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Monday, November 23, 2015

The Man in the High Castle

Amazon's tv series, The Man in the High Castle, has resumed and I'm finding it to be pretty good. Here's the beginning of a recent article about it at The Atlantic ...

The premise of The Man in the High Castle is undeniably fascinating. What if Hitler had won the second world war? What if America had been conquered by the Axis powers, and partitioned into a German-occupied east and Japan-controlled west? Amazon Studios’s newest show, based on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 virtual-history novel of the same name, is just as strange and horrifying as the dystopian classic, vividly realizing the what-if world Dick created.

Developed by Frank Spotnitz (best known for his many years of work on The X-Files), The Man in the High Castle is a fairly loose adaptation of Dick’s novel, taking in the entire scope of the Americas rather than just focusing on Japanese-controlled San Francisco and the “neutral zone” in the Rocky Mountains, as Dick did. Set in the 1960s, this is a world with swastika marquees in Times Square and a discomfiting (though obliquely remarked-upon) amount of racial harmony. It’s a world where a graying Hitler, now in his 70s, helps maintain a fragile peace with Japan that many think will expire upon his death. On a macro-scale, the series is absorbing, but it takes a few episodes to settle into the smaller stories that are unfolding ....


Some of the really awful stuff about living in the show's Nazi world is obvious, like the scenes of the torture of a resistance leader, but others are in some ways even creepier in their offhandedness ....



Also interesting - the music from an alternate 60s in which Japan and Germany have won WWII. This old song from last night's episode was playing in one of the scenes in Japanese occupied San Francisco ...



Here's a trailer for the show ...



Sadly, only 10 episodes in all but I'm looking forward to the rest of them.

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