Someone, possibly Richard Matheson, described the formula for a perfect Twilight Zone episode: “you had a really stunning idea that hit you in the first few minutes, you played that out, then you had a little flip at the end.” Frank Spotnitz’s series The Man in the High Castle (first episode free at amazon.com, the rest free for Amazon Prime subscribers)¹ brings in that stunning idea direct from Philip K. Dick’s source novel, provides the necessary flip at the end, and then completely forgets to play it out over a ten-episode first season.
Dick’s novels and short stories have been turned into many films, but only one of them–Richard Linklater’s dark, affecting A Scanner Darkly–can be considered a true adaptation. Here, as usual, Spotnitz takes a central, engaging idea from Dick and uses that as the base for his work. Done right, this can produce powerful films, with Blade Runner, Minority Report (the movie, not the series), and Total Recall (the Verhoeven original, not the remake) the best-known. Unfortunately, The Man in the High Castle isn’t in this category and will most likely take its place alongside such limp Dick² films as Screamers and Paycheck.
The stunning idea lands in the first half hour. (This review will have complete SPOILERS for the first episode and vague spoilers for the rest.) The series takes place in an alternate 1962 America: Japan and Germany both won World War 2 and then divided the country between them, with a “Neutral Zone” running along the Rocky Mountains. (The opening credits effectively set that up, and even more effectively use “Edelweiss” as a theme.) They’re in an uneasy peace and there is a Resistance to both of them; that Resistance has come into possession of a series of films that have been produced by or are being collected by the Man in the High Castle. In San Francisco, Juliana (Alexa Davalos) sees her half-sister killed over one of these films, and it turns out to be newsreel footage of the war–from our universe, with America defeating both Germany and Japan.
That’s disturbing, displacing, attention-getting; and even more so, the characters barely consider the possibility that the films are an elaborate hoax. This 1962 hasn’t developed anything like CGI, and to fake something on that scale seems too difficult for anyone in that world. (Or this one, apparently; later in the series, there’s another film and Spotnitz’s creative team does a piss-poor job of matching the directorial style and look of the actual newsreels.) To them, the films are real, a sign of hope–the chance that the world might not be what it is. It’s the kind of idea that makes a line like “the Führer considers this a threat to the very existence of the Reich” more than a war-movie cliché; that might well be the most accurate description of what they are.
It’s the sort of thing that’s Philip K. Dick at, if not his best, his most characteristic. Dick understood that the methods of science fiction take themes and turn them into plots; he could take questions of identity, perception, realism, and knowledge and make his characters experience them, not just the readers question them. (Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, notes that Dick experienced these questions in his life, saying that those who treat Dick’s inquiries into “What Is Real?” as mere metaphysics have never undertaken an extensive study of his life.) No book better portrays the double agent than A Scanner Darkly, not even the work of John le Carré, because Dick could show us a psyche that was actually breaking into two distinct, autonomous entities. Almost no author explored the border between human and nonhuman like Dick did in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or multiple realities like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Reading them does exactly what art can do, open the self to things quite literally unimagined.
The Man in the High Castle is about historicity and authenticity–if we are cut off from the past, does the present hold any value? Is it possible for an entire world to be false? That’s an idea that began to develop as far back as Marx’s writing and has only become more important through time. One story from the novel that does make it into the series is an antique dealer forging American historical artifacts, although the series reverses a key moment from it. With one or two exceptions, Spotnitz seems to me to have dropped most of the novel’s material, but I could be wrong about this. (Full disclosure: I read this novel some decades ago and remember almost none of it, so I could be blaming the adaptation for problems of the novel. I invite more recent readers to correct me in the comments.) Another simple, devastating scene shows Jews practicing their religion in secret, keeping forward a tradition even when it could get them all killed; if your identity can’t survive, then do you actually survive at all? These little moments tie back to that central idea of living in an entirely false world, and as in Blade Runner and Minority Report, it could easily sustain an entire series.
Spotnitz’s fatal mistake is that he doesn’t use it. From the first half hour to the final scene, the films are simply a MacGuffin; they could be plans for a superweapon or a list of spies and the plot would be exactly the same. (By the way, there are plans for a superweapon–“the Heisenberg device”–floating around too.) The plot of The Man in the High Castle is three people–Juliana, her boyfriend Frank (Rupert Evans), and undercover Nazi agent Joe (Luke Kleintank)–jockeying to get the films and getting into and out of trouble, a standard espionage thriller. Fittingly, there are lies, escapes, betrayals, hidden identities; I was hoping for some good 1962-spycraft but outside of a capsule with microfilm, there’s not much of that. Using that kind of story isn’t a problem, but cutting out the stakes of the film making a break in reality means that it’s just like any other such thriller, and makes the series rest entirely on those three characters and actors.
And hoo boy, does this series fuck that up. Characterization here is on the level of poor network television, where everyone only plays what the plot needs them to be at any given moment, whether that’s resolute, frantic, self-interested, or whatever. In particular, there’s a lot of “well every single thing you’ve ever done has been to betray me, but, dammit! I know you’ve changed!” Yes, it’s Juliana who has to do one of those scenes and I was almost screaming “you played Gwen Raiden on Angel, for fuck’s sake! You were basically ownage in a cocktail dress! What is this retrograde helpless-female shit?” Davalos and Evans are adequate, but Kleintank really, um, tanks the whole thing. He seems to come from whatever line of DNA from which the CW grows its inoffensively handsome twentysomethings for playing teenagers. (*checks IMDb* “Known for: Gossip Girl” Gee. What a shock.) Apparently he feels that if you’re playing a 1962 character, once you’ve got your spitcurl and figured out how to lean against a car, your work as an actor is finished. He’s the pivotal role of the series, having to play scenes with almost every other character and play them as professional or romantic or heroic or duplicitous as the plot demands, and Kleintank manages to be equally uninteresting and uninterested in all of them. Perhaps that was meant to generate suspense.
To be fair to everyone but Kleintank, there’s a limit on the performances set by the plot and characterization. There’s the implicit network TV rule that the main characters can never be in anything but emotional danger, while simultaneously designating all secondary characters expendable. Also, there’s people leaving places, coming back, then leaving again without a lot of purpose to it, and plot threads that vanish only to come back some episodes later, including an assassination attempt and Hitler nearing death. Also, characters suffering convenient attacks of stupidity when necessary; if it’s necessary for our main characters to get away, suddenly the police don’t cover the back door on a raid. Come on, Amazon, you’re basically our corporate overlords now, you made Transparent in your studios, and except for all the “fuck”s and breasts this feels like a mid-season burn-off on USA.
Happily, it’s not a total loss. Spotnitz worked on The X-Files for many years and the whole series has much of the same dark, lived-in, slightly blurry look. That works best in the Neutral Zone setting of Canon City. And the rest of the cast features a few good-to-great performances: as the antique dealer, Brannon Brown neatly conveys the kind of everyday humiliation, and everyday duplicity, of an American living under Japanese rule. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa has aged beautifully; I remember him from his urban Japanese badass roles in Rising Sun and Showdown in Little Toyko (the latter is like a cheap exploitation knockoff of the former, and the punchline is that the cheap version is both better and less xenophobic) but he brings such a weight and sadness to Trade Representative Higomi. Perhaps the best overall directorial choice here is to give him a lot of lingering closeups. As his antagonist, Joel de la Fuente does well too, playing simply the idea of loyalty to nation above all else. Burn Gorman shows up too, as a bounty hunter called the Marshal, and he’s, unsurprisingly, great and terrifying. Gorman knows how to use his smallness to play a bystander or, as he does here, something feral. What always impresses me about him is that he’s weird enough looking that he doesn’t have to do anything, but he fully commits to every role he plays. (It’s typical of The Man in the High Castle that it loses track of him after two episodes.) 
The standout performance, though, is Rufus Sewell as Obersturmbannführer John Smith. (That name and that title is a wicked joke in itself.) Sewell plays Smith so completely, layering his emotions and responses; as an American-born Nazi, he’s internalized his identity so much that there’s no ordinary man left to him. Sewell finds both sadness and pride in that; what the Nazis gave to their own was a sense of belonging and purpose in a society, and do not ever underestimate the power of that. Smith embodies brutality, efficiency (when he has to kill someone, he does it with the most economical move possible), and unarrogant pride. (An officer of the Reich fucking well does not crawl, even when people are shooting at him.) In the second episode, Smith gives a brilliant little speech to his son, about how he will always be part of something bigger, and you can easily imagine a stereotypical 1962 American father telling his son that he will always be free. More than any other moment, it’s when I really felt the idea of an alternative America and it was entirely on Sewell’s conviction. It’s clichéd but true that I wish the grown-ups had been in charge of this series.
That scene with Smith and his son hints at it, but only in the final scene does The Man in the High Castle even begin to fulfill the promise of its central idea. My reaction wasn’t “yep, saw that coming” (although I did), it was “why didn’t we see that eight episodes ago?” It doesn’t come across as a stunning twist that makes us reevaluate all that’s gone before, or a shocking revelation that makes us want to know more. It simply feels like Spotnitz demanding a second season. He might get one, and hopefully he’ll use it to pursue what’s interesting here. (Update, 12/18: it has been renewed for a second season; when that will be not known at this time.)
¹Netflix most likely won this round; our own NerdInTheBasement has begun his reviews of Jessica Jones here.
²Sorry. This kind of thing is unavoidable. You have no idea how much I wanted to title this review “Dickless.”