TV Review - The Man In the High Castle - Pilot

The Man in the High Castle is an Amazon pilot, adapting Philip K Dick’s alternate history masterpiece for the small screen. Given the source material - a book that not only sets up a chilling “world-that-never-was” in which the Axis wins World War Two, but also looks at themes of social conformity, the plasticity of reality and the nature of truth - and how one can ever really know what is real and if it even matters - it will be interesting to see if a TV show can capture this kind of depth.

If this episode is any indication, I feel confident in writing…maybe?

First, the good stuff. The episode looks great. There are so many nice touches, like the ubiquitous propaganda posters and the Nazified Times Square, that the viewer can rapidly immerse themselves into the reality of this fictional world. Beyond the design and the effects, the cinematography is impressive. The contrast between the harsh, gritty noir of Nazi New York and the slightly warmer glow of Japanese San Francisco is a subtle, but powerful signifier of the two worlds and a visual reminder of which side is the lesser of two evils. The acting by the leads is okay, in as much as the half-dozen or so major characters who are introduced can be captured in the limited screen-time each is afforded. Finally, there is a horrific scene in which Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a truck driver and Nazi agent is changing a tire in rural German America. A cop stops to help him and everything seems great. Then ash starts falling from the sky and the cop says it’s from the local hospital. It’s Tuesday and that’s when “they burn crips and the terminally ill.” It’s played in such a banal fashion, it captures how any society can assimilate and normalize the most horrific things.

Now, the bad. There’s a lot of the “pronoun game” being played. That’s when one character says to another something like “I have it and I have to get it someplace” then refuses to tell the other character what “it” is. There are a couple of moments of plot-movement via coincidence that make little sense. Protagonist Juliana Crane’s (Alexa Davalos) half-sister shows up in an apothecary shop she is visiting, after being out of San Francisco for weeks. and, she plays the pro-noun game the whole time, refusing to share any useful information, then rushing off after spending 45 seconds talking to Juliana. It is so clumsy in both scripting and execution, I almost turned off the episode as a waster of time. Later, after the half-sister is killed, Juliana finds out that she was in possession of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In the novel, this was an alternate history written by the titular Man about an Allied victory in World War Two (although not the one in our timeline). In the series, this will be a newsreel (or, perhaps, a series of them) apparently from our timeline. Juliana, for no particular reason - other than PLOT - decides to continue with her sister’s mission, whatever that is.

As for changing Grasshopper from a book to a film, it could work. After all, this is a visual medium, so a newsreel makes for a sensible alternative method of presenting this other story. As long as the theme of how reality exists in layers and the flexibility of truth are maintained, then I’m okay with this.

In spite of some weaknesses in the story, this was a fairly well-done hour of television and holds the promise of being a good adaptation of Dick’s work. Hopefully, Amazon will give the go-ahead for a full season.