the man in the high castle season 1 synopsis

Kido (Joel de la Fuente), who is hunting for traitors and John Smith (Rufus Sewell), an SS officer Peace between the two superpowers Japanese police Inspector San Francisco who is secretly plotting with a German traitor to maintain

More impressive as the apparent villains: Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the Japanese trade minister in Joe Blake in particular is a hard character to nail down, riven as he is by conflicted loyalties but we are not necessarily well-sold on why those loyalties are so conflicted. Alexa Davalos, Luke Kleintank and Rupert Evans turn in reasonable performances as our three main characters, Juliana, Joe and Frank, but they are given variable material to work with. Fortunately, the series quickly abandons a superficial examination of the idea for a more complex and nuanced look at nationalism, patriotism, ideology, the ideas of resistance and the notion of hope.Īfter a solid-but-slow opening few episodes focusing on antics in Canon City (where the premise is not very well explored), the series improves immensely as it delves deeper into what's going on in the Pacific States and the Reich. The SS and the Japanese Secret Police brutally torture suspects for information and Americans are forced to hand over their children to the Hitler Youth for indoctrination. It's still a mindbending book, but also an approachable one.Īt first, it appears that Amazon has eschewed the subtlety of the novel in favour of a much more obvious adaptation: New York draped in swastikas, San Francisco decked out in Japanese rising sun. The killer premise has always been at the core of the novel's appeal, as has its - relatively, for Dick - straightforwardness and less of a reliance on dwelling on mental states or consciousness. Rather than overtly painting the terror of such a world, Dick effectively shows it to be horrific in its mundanity: people accepting the enslavement of Africa and the annihilation of the Jews without comment. Released in 1962, it paints the picture of a world where the Axis powers won the Second World War. Dick's best-known novel, which is quite an achievement given the famous films based on his novels (including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and The Adjustment Bureau).

The Man in the High Castle remains Philip K.

The man in the high castle season 1 synopsis