You might catch glimpses here and there, but familiarity breeds the dulled recognition that if you sink the ship, you’ll probably go down with it. When you’ve grown up in any system, be it political or economic or familial, you’re too close to its flaws to truly see them. Instead, he longed to examine both the seductiveness of fascism for those who would be oppressors under it and the ways that most of us are only too happy to go along with horrible things, so long as they don’t rattle our own status quo. Spotnitz could have easily set the show in a world where the Axis won World War II, then populated that world with cartoon bad guy Nazis. It was a little boring.īut it was also fascinating conceptually, thanks to showrunner Frank Spotnitz. It was poky and ponderous, with a drawn-out first half that too often stranded itself against narrative shoals. The first season of The Man in the High Castle was not great television. It’s hard to convincingly play a cipher.) Amazon In changing showrunners, The Man in the High Castle completely lost its sharpest themes Alexa Davalos plays Juliana Crane, around whom whole universes knit themselves, apparently. Season two looks gorgeous, but it’s dangerous, like a well-designed fireworks display that sets a whole city aflame.
In short, a once fitfully interesting series about the perniciousness of fascism lost its showrunner - because Amazon didn’t seem to believe its biggest show even needed a showrunner - and slowly but surely devolved into plot-heavy Nazi kitsch.
(The superlative Transparent is produced by the company’s comedy division.) There are still good performances and strong production values, but the series is now uninterested in big ideas or themes - as emptily provocative as the promotional ads Amazon cooks up for it. In and of themselves, these discussion segments are nothing worth getting too upset about, but they exemplify just where the second season of The Man in the High Castle went wrong, and why Amazon, thanks to largely self-inflicted wounds, remains a second-rate pretender when it comes to making quality dramas. Mostly, he made sure viewers knew what they had just finished watching. I watched all 10 installments, and he talked about something that wasn’t a direct recitation of plot points maybe twice. Percival’s post-episode musings on The Man in the High Castle are especially devoid of anything worthwhile.
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