Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was terrific as Trade Minister Tagomi, reserved but roiling with tension. Throughout, the conquerors and collaborators were the strongest characters, exposing the cultural and geopolitical fissures between the Germans and Japanese, and within each side. Episode 7 had a fascinating subplot for antiques dealer Childan (Brennan Brown), trying to suck up to a wealthy young Japanese couple, not realizing they wanted him to educate them about American culture, not denigrate it. The season’s pleasures weren’t all plot: there were fine performances, but away from the center. (Personally, I liked the bizarre Nazi-Western imagery of the Rocky Mountain neutral zone, but it did sometimes feel like a different series.) The first half of the season followed an odd pattern, doubling back from the Canon City story line and setting the characters in pursuit of another film reel, as if trying to re-pilot itself.
(Let me Google that for you: in our world, Stalin died in 1953.)Īs streaming series often do, “Castle” crawled through a sluggish middle section to get there.
Another reel - described, but not seen - was a Joseph Stalin propaganda film from 1954. The last two episodes went all in on “science fiction or magic.” A new film retrieved by the resistance showed not a better past but a worse future: San Francisco being nuked. How could any director, in an era without CGI, create this artifact, short of science fiction or magic? The “Grasshopper” we see in the pilot, on the other hand, is a detail-perfect newsreel of the end of World War II as we know it from real life, down to footage of actual historical figures. It’s easy enough to realistically explain a counterfactual novel - it’s words on a page. But the change had implications for the show’s story and even its genre. and Britain entered their own Cold War.)Īdapting the story, Frank Spotnitz changed “Grasshopper” to a film - a visual medium, obviously, better suited to TV. In Dick’s novel, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” was a novel-within-a-novel, which depicted the Allies winning the war, though the aftermath was different from the history we know. The series pilot made a major change from the Philip K. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.
Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. It put a gun in a character’s hand, gave him a clean shot at history’s greatest monster - and guided the audience to hope he wouldn’t shoot, because the next führer might be, for once without hyperbole, worse than Hitler. It did not simply cast him as a character, in a supervillain’s Alpine schloss, screening movies that predicted alternative futures within this alternative past. It did not simply imagine Hitler winning the war.
Which goes to show what a weird, audacious creature “High Castle” had become by the end of its ten-episode first season. The answer, it turned out, was: It’s complicated. The show’s season finale asked a version of it, showing us an assassination attempt on not an infant Hitler but an elderly one and asking, implicitly, how we felt about it. The question was not stealth marketing for Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle,” but it proved timely. Eventually, even presidential candidate Jeb Bush weighed in (“Hell yeah!”). Ī few weeks ago, The Times Magazine blew up social media by asking readers if they would travel back in time and kill baby Hitler.
Spoilers for the full first season of Amazon’s “The Man in the High Castle” follow.