The Man in the High Castle Review (Spoiler Alert)

[James2]

The first two seasons of The Man in the High Castle were excellent, in the third season it declined, and by the fourth it had gone full SJW.

For those who aren't aware, The Man in the High Castle is a TV show (based very loosely on a book by the same name) set in the 1960's, in an alternate world in which the Axis had won the Second World War. In this world, Germany and Japan split the US down the middle, and most of the plot revolves around their rivalry and the various resistance groups fighting against them.

The show's first two seasons are remarkable for their lack of Manicheanism. Most modern conflict-based stories are more or less Manichean, in which one group (the good guys) fights against another group (the bad guys), and the bad guys only motive is being bad for its own sake (they are not allowed to have understandable human motivations for their actions). The Man in the High Castle originally bucked this trend almost completely, showing the official bad guys as human and ambiguous, rather than demonic. By the third season though, the show had lost its touch. It took on an aura of moral preening and a sense of the resistance being destined to win. It also engaged in ridiculous anachronisms, like portraying American society in the Neutral Zone as being accepting of homosexuality (because only fascists could be intolerant of sexual deviancy, apparently).

The fourth season, as mentioned, had gone totally SJW. The heroes of the fourth season were a group of black communists creatively named "the Black Communist Rebellion". They more or less came from nowhere and were portrayed as unambiguously good (despite openly belonging to the single most murderous ideology in all of human history). They managed against all plausibility to drive the Japanese from the West Coast, and declared that part of the country a black ethnostate. Meanwhile in the East, one of the leading protagonists, Reichsmarshall John Smith (an American who had become the top Nazi official in America, and who was secretly disillusioned with the Nazi Party) killed Heinrich Himmler (who took over Germany after Hitler's death) and agreed to split the German Empire with another general (Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Goertzmann) on the condition that he would rule America while Goertzmann would rule the rest of Germany's possessions. He then proceeded with plans that had been made to reunify America by annexing the West Coast after the Japanese exit.

One might think that the reunification of a self-governing America would be a good place to end the show, but the producers didn't see it that way. Instead, Smith commits suicide, after which his next-in-command General Whitcroft calls off the invasion of the West, presumably in favor of the (obviously more moral) option of letting it be terrorized by genocidal Marxists.