(Note I updated and expanded some of my thoughts posted here on season three)
I just finished watching the fourth and final season of Amazon's
adaptation and
expansion of Philip K Dick's lone Hugo award-winning novel Man in the
High Castle. As a PKD expert, I was watching it slowly and carefully.
While the first season is the only one based actually based on the novel the series takes the same characters deeper and pushes the story in far more science-fictional directions. As a whole, the entire series is very uneven, and each season varies in quality. The first is the most like the source material but as a Television drama, the fourth season is leaps and bounds ahead of the other three seasons.
The Fourth season succeeds because it replaces the slow burn of the novel and early seasons with very intense melodrama based on my two favorite story-telling fundamentals Parallels and Reversals. All these dramatic moments take full advantage of the high concept and alternate history to create conflict. The arc of the shows American Nazi Leader John Smith and his wife get better and better with each season. It is his conflict that drives the final season up to its most painful conflict. Rufus Sewell is just amazing in this role, in a world that better-respected genre he would get Emmy nods.
We know Phil outlined a novel and wrote a few chapters of a sequel but the show is not really based on that. Season 2 has a few concepts from Owl in the Daylight (PKD's sequel) but it is mostly an expansion of the characters and setting. In my opinion, the second season suffered because it lacked a strong narrative drive and was too focused on Juliana Crain who suffers from being a painfully typical and thinly drawn PKD female character. Alexa Davalos does what she can with the role, but her character is greatly outshined by Helen Smith played by Chelah Horsdal in the role of a lifetime.
Helen Smith is a character that starts off unremarkable and frankly one I
barely noticed early on. From the moments when Helen and John have to
deal with the illness and eventual sacrifice of their son deemed unfit
for the Reich, the Smiths become the most interesting thing about the
show.
Another character and actor that
seemed to steal the show was Smith's Japanese counterpart (narrative
wise) in Inspector Kido played masterfully by Joel De La Fuente. That said
the entire cast from the stars to guests was very good throughout
the series.
I think season three of High Castle is a good slow burn speculative drama but that is when it really becomes something very different from the source material.
Season 2 had some clumsy sci-fi that is rooted in the choice to change Hawthorne Abensen's stories of the other world from a novel to films. The second season spends way too much screen time on these movies.
In
PKD's original novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (the novel in the
novel) makes internal sense.
The films in the show make visual sense but not logical sense. It
requires almost a mythical explanation, verses the clearly multi-verse
explanation of the novel. Dick's long time editor Don Wollheim rejected
the concept as not even science fiction, but the films in the TV show
make the story almost pure fantasy, I was glad that those aspects of the
series was dialed back in the final two seasons.
The expansion of the novel on the show becomes a story about resistance to fascism. Of course, I think that is a good theme, also timely with Agent Orange in the Whitehouse but the original point of the novel has been lost. The message PKD most honed in on - was NOT gee-whiz look how scary it would be if the bad guys won but the danger of false historical narrative. How much can you really trust the history you are being taught? Does bias itself create false reality?
I think Anti-fascism is a running theme in PKD's fiction, So I don't
think this was a bad direction for the show.
His anti-nazism took a
weird turn in his second novel The World Jones Made. But the novel Man in the High Castle treated life in the occupied parts of America as a mundane horror. The show expands the horror and cruelty of Nazism to a more realistic level that portrays the horrors of the holocaust. For whatever reason in the novel, the
Japanese west while authoritarian did not reflect the level of horror as the
east. I think the survivors of Nanking might have thought PKD's depiction soft.
As the intensity
of the drama ramps up so does the science fiction, in the first season
only unknown glitches in the multi-verse sent the Japanese leader Tagomi
back and forth between universes. In the final season, The Nazis have a
machine that sends agents into a universe more like ours. This creates excellent parallel stories for Juliana and John Smith who spend time in a
non-Nazi America. John Smith's visit to the other world is some of the best moments of the series.
The fourth season of Man in the High Castle adding real-life Black Panthers
like Fred Hampton and black communist resistance fighters to the 60s
occupation of San Francisco was every bit of a radical take on
anti-racism as the new Watchmen series. This is not without context in PKD's larger canon Counter-Clock World for example had a black sub-nation in the post-World-War 4 America of the novel. This provided an interesting but
historically significant wrinkle in the final season that became
accidentally timely.
I
am not sure how PKD would have felt about the ending of the series. It
is not exactly a happy ending, the novel was not looking to solve fascism, but show it's mundane horror and to highlight the unreliable
nature of history as a narrative. None the less the series is overall good, with a weak second season the overall experience is good.
Dickheads episodes links:
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