Throughout his career he has interviewed a wide range of celebrities in the arts. He returned to writing full time in 2010. In 1993, he made the move to features, and in 1995 became the Entertainment Editor for 15 years. Daily News working in editing positions on the news side, including working on the day the L.A. Meanwhile, Juliana’s boyfriend, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), a craftsman who makes fake artifacts, has grown increasingly radicalized after seeing images of his own execution in another mysterious film. Last season ended with Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) betraying the Resistance and allowing Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a Nazi agent, to escape the Pacific States with a film called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.” The reel, originally bound for the Man in the High Castle, shows an alternative version of the war. Japanese authorities on the West Coast investigate information of a Cuban missile crisis but don’t know what it means and wonder if it will affect future plans. The new season offers a vision of how such a world like that could become so normalized, how fate - as seen in the reels of film with alternative histories kept by the Man in the High Castle - can turn on the slightest breeze.Įven as the mystery unfolds and the action picks up in the second season, the dreamlike possibilities seem to bleed into each other. Dick’s alternative-history novel had to spend a lot of time laying out the premise of an America conquered in World War II and divided into east and west sections by the Germans and the Japanese with a ungoverned neutral zone in the middle. The first year of Amazon’s television adaptation of Philip K. And in class, the students pledge allegiance with an oath “to the leader of Nazi Empire Adolf Hitler.” It looks like a scene from Anywhere, USA - except for the swastikas. The central question of this show hinges upon a collision between American and Third Reich ways of life, so giving us characters who are morally compromised or hazily in-between - rather than, as many are, firmly situated on one side or the other in an intractable war - will allow the ideas of the show to reach their potential.The second season of “The Man in the High Castle” begins in the early 1960s as a group of middle-schoolers get off a bus. What would make the show more watchable in the long run? The twist at the end of the pilot is a good sign: Prior to that, the characters had behaved exactly as we might expect them to. With characters as schematic as the ones in High Castle and a plot so reliant on shoulder-tapping obviousness, it’s hard to imagine tuning in for that long. What it can only do far more effortfully and over a longer period of time is convey a complex society very different from our own. TV can give very obvious information very quickly, through exposition. But the mechanics of how the Germans and Japanese conquered and then divided America are easily hopscotched over. The mechanics of a bus trip to a free zone are straightforwardly stated by a character whose function is largely pure exposition. In The Man in the High Castle, the popular movies and songs of Nazi-controlled America are lingered upon, as though they’ll be important later. Those last two shows are but two easy examples of an irritating phenomenon: when they did parcel out information about the world in which their characters found themselves, it was heavy-handed in a way that only emphasized how much the rest of the show was wheel-spinning. We want to know how America ended up overrun with German and Japanese soldiers - just as how, in Under the Dome, we want to know how the town ended up under a dome, or how in the late ABC reboot of V we wanted to know the alien’s plots. Subtlety isn’t television’s strongest trait, but shows like The Man in the High Castle, which exist in a wildly different universe than our own, only exacerbate the medium’s problems with obviousness. What would it really be like to live under Nazi rule in America? We don’t get a strong sense, aside from a vague feeling that the police would be far more aggressive. In Amazon’s Man in the High Castle pilot, when the camera pauses on a movie theater marquee or poster of a Third Reich soldier, it feels as though we’re being nudged in the ribs: This will be important later! The important stuff that’s actually interesting gets withheld to a frustrating degree, in favor of fairly dull characters who are on quests we don’t get enough information about to care. In a book, a mention of a popular current movie or song, or a quick description of a poster or work of art, can be easily absorbed in the flow of information. When television attempts to do the same, it feels sledgehammer-level unsubtle. The power of books that imagine the apocalypse (or a far worse alternate present) is their power to parcel out information about the state of the world we’re witnessing through context.
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