What Does That 'Man in the High Castle' Ending Mean? - thewrap

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  • Author: Phil Owen
  • November 21,2019

What Does That 'Man in the High Castle' Ending Mean? - thewrap

(Spoilers ahead for, you know, the ending of “The Man in the High Castle.” Like the headline says.)

After four seasons, Amazon’s ambitious but often scattered “The Man in the High Castle” has finally wrapped up. It wasn’t a “clean” ending, exactly — it’s one of those endings, like that of “Game of Thrones,” where we got a conclusion to the big picture story arcs that the show has focused on this whole time, but the story for the surviving characters is far from over. It’s not a “they lived happily ever after” kind of situation. It’s a “the world continued spinning” ending.

But certainly things are looking up in the, ah, Prime Earth of this story. The Japanese have abandoned North America, and the Black Communist Rebellion is setting up a new, presumably much better government. The east coast has autonomy from Germany, and is now being run by a guy who clearly wants the Nazis gone. John Smith (Rufus Sewell), perpetrator of so many crimes against humanity, is finally dead and gone. These are all good things.

But after all that happened, there was still one last scene for “The Man in the High Castle.” The final scene takes us to the portal the Nazis built so they could travel to alternate universes. Something weird has been going on there all season, with the portal turning itself on a couple times and giving Juliana (Alexa Davalos) weird feelings that something is about to happen with it.

So in this scene, the American resistance has taken the facility where the portal is located from the Nazis, and we’ve got Juliana, Hawthorne (Stephen Root), Wyatt (Jason O’Mara) and a bunch of others hanging out in the portal room as it fires itself up. And once the portal stabilizes, out walks a whole bunch of people. These folks just stroll right through the room, not really acknowledging the people who were already present. And Hawthorne, the Man in the High Castle himself, walks through the crown and into the portal.

It was a very moving moment for me to watch, even though I honestly do not understand what it means. Juliani says these people are coming from “everywhere” but that’s obviously very vague. Was this some kind of metaphor, with the souls of those killed in the past two decades of atrocities around the world returning? Or was it really, literally happening?

“The Man in the High Castle” doesn’t really provide anything in the way of setup for this turn of events, either way. It never established firm details about the travelers who had been bringing those alternate universe films to this version of Earth, and those films came from many more Earths than just the one the Nazis had been using the portal to travel to.

Was there some kind of parallel universe organization affecting events in this world the way the Nazis had been interfering in that other world they kept visiting? And they decided that now was the time to pay it a visit? Or maybe these were refugees who had fled this reality and were now returning?

Since the show is over now, we’re never going to get an answer to this. But even though I don’t get it, I like the scene a lot anyway. I like the vibe of it.

It feels like victory.


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