RETURN TO THE REICH

Worlds collide in the final season of the alternative-history drama starring Rufus Sewell

- Rufus Sewell

World War Two history blends with sci-fi in Amazon Prime Video’s epic drama The Man in the High Castle, which returns for its fourth and final cataclysmic season this week.

Based on Philip K Dick’s novel, the 1960s-set series imagines a world where the Allies have lost the war and America has been carved up by the Japanese Imperial Army and the Nazis.

However, banned newsreel films of the Allies winning the war have been seen by resistance fighter Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) who learns that the footage comes from a parallel universe in which the Nazis and the Japanese have been defeated.

At the end of the third series, Juliana uncovered a Nazi plot to conquer parallel worlds when she infiltrated the underground cavern where they were testing a mysterious machine, but she was captured by SS Reichsmarschall John Smith (Rufus Sewell).

After being shot by Smith, Juliana saved herself from certain death by using her ability to travel between both worlds and entering the alternate reality. There, Smith wasn’t a Nazi but a salesman and the Allied powers had won the war.

The new season picks up the action a year on from these events. Juliana is still in her alternate reality living with Smith, his wife Helen and their children, including their ‘dead’ son Thomas. In the Nazi world, dedicated Hitler Youth member Thomas had willingly allowed himself to be euthanised by the Reich because he had muscular dystrophy and had been labelled a ‘defective’ by the regime.

So will the Nazi Smith, who saw Juliana disappear, try to go through the portal to this other universe?