Watching this man who used to minimize his heritage now learning and embracing it with a whole community of Jews in hiding would have been a powerful moment no matter how the show depicted it.īut they did something extraordinary - they chose to intercut the bar mitzvah with a scene of a Nazi rally, the audio from one overlapping the video of the other as they switched back and forth. “The Man in the High Castle” best embodied this spirit in a scene near the end of Season 3, where Frank Frink - the show’s most prominent Jewish character since the beginning - has his bar mitzvah. Watching the show, I was often reminded of a Yiddish resistance song, “Mir Veln Zey Iberleben,” which translates to “We Will Outlive Them.“ While some marginalized characters joined and organized resistance movements, and for others the act of survival was itself resistance, I took hope in it all. We are falling in love, learning, making art, working, worshipping, and resisting a society that wants to remove us from the world. This, for me, was the very best of the show - when even in the worst of times, when everything we feared has come to pass and the world is as frightful and dangerous as it has ever been, we are still here. And throughout “The Man in the High Castle,” I found a bitter and relentless hope in watching the characters like me moving through this world.
Where did it swing for the fences? Where did it fall short? And what can other stories about alternate histories learn for the future? Since the show wrapped up its final season last month, this is a good time to explore some of its highs and lows. It is extremely dark and bleak - even the lighter moments always seemed a long way off or were snatched away fast - and the inescapable Nazi iconography is a lot to subject yourself to over the course of an hour or more, especially if you’re Jewish. I will admit to having a complicated relationship with “The Man in the High Castle.” While I think it was excellently made, consistently well-acted, and raised interesting questions worth chewing over, I find it difficult to recommend outright. As we all know, that’s not so far-fetched anymore.
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE FRANK FRINK FREE
That’s not to say 2015 was any sort of idyll free of danger or systemic injustice, but the last four years have made the worst of our politics and society more overt.įor instance, when the show began in 2015, or when the book it was based off was published in 1962, the idea of Nazis marching in the streets of a major American city was a terrifying bit of fiction.
When I started watching “The Man in the High Castle,” the idea of a show set in an alternate universe where the allies were defeated in WWII and the Nazis rule over half of North America landed differently than it does today. Significant spoilers for all four seasons of “The Man in the High Castle” contained below. This article originally appeared on Alma.
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