"The Man in the High Castle"

Behind the times, as always, I finally caught up on this powerful series.  With everything going on politically there couldn't be a better time for this prescient show.  Take strong source material, outstanding performances by a large number of actors and a Sci-Fi twist to the oft-written trope of "America loses WWII" and you have this streaming series, which kept me bound for nearly a week, digesting each and every one of the 40 episodes.  Digest is a good word.  There is so much to take in that I think this will be one of those shows which haunts me for a good deal of time to come.  It's not an easy watch.  The Nazi world permeated everything, making me feel sick from episode to episode.  The characters -- Japanese military of the Empire, the Nazis, the various resistance groups -- not one of them, not even the most benign character, had clean hands.  Philip Dick nailed it when he wrote that every invading force always sees themselves as liberators.  There is death, a lot of it, and I didn't cry for any particular character knowing that the entire show endorses a kind of Karma which fed into the endings of so many of the main figures.  While each of them espoused to do what was right, and often ended up doing horrific wrong, they had a unique ability to destroy the lives around them, their loved ones, their families.  It was "The Cherry Orchard" and "Hamlet" all tied into a kind of majestic drama.  "What is right" became the core issue.  Philosophical meanderings, after viewing, are what stay with you.  To paraphrase the show, do we really know any person beyond ourselves?  Is a man just a man when all is said and done (or are there true monsters)?  If you had a choice between saying nothing in the face of destruction, and surviving, or speaking up and likely dying, which would you choose?  What is the price of survival?  It went round and round and round. 

The show gets a lot right and a few things a little wrong.  The little stuff I worked to dismiss.  The first three seasons takes place in, essentially, a single year.  The children, however, grow up, noticeably.  So you have kids aging three years in one.  The locations, like so many, don't fit the reality.  I kept chafing at the depiction of "Bailey's Crossroads, Virginia" but tried to put it aside.  It's not the first time Hollywood has picked a random spot off a map and depicted it completely inaccurately.  Other details were outstanding.  The clothing, cars and household items of the losers come from the time of the loss.  In San Francisco and the Neutral Zone, everything seems to be stuck in the 1940s.  In Berlin and New York everything is shiny and new, modern -- for 1962, that is, which is when the series is set.  The racist, bigoted opinions voiced aren't just those of the Nazis, they are things which were commonly said in that era.  Some, sadly, exist today.  I found the ideas of Asians feasting on dogs and Blacks being essentially violent and savage to be particularly hard to take.  And that's the thing.  When this series debuted in 2015 I would have thought "Science Fiction".  But it is not.  We have had four years.  Four awful years, to show us the truth.  To show us how easily people buy into media lies, how they bow to fascists to ensure their own fake security, how little they care about those whom they see as different.  In 2015 I would not have believed that Americans could become Nazis.  Today, with white supremacists marching openly in the streets, supported by a U.S. President, I realize the danger, the sickening pull of it all.  This show, along with the last four years, has reminded me that we must be vigilant.  That forces of evil hold far more sway than I ever wanted to admit.  

The show ends with one more philosophical challenge.  So many possibilities, so many versions of ourselves -- if we can be anything, why do we choose to be who we are?

Worth watching, even if it makes you hugely uncomfortable.