.
Tagomi and Inspector Kido of the Kempeitai have joined forces, with a surprise assist from the mysterious Man in the High Castle himself who has Resistance member Lem Washington give Tagomi one of the mysterious films the Man seems to curate. The film shows the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific – but in our reality, not theirs. Kido gives it to his secret ally, Smith, persuading him that the film shows Japan's nuclear capability. Smith then uses his connection with Joe Blake/Josef Heusmann (who has tried and failed in his own attempt to dissuade his father from prosecuting global nuclear war) to bring it to the Nazi leadership, including Martin Heusmann and Heinrich Himmler. Heusmann does not want to call off the nuclear war, but Smith privately shows Himmler evidence that Heusmann poisoned Hitler. Himmler has Heusmann arrested and honors Smith for saving the Reich and the world in an international television broadcast.
Simultaneous with the development of these events, Crain's uneasy alliance with the East Coast Resistance comes to a head. George Dixon, who has been her sometime ally and who happens to be the father of Crain's half sister, sets off to publish evidence of the Smith family medical secret – evidence that she unwittingly helped obtain. Then two Resistance members try to kill Crain. For only about the second time in the entire series, she uses her martial arts training (aikido in the TV series, judo in Dick's novel) and is forced to kill the leader of the Resistance cell. She then chases and kills Dixon to prevent him from exposing Smith's son, but she unknowingly also helps Smith to save the world without the embarrassing secret of his cover up of his son's illness getting in the way. In the ultimate irony, however, at the very moment of Smith's triumph, his son Thomas, seeing his father honored on TV, realizes that his own duty is to turn himself in and allow himself to be euthanized. Ultimately, neither Crain nor Smith nor the boy's distraught mother, Helen, can save him.
It now becomes clear that the opening of the episode was a bookend to this fateful ending. It showed a younger John Smith and a pregnant Helen watching a Nazi atomic bomb go off over Washington, DC. Smith, ever in uniform, was then a member of the American military and not yet a convert to Nazism. We more fully understand what has happened to Smith and its cost. First he sold his soul to the devil, and now the devil has taken his son.
Finally, Juliana meets once again with the Man in the High Castle who explains that she has been his proxy all along, doing the right thing at every turn. We might suspect now – if we have not previously suspected – that the Man is a traveler between alternative realities (whichever one is his origin). He is somewhat like the Wizard of Oz. He has even sent Juliana, like Dorothy, on a hazardous mission to slay the Wicked Witch of the West (the European menace rather than the Asian one). She has not exactly slain the Nazi Reich, but at least she has played a key role in saving the world from nuclear annihilation so that the forces of good can live to fight another day.
Creator, producer and head writer Frank Spotnitz has expanded Philip K. Dick's short novel of the same title into a grand epic. While he has felt the need to deviate from Dick's novel, he has fulfilled its spirit in many ways, preserving some of Dick's inside-out view of the universe.
There are some well-earned dramatic payoffs to several long story arcs. Tagomi-san, the Imperial Trade Minister – as much a favorite character of many viewers as he was for readers of the novel – has returned from his journey to an alternate reality in which the Axis Powers lost World War II and where, to his surprise, Juliana Crain, his former employee in his own world, is his daughter-in-law. Although Tagomi could have remained in this world if he had wanted, the Cuban Missile Crisis has convinced him to return to his own time-line to try to prevent nuclear war. Meanwhile, Crain has been on a journey of her own. After letting Nazi agent Joe Blake get away at the end of the first year, facing an unfriendly interrogation from the Man in the High Castle, and going on the run from both the Resistance and the Kempeitai (Imperial Secret Police), she is in New York, under the protection of Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith. She has been living a double life, used by both Smith and the East Coast Resistance; yet Crain proves to be the link between all the other characters and the fate of the world.
Smith has a secret: his son is incurably ill. Under Nazi law, he ought to be euthanized. Smith also desires to keep his own power, even under Nazi domination, while protecting America, at least in its geographical sense. (In his twisted way, Smith is a tragically compromised patriot.) Joe Blake, whose life Crain spared, has learned that he is not only a child of the Third Reich in a very disturbing sense, but he is the biological son of a powerful and ambitious Nazi official, Martin Heusmann, who has recently become the acting-Fuhrer after the death of the septuagenarian Adolf Hitler.
Tagomi and Inspector Kido of the Kempeitai have joined forces, with a surprise assist from the mysterious Man in the High Castle himself who has Resistance member Lem Washington give Tagomi one of the mysterious films the Man seems to curate. The film shows the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific – but in our reality, not theirs. Kido gives it to his secret ally, Smith, persuading him that the film shows Japan's nuclear capability. Smith then uses his connection with Joe Blake/Josef Heusmann (who has tried and failed in his own attempt to dissuade his father from prosecuting global nuclear war) to bring it to the Nazi leadership, including Martin Heusmann and Heinrich Himmler. Heusmann does not want to call off the nuclear war, but Smith privately shows Himmler evidence that Heusmann poisoned Hitler. Himmler has Heusmann arrested and honors Smith for saving the Reich and the world in an international television broadcast.
Simultaneous with the development of these events, Crain's uneasy alliance with the East Coast Resistance comes to a head. George Dixon, who has been her sometime ally and who happens to be the father of Crain's half sister, sets off to publish evidence of the Smith family medical secret – evidence that she unwittingly helped obtain. Then two Resistance members try to kill Crain. For only about the second time in the entire series, she uses her martial arts training (aikido in the TV series, judo in Dick's novel) and is forced to kill the leader of the Resistance cell. She then chases and kills Dixon to prevent him from exposing Smith's son, but she unknowingly also helps Smith to save the world without the embarrassing secret of his cover up of his son's illness getting in the way. In the ultimate irony, however, at the very moment of Smith's triumph, his son Thomas, seeing his father honored on TV, realizes that his own duty is to turn himself in and allow himself to be euthanized. Ultimately, neither Crain nor Smith nor the boy's distraught mother, Helen, can save him.
It now becomes clear that the opening of the episode was a bookend to this fateful ending. It showed a younger John Smith and a pregnant Helen watching a Nazi atomic bomb go off over Washington, DC. Smith, ever in uniform, was then a member of the American military and not yet a convert to Nazism. We more fully understand what has happened to Smith and its cost. First he sold his soul to the devil, and now the devil has taken his son.
Finally, Juliana meets once again with the Man in the High Castle who explains that she has been his proxy all along, doing the right thing at every turn. We might suspect now – if we have not previously suspected – that the Man is a traveler between alternative realities (whichever one is his origin). He is somewhat like the Wizard of Oz. He has even sent Juliana, like Dorothy, on a hazardous mission to slay the Wicked Witch of the West (the European menace rather than the Asian one). She has not exactly slain the Nazi Reich, but at least she has played a key role in saving the world from nuclear annihilation so that the forces of good can live to fight another day.
