History Series / TheManInTheHighCastle

* NotSoDifferent: Juliana accuses George Dixon of being just like the Nazis when he's about to use the fact of Thomas Smith being ill against John Smith, as this would not only result in John's career destruction but also Thomas's death by involuntary "euthanasia". George admits it, and says they have to be even worse than the Nazis if the Resistance wants a chance at victory.

** In season 4, the BCR manages to make the occupation of the Pacific States so costly for the Japanese Empire that they unilaterally give up their American colonies, despite knowing full well that the JPS is the LesserOfTwoEvils. Unsurprisingly, the Greater Nazi Reich immediately starts preparing another invasion and genocide which the BCR is powerless to stop.

** The BCR have no love for their Japanese occupiers and are borderline black supremacists, but they do not allow vigilante killings and senseless anarchy once the Pacific States has been abandoned by the Japanese. They are aghast when they come across the attempted lynching of [[spoiler:Inspector Kido]] by an angry white mob intent on exacting revenge on any and all remaining Japanese, but considering black Americans long history of being lynched themselves, it makes sense. They insist he have a trial rather than simply be hung.

** The Nazi border guards encountered by Julianna and Wyatt wear ''Wehrmacht Heer'' uniforms, but their vehicle is painted with SS runes. The ''Heer'' was the regular army of Germany, while the SS was the private military of the Nazi Party. They did operate together on a regular basis, but had separate logistics and chain of command. ''Heer'' troops would not be driving an SS vehicle.

* AssholeVictim: Not only the characters who are killed without mourning are not just Nazis or collaborators, but resistance members too. The notable examples includes [[spoiler:resistance members George Dixon, Susan and offscreen Gary Connell and eventually Nazi spy Joe Blake, all of whom except Gary were killed personally by Julianna in self-defense.]]

* BigBadEnsemble: The Axis Powers and surprisingly, [[spoiler:the Resistance, mostly towards Julianna, who has become one of their targets following helping Joe Blake at the end of the first season and being blamed for Karen's death at the beginning of the second season]].

* ClapYourHandsIfYouBelieve: Hawthorne reveals to Julianna that the first grasshopper films were actually fakes made from cobbled together real world footage. Although the details on what happened next are sketchy, creating the fake films gave him access to the real ones.

** The book ends with Julianna realizing that the Axis did indeed lose the war, but it's left up the readers to decide what that means. (There was intended to be a sequel, which involved travel between parallel dimensions, but it never saw the light of day.)
** The series has this due to being canceled halfway through its fourth season. [[spoiler:The series ends with the Nazi's portal opening of its own accord and the people who Julianna saw in the wasteland in her visions spilling out and looking around in confusion. The only answer we get is Hawthorne's unhelpful explanation that the people are from "everywhere". There are some possible hints in the previous episodes (such as Hawthorne telling Smith that the Axis had killed so many people that the multiverse had become unbalanced. We're also told that Hitler came across his filmstrips through his spiritualist beliefs, suggesting that the afterlife might be involved.) However there's nothing conclusive.]]

* TrailersAlwaysLie: The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB8f94E2Oxc Season 3 trailer]] showed scenes of Julianna unfolding a flag with the peace symbol in the colors of the Nazi flag. This never happens in the entire season.

* TroubledBackstoryFlashback: When Julianna is sedated by members of The Resistance, she experiences a flashback montage which includes [[spoiler: attending her father's funeral and attempting suicide by standing in front of a bus]].

It now has a [[Recap/TheManInTheHighCastle recap page]] which seriously NeedsWikiMagicLove.

The series begins many years after the victory of the Axis powers in the UsefulNotes/SecondWorldWar, and what was once the United States has been divided between the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich. A thin strip of neutral, lawless territory in the Rocky Mountains serves as a buffer between the two superpowers, who have been in an uneasy truce since the war's end. Juliana Crain, a woman living in the Japanese Pacific States with her fiancé Frank Fink, is given a film reel depicting an AlternateHistory where the Allied powers won the war. In the Greater Nazi Reich, a man named Joe Blake carries one of these mysterious film reels toward the Neutral Zone, under orders from Obergruppenführer John Smith. Meanwhile, high-ranking politicians from both empires fear for the aging UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's life, knowing that the death of the Fuhrer would trigger a war far more terrible than any seen before.

* AnyoneCanDie: In a dystopian setting this dangerous, it's no wonder that death is just around the corner. By season 3, even main characters start to bite the dust, with [[spoiler:both Joe Blake and Frank Fink]] dying for real. [[spoiler: Season 4 opens with the death of Minister Tagomi.]]

** Frank Fink watches one of the Alternate Universe reels with Juliana, where he witnesses himself being executed by Joe Blake as part of a Nazi death squad. This is in a reality where the SpaceColdWar between the Nazis and Japanese "turned hot", and San Francisco was nuked and invaded by the Reich.

* DreamIntro: The season 2 episode "Land O'Smiles" opens with Frank Fink performing a Judaic prayer with his [[spoiler:deceased]] sister Laura and her children before gas suddenly starts to come down from the ceiling when he wakes up from this nightmare.

** The Crown Prince's speech. [[spoiler: The Crown Prince wants to give a speech cementing peace between the Japanese and German empires. The trade minister and a German agent are conspiring to deliver nuclear secrets to the Japanese science minister. A conspiracy of Nazis want to assassinate the prince and take the blame for it in order to spark a war. And hapless Frank Fink just wants to show up and kill the Prince in revenge for his family being murdered by the Kempeitai.]]

** By the end of the season, Kido knows Frank Fink is innocent, but is pursuing him as a suspect anyway, since he knows that if the truth gets out about [[spoiler:the crown prince being assassinated by a Nazi agent, there'll be a devastating war that the Japanese will almost certainly lose.]] He's even prepared to commit {{seppuku}} to preserve the lie.

* IAmSpartacus: In season 3, a bounty hunter tracks down a small community of Jewish refugees posing as Catholics somewhere in the Neutral territories. After he holds one of them at gunpoint, [[spoiler:Frank Fink]], who is still alive, stands up and tells him to take him instead, since he's also a Jew. One by one, everyone else also stands up and tells him to take them too, before he's shot from a distance by a gun-toting inhabitant.

* LaserGuidedKarma: During the Japanese withdrawal in Season 4, Inspector Kido is captured by vigilantes and locked in the same gas chamber room where he killed Frank Fink's sister and her children. He realizes the karma and resigns himself to it. [[spoiler:Then subverted due to the gas cylinders being empty, and Kido gets an opening to kill the thugs and escape.]]

** In season 2, Frank Fink dreams about visiting his sister and her children and joining them in a Judaic prayer before gas starts pouring down from the ceiling, killing them all.

** The Jewish prayers are all accurate. A bar mitzvah recites the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barechu Barechu]] before beginning to read from the Torah. When [[spoiler:Frank Fink]] is about to be executed, he repeatedly recites the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shema_Yisrael Shema]] ("Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one."), the most holy prayer in the Jewish faith and often used by religious Jews as their last words.

** The Resistance in the JPS begins spamming their own sigil against the occupation, designed by Fink.

---> [[spoiler: Frank Fink... is alive.]]

** Juliana's mother tells her that she was afraid that her other daughter Trudy is dead because she had the same foreboding feeling that she had when her first husband died during the war, but is sure that Trudy's alright because the feeling went away the next morning. Juliana knows all too well that her sister is most likely dead by this point because of their involvement in the resistance.

** The SS's intelligence branch, the SD (''Siecherheitsdienst'') pops up in multiple episodes, especially in the Neutral Zone, where their agents murder and terrorize people with impunity.

* GratuitousGerman: Comes with the territory, but of varying quality. Kenneth Tigar (Himmler) for example has an extreme accent, Carsten Norgaard (Wegener) speaks fluently and almost flawlessly, Timothy Murphy (Eichmann) makes a laughable attempt, and Wolf Muser (Hitler) is, well, a native speaker (just to name several).

** Nicole tries to make herself [[UltimateJobSecurity too indispensable to be persecuted for her closet bisexuality]] by spearheading Project Jarr Null, a cultural genocide of American culture, while semi-secretly attending lesbian clubs. [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness It doesn't work; as soon as the Statue of Liberty's head hits the ocean, Himmler has her arrested and sent back to Germany for 're-education']].

* BecomingTheMask: John Smith. Initially he joined the Reich to provide for his family, participating in Nazi atrocities for many years while burying his conscience. Throughout the series he continues to climb the ranks to protect them from new threats, but loses even that excuse by the end. As of the last episode of the series [[spoiler:there is literally nothing stopping him from abandoning the Reich. The new führer has made North America completely autonomous, and will not interfere with Smith in any way, even though he continues to provide logistical support. Smith's second-in-command even begs him to break away from the Reich and make America independent again. However, Smith continues to go through with the plans to kill most of the people in the Pacific states with a series of scorched-Earth attacks, and to renew the American Holocaust against those who remain. In their last moments together, Helen tells him that they need to stop pretending to be Nazis, and John says he doesn't know how.]]

** Later episodes of Season 3 introduce a VTOL-capable jet flown by the ''Luftwaffe''. It looks a bit like an Arado Ar-234 bastardized with dropship from ''Film/{{Aliens}}''.

* BecomingTheMask: John Smith. While initially he joined the Reich to provide for his family, participating in Nazi atrocities for many years and burying his conscience, and throughout the series continues to climb the ranks to protect them from new threats, he loses even that excuse by the end. As of the last episode of the series [[spoiler:there is literally nothing stopping him from abandoning the Reich. The new führer has made North America completely autonomous, and will not interfere with Smith in any way, even though he continues to provide logistical support. Smith's second-in-command even begs him to break away from the Reich and make America independent again. However, Smith continues to go through with the plans to kill most of the people in the Pacific states with a series of scorched-Earth attacks, and to renew the American Holocaust against those who remain. In their last moments together, Helen tells him that they need to stop pretending to be Nazis, and John says he doesn't know how.]]

* BlatantLies: The official story taught in schools regarding people of African decent in the American Reich is that they were sent back to Africa to work for the Reich. They are actually killed in accordance with [[AbsoluteXenocide Nazi ideologies, but since the PropagandaMachine uses African slavery to vilify pre-war America they can't openly disclose the truth. When Smith's daughter asks him about the situation, he has to ask her what she's taught in school because he's not confident that he's up to date on the latest story.

** Along with the Neutral Zone in North America, a similar buffer zone between the two Empires exists in Central Asia. The Reich's dominance of oil implies they have possession of the Middle East.
** Sweden is confirmed to be an independent sovereign nation, but can be assumed to go out of their way to stay on Berlin's good side. Mexico remains independent as well, but probably has to walk a tightrope to stay out of either superpowers' sights. Some South American countries are still independent as well. Argentina is specifically mentioned, as Smith tries to send his son there to protect him, but is allied with and heavily influenced by Germany. It is implied that Germany and Japan probably have plans for them.

** The Reich's borders encompass the entirety of Europe and Russia (as far as the Ural Mountains, at most), and nearly half of the USA and Canada. They have also colonized all of Africa (and are much nastier than even the Belgians in doing so), and those blacks who haven’t been massacred are kept only as slave labor. Several countries are said to be Nazi vassal states with only nominal independence at best.

* DecoyProtagonist: [[spoiler:When the show started, Frank Frink, Joe Blake and Tagomi were stated to be protagonists, but by the GrandFinale, Frank and Joe were killed (with Joe undergoing a FaceHeelTurn into one of the show's antagonists that would lead to his death) in the third season, while Tagomi is KilledOffscreen at the beginning of the last season, leaving their voided roles to filled in by other characters who were there since the first season as minor supporting characters or even later added new characters such as Wyatt.]]

* BuryYourDisabled: In the eugenics-supporting alternate world created by the Nazis, the infirm are one of the groups targeted for extermination by the authorities.

* StealthPun: At the end of Season 1, we see a man literally living in a high castle. [[spoiler: His name is Adolf Hitler.]]

* StealthPun: At the end of Season 1, we see a man living in a high castle. [[spoiler: His name is Adolf Hitler.]]

* InterdimensionalTravelDevice: Throughout the series, various characters are able to visit parallel universe through some form of meditation, causing the film reels showing these worlds to spread. In season 3, the Nazis build an interdimensional travel device through technological means in an abandoned mine, the ''Nebenwelt'' (Next World) project, in order to conquer other worlds.

* CoolTrain: New York has an elevated monorail system. Berlin has an even more extensive network implied. In Season 4, John travels back and forth from the ''Nebenswelt'' installation in a personal bullet train that has externally mounted auto-turrets and forward-facing [[GatlingGood miniguns]] for defense!

* InterdimensionalTravelDevice: Throughout the series, various characters are able to visit parallel universe through some form of meditation, causing the film reels showing these worlds to spread. In season 3, the Nazis build an interdimensional travel device through technological means in an abandoned mine, the ''Nebenswelt'' project, in order to conquer other worlds.

* MultiversalConqueror: After learning of "Travellers", visitors originating from alternate universes, the Nazis embark on a project to build an InterdimensionalTravelDevice, dubbed the ''Nebenswelt'', in order to conquer those other universes. [[spoiler:However, their efforts may be in vain if the Man in the High Castle is to be believed.]]

** In "Sunrise", Joe Blake is briefly seen watching a children's cartoon called ''American Reich'', about two detectives who work for the Reich Police. The narration is straight out of ''Series/{{Dragnet}}''.

* SilentCredits :Used at the end of the series finale

* BiTheWay: Nicole turns out to be bi, as she has sexual relationships with both Joe and Thelma.