I was talking with a friend the other day, Oliver Benjamin, the founder of the new sort of religion, Dudeism, about the series The Man in the High Castle, another Philip K. Dick novel turned out for the screen. You’ve got to realize, said Benjamin (I am paraphrasing) that when Dick wrote that no one knew what was going to happen. The US was insecure, politically, he said, but it’s like now we won. It’s as if now we feel we are at the end of history, he went on, acknowledging what Francis Fukuyama had once said about liberal democracy being the final state of political affairs. “So to release this series now it risks being contaminated by the smugness of victorious hindsight,” said Benjamin.

So here we are now, with our good liberal democracy, and some amount of insecurity. A world which Dick might have conceived of; one in which trumped-up ideologues can masquerade as saviors of right, honest democracy. We may feel smug, but we probably shouldn’t. What a great time it is for a series to arrive that tells us we are more or less towering morons in the face of political consumerism…The only problem with Man in the High Castle, is that it doesn’t do that enough. Not in the first three episodes at least.

The series, directed by Frank Spotnitz of the X-Files, is visually stunning. The storyline is compelling, because it’s hard not to be fascinated by a made-up America under the influence of German-Japanese fascist rule. But at the same time, as has to be the case with anything coming out of Hollywood it seems, rather than focus on Dick’s nuances concerning social instability and political connivance, the series focuses on goodies versus baddies. That being the Axis powers (baddies) of Germany and Japan now ruling the United States, and a small resistance who want their country back.

In view of modern politics when you see Swastikas draped over buildings in New York you can’t help but think, ah, well, we told you so. If it’s not one creepy despot on the throne, it’s another. We are all suckers to Plato’s great Noble Lie, which is likely what Dick intended his novel to highlight.

But that alone wouldn’t bode well for viewing figures, so the series is more about an uprising than it is about philosophical complacency. What we get in the series is a small bunch of well-meaning guys and dolls fighting to procure once again the American Dream. The same America, one academic pointed out in an interview about the series and book, that was “Excluding black people from the lunch counter” as the Nazis were busy attempting to extinguish the Jewish race.

That’s basically where the premise of the series falls short. Dick’s ambiguities are all but gone. There are not essentially flawed humans who can be talked into believing in pretty much anything, but good and evil folks with clear hopes and aspirations. So far at least. Like Benjamin said, it’s as if the series is telling us that we won; that good triumphed over evil.

While Man in High Castle is certainly one of the best series to come out this year, it could have been better if it were more skeptical. Skepticism was the rationale of all Philip K. Dick ‘s work, yet the series glosses over this and instead goes back to the Us Vs. Them paradigm. Are we not getting bored with Hollywood certainty? How much longer can we be conducted into thinking there is simply good and bad forces directing the world? Man in the High Castle would have been better if it had remained as confusing as Philip K. Dick.

According to this review in Vox, the series does get more subversive as it goes on. You can watch it now on Amazon Prime.