The Man in the High Castle Season 4 premiered this week

Yes, that's actually exactly right: Amazon is trying to bury this expensive, constant-behind-the-scenes-chaos disaster. The sooner it's done with, the better, as far as Amazon and virtually everyone on the cast and crew is concerned. So I've heard from people involved with its production.

Why did they write out Luke Kleintank?

So far it's really strange. The Crown Princess of Japan is back in San Francisco and is one tough bitch, ordering the Japanese generals and admirals around. There is no explanation why she's there or where her husband is, or how she became so ballsy.

Chelah Horsdal is such a fine actor that it's a treat to hear her voice.

Any more details, r1?

Is Luke in it at all?

Thomas, John's son, is hot now.

To start, they changed showrunners and writers every single season. There was a lot of disorganization where cast members had to fill in the new production team and writers about past seasons' plot points and crew units spent weeks planning expansive scenes that later got scrapped for no reason, repeatedly. It's just been a very stressful, wasteful situation. Everyone involved is glad it's over.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that it’s not worth it to Spend money or energy promoting the Last season of a show. The fans will watch, and it will be there when people pick up the show in the future, but because they are not dependent on advertising dollars it really doesn’t matter how many people watch the finale. Unlike what we used to experience where the final season and especially the final episodes Could get a ratings bump (increased advertising $$$)

I was so surpassed when Luke kleintank died. I thought he was going t be on until the end.

Me too, R10. He was established as a central character and his death was so sudden. There has to be a story there.

I do love it, though I have no idea what is going on half the time.

I remember this scene, with the sunlight lens flare. I thought they'd end up together.

It makes me so sad, watching how things are in that world.

R7 Quinn Lord, quite the uber twink.

God the writing this year is terrible.

I don't understand what happened at the end. All those people coming. ???

Did anyone understand the point of the end?

Why would anyone go from their world to Nazi world?

I'm 3/4s through it--and what a mess--half the main characters are missing and we suddenly have this highly effective version of the Black Panthers pretty much coming out of nowhere with a bunch of new characters. Could have been interesting if seeds for them had been laid earlier, but it comes off as wish-fulfillment pandering with blacks being swapped in for the Jews in earlier seasons. Lots of rushed forced plotting--Juliana's getting a ton of plot armor.

On the plus side, the Smith arc is interesting to watch--Rufus Sewell's doing a terrific job. He's an actor who, long ago, seemed to have everything he needed to be a star, but the breaks never quite happened.

R1 Why did they keep changing show-runners? Who/what the behind-the-scenes so chaotic. And why the actors playing Tagoma, Frank and Luke all disappear? I really expected Juliana to meet alt-Frank or alt-Luke in the other world. It seemed set up for that.

R20 yes a lot of characters just gone...no explanation.

I liked the series a lot overall. It was provocative. A few reactions now that it has run its course:

1. The first season was boring to the point that I think it missed its opportunity to engage as many people as it could have done.

2. I didn’t mind Kleintank’s offing. He was a bad guy who deserved what he got, and I liked the way the scene was handled, from the simple cutting to the way Juliana evolved.

3. Frank’s death was a real loss for me, but I am glad that this series did show life-or-death consequences for its characters without copping out.

4. The Japanese trade minister’s death took me out of the series. He was a primary—maybe the primary—character and it seems like it had to have been a casting decision and not a story decision to remove him, which is terrible.

5. DJ Qualls was missed.

6. I really liked the Black Communist Rebellion storyline. It came out of nowhere but it added a major complexity to the (pardon the pun) black-and-white goodness-and-badness of Nazis vs. free people. We knew watching it that the “good” people in the neutral zone are the people who enslaved black people, and that if things go back to “normal” in the US, then things will remain shitty for black people in the US. Their terrorism was justified—and it was incredibly naive in that by scaring away the Japanese, they invited in an even more ruthless oppressor. I think this added a lot to the thought experiment of the show’s premise.

7. I liked Sewell’s family’s arcs. The wife started out seeming ruthless and ended up with a conscience. The kids made their own decisions and went in radically separate directions, which is believable to me. Sewell’s arc was more complicated—he seemed to have a crisis of conscience that he denied to himself and then he chose his ambition over decency. That would have bothered me had his story not ended with him telling his wife that he didn’t know how to do anything differently. I found that moment poignant and I am, again, glad for the show’s decision to make its characters face consequences for their actions, good and bad. In the case of the Nazis, it seemed like karma, but in some cases it was just consequence: Frank suffered the ultimate consequence for his rebellion, which can’t be called karma, but he did become a martyr.

8. The ending was too ambiguous with the people from another world entering theirs. I imagine that may have played better in a book (or not), depending on context. Since we saw that some of the beloved dead people had more decent lives in other worlds, I kind of settled on assuming that the scene is supposed to suggest sort of crossing over to heaven and getting to see long lost loved ones—something to that effect, except during a parallel worlds portal. But if that was it, then the scene was left too ambiguous. Also, so many people had already been flipping between those worlds routinely that it didn’t really pack a powerful punch. Had we not seen Juliana and the Nazis making that trip as a matter of routine then the portal opening and all those people coming through would have ended the series on a note of mystery. As it is...nope. Juliana and the Japanese trade minister also could use their minds instead of the machine to do this dimension hopping and so that further complicates the point of the machine for me. It just wasn’t the best possible ending in my opinion. I would have been happy with the series ending with the new head Nazi calling off the west coast attack and ordering that the machine be destroyed because it is unnatural. That would have been fine. And Juliana still could have flipped back to that parallel world and gone back to help Sewell’s wife, who is alone now that her son is off in Vietnam and both versions of her husband are dead. That would have been a bittersweet ending. But oh well.

9. I enjoyed it a lot but I am glad it’s over. When the show came out the premise of Nazis having won WWII was alarming but conceptual only. Nowadays it feels too close to home, which makes the surreal nature of the show feel eerie and clandestine. I don’t need anymore of it.

10. Still a better final season than Game of Thrones.

My biggest problem with the finale is all the people suddenly coming through the portal. Is the opening in the alternate world (I'll call it Earth 2) physically analogous to the location in Earth 1? If so, why were all these people hanging out in the Poconos - is there a resort on the site of the the portal - there didn't seem to be when John went through the portal.

Assuming there was a reason for all of these people to be near the portal on Earth 2 - were all of these people just standing around, when all of a sudden a tunnel opened, and they decided - hey, let's walk through this tunnel that just appeared and see what's inside it?

In addition, John taking Helen to the portal didn't make much sense to me. I thought it was established that John could cross because his counterpart had been killed on Earth2. Helen's hadn't, so was he planning on having her wait at the portal while he went through, travelled to whatever military base the Twink was stationed at, kidnapped him, and then brought him back through the portal. Was he going to try to take her through - because that would have killed her.

All in all I didn't think that the season was awful, though I was very disappointed that the trade minister was killed off screen in the first few minutes. I am assuming the actor did not return, and that was the reason. I would at least liked to have a final scene with him.

It drove me a bit nuts that, after freeing America from the grips of German leadership after the slaughter of the Nazi Party leaders in Berlin, that John would come home and continue planning to exterminate all non-whites and Jews on the continent. At least the last few minutes, when his successor called off the air strike, and took off his swastika indicated that he, at least, might have the guts to end the American Reich.

[quote]half the main characters are missing

Because half the cast quit.

R25 Why? I particularly felt the absence of the Japanese Trade minister--he was the good guy working for a bad cause and trying to make it better. A really interesting character and the balance to Juliana Crane.

What happened to the skinny guy who turned out gay? DJ Qualls’s character?

r24, it was not established that Helen traveling through the portal would have killed her or her doppelganger. John traveled through while his was still alive, and they were not on the same timeline, but in parallel universes so no time travel paradoxes.

It had so much promise as a show, but it kept losing its way.

The image I most love from the series is the one at 0:05 - Joe and the golden hour sun flare.

Colors are off in this however.

Luke Kleintank is handsome but he lacks much sexual pull.

Luke reminds me of someone who once held me spellbound so he pulled me in.

I was intrigued by his story arc and sorry to see his end.

Finished it. I wasn't that bothered by the end. The people were from all the different parallel universes, so I'm assuming that they're looking for loved ones--that's clearly what Abendsen's doing--and his wife told him where to find her in another world in a previous episode.

My problem with the BCP story line is that there was no moral ambiguity to the characters and, boom, with one organized pipeline blow-up, they're in charge. I'd have been fine with a Black Panther parallel, but this was clunky and irritating. POC and women saving the day--the storyline just had none of the interesting ambiguity of the earlier seasons.

That said, I liked the Smith family storyline and Rufus Sewell acted the hell out of his part. Though it's completely unclear why he'd feel the need to create new death camps. Not even the Nazis started out with the death camps--the Final Solution was the third solution--first deportation (some Jews actually were deported to Palestine), followed by work camps and then extermination. It seemed like the obvious thing for John Smith to do would be to create a Nazi-friendly America, remove a few obvious symbols, such as the swastika, but still be a military dictatorship. I'd think losing his son as he did would make him a little less eager to gas people.

I like the actor who played Inspector Kido, but suddenly producing a son for moral conflict was irritating. I assume it was because they lost the Trade Minister. Really missed him.

But that said, still better than last season of GOT and, further back, the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

R33 The BCP story didn’t have much time to be established, create nuance and resolve and so it had to be relatively superficial. There was a little bit of color to the story, though. They were communists—all for one, one for all—but you saw after the Japanese left how the woman was inclined to live in luxury, taking over the Japanese princess’s bed to the opposition of the man. This followed an earlier scene in which someone asked who is in charge and she said “we all are...but you can talk to me.” She had a tendency toward greed and personal ambition that somewhat undermined her societal role and projects future corruption or at least tension as she becomes more comfortable and wants more for herself.

The other less black and white aspect was more obvious, with the BCR fighting the Japanese power and winning, only to find itself entirely vulnerable not only to white Americans, but Nazis who had already established a plan to exterminate them. It didn’t get into this at length, but the BCR introduction demonstrated the importance of strategic allies and relativity of threats in foreign relations. The Japanese oppressed the former Americans, clearly, but throughout the series we saw that the Japanese were the lesser of the two evils. They could be brutal, but their way of brutality was to make non-Japanese people subservient, whereas the Nazis’ way was to coldly destroy all nonwhite people. The surviving white people may end up in relative luxury, but under the thumb of a suspicious fascist system that would just as readily exterminate them (or their children, without exceptions for anyone).

I think that without the Japanese trade minister’s moral presence, the BCR did a good enough job of demonstrating how the Japanese occupation was seen by those it oppressed as the worst possible life—only because they didn’t know that the Japanese occupation was keeping oblivion at bay.

R33 I didn’t mind the way the series used Kido and Sewell to show the horrors of sending kids off to war just to die for no good reason. These themes were not telegraphed by earlier seasons and they may have been late additions to the series, but they’re valid and in my opinion welcome ones to show.

I think it’s useful to bear in mind that this show, like a lot of sci-fi genre material, is really dramatizing concepts more than it is getting into psyches of characters. One of my creative writing instructors always asked about books we were assigned, “is this an idea book or a character book?” The Man in the High Castle is an idea show, and the characters are more like game pieces being moved around to show how systems work than they are like human beings.

R35, good speculative writing is both--and the earlier seasons of High Castle had that--which helped the plotting. The fourth season was clunky on plotting--felt like chess pieces being shoved into place to reach an agreed-upon end-point.

R34, I think you're giving the show too much credit--if the BCR had been all that, I would have been happier with it. The communist angle was a nice touch, but it wasn't really implemented with any accuracy. One of the reasons, for example, that communist rebellions succeeded in oppressive regimes is because they used small cells of people, which meant they were extremely hard to track. You didn't have large gatherings of the leadership--that was extremely dangerous. Also, communist groups have been pretty ruthless historically. You see tough moral choices made by other characters, but the BCR characters pretty much skate by on this and it's a real weakness in a show like this.

The fourth season wasn't terrible, just really clunky and forced with pretty much all the west coast story lines. And it could have been good--introduce the BCR but don't give them an easy path to success. Make the schedule work so you retain the character of Tagomi. Skip the whole Kido's son story line. I appreciate what the actor did with his moments, but the storyline came out of nowhere.

As for Childan . . . I couldn't even take his plotline seriously--he's doing it all for love and is slated to be the equivalent of a Japanese war bride. Okay . . . .

Too bad the show couldn't stick with a showrunner--when you work up a scenario this elaborate, it helps to know where you're going and have the long-term arc planned out. The book is pretty minimal, so the show always just used it as a starting point, though the show did use Juliana killing off Joe, which is kind of the climax of the book.

But if the arc had been thought out then we wouldn't go from thinking blacks had been either killed off or sent to Africa to their being a large-enough and well-organized enough group to lead a successful revolt against the Japanese and get California as a homeland. It could have been at least set up that there'd been some sort of underground railroad for them through the neutral zone.

Meh.

Meh. As well.

To answer the above's questions, DJ Qualls and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (the trade minister) were among the cast members that quit. The behind the scenes situation was that bad.

But Joe didn't quit -- he was just written off. The character met a similar fate in the book, so I guess the writers were drawing from that.

R39, Can you give an example of how things were so bad behind-the-scenes that actors playing key characters quit? Both Tagawa and Qualls had good parts--and the work-arounds clearly led to some of the bad plotting of Season 4. DJ Qualls was clearly supposed to be part of the resistance storyline in the neutral zone and the sudden appearance of the addict son and the superpowers of the BCR were clearly overdone to fill out the Japan story line.

And why did the showrunners keep leaving? Fired? Quit?

R28, John didn’t travel through the portal until he was told the other John had been killed.

And it was absolutely established by Hawthorne that nobody could survive traveling through the portal unless their counterpart didn’t exist in the other world. The show totally ignored this. How the fuck would the Nazis have known who’d existed on the other side when they were continuously sending “spies” for a year?

I also couldn’t stand the ending. I like the poster upthread who thought the show should have ended with the American Reich clearly falling apart and Juliana returning to the other world to be with Helen. I liked that hunky guy who was wooing her in Virginia.

Thomas was the hottest Nazi twink since Rolf.

I gave up after the first season. It sounds like it may finally have gotten interesting. Should I pick it back up?

R41 The obvious answer....they did not care if some of the spies died.

I really liked the first season but the second lost me. From memory it became more metaphysical and hard to follow. Could have been a great show but it sounds like they didn't really have one person overseeing it from start to finish and keeping it on track/fulfilling a vision.

I've seen a few billboards announcing the final season in LA.

The kid playing Jennifer did a surprisingly effective job in the big showdown with Nazi Mommy. I hope Amy got sent to a re-education center after the American Reich fell. And I hope Old Lady Himmler got beheaded.