The Man in the High Castle Recap Season 2 Episodes 6 & 7: Land O’ Smiles and Kintsugi

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After the slow-building tension of the past two episodes, the pace starts to pick up again with episodes 6 and 7. The characters are starting to put their plans into motion.

Joe talks with his father’s housekeeper, Frau Silva, and discovers that his father had a wife and two sons that he lost in the war. She refuses to answer any further questions after that, but otherwise continues to be ridiculously worshipful and kind of a stalker. Joe escapes her the first chance he gets and goes with Nicole to a Lebensborn overnight drug orgy in the country. While he’s stoned, he sees himself dead, and says goodbye to Juliana and his old life. When he wakes up in the morning, he tells Nicole he’s ready to go back to his father. That seems to mean he’s also ready to embrace being a Nazi, since he puts on the suit Frau Silva had left out for him the morning before, complete with Swastika armband. The Lebensborn appear to have organized themselves into some kind of Aryan superbaby cult. All it took was an orgy and a few hallucinations to convert Joe. Seems like the guy who went through that whole season 1 cross country ordeal and stood up to the great Obergruppenführer Smith multiple times might be able to hold out longer than one debauched night, but I guess he discovered it’s good to be wanted.

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The Man in the High Castle Season 2 Episodes 1&2 Recap: Three Castles

The Tiger’s Cave & The Road Less Traveled

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Time to catch up with Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle! We finally meet the man himself, Hawthorne Abendsen, and, not surprisingly, he’s a little nuts. The “castle” appears to be a giant warehouse full of alternate reality films. Metamaiden doesn’t like him. She’s confused about where these films are coming from, and how the supernatural aspect plays into the full picture of the show. I (metacrone) think he’s high strung from having seen so many potential future disasters, and he’s weighed down with the possible impact of his choices.

All three factions in the show’s world now have access to information about the alternate realities (and, consequently, have their own man in a high castle). The Resistance and the Nazis access it through films brought to Abendsen and Hitler, and the Japanese through Trade Minster Tagomi’s mystical abilities. Both Abendsen and Tagomi seem to have figured out that Juliana is an important, lynchpin character in some way. Tagomi appeared to feel that her locket was too important as a talisman to offer back to her, even as they were both staring at it in his house. I’m not clear about whether Hitler’s specifically trying to have her killed, but Smith has certainly been keeping up with her status and whereabouts.

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