MovieChat Forums > The Man in the High Castle (2015) Discussion > Thoughts on the conclusion [Major Spoile...

Thoughts on the conclusion [Major Spoilers]


The breakaway at the end wasn't too surprising. After Smith's second in command mentioned that there were enough nukes on American soil to stalemate the Reich, Cold War style, and declare themselves independent, you more or less expected it to happen at some point. They found out a lot more Americans than it seemed were unhappy under the Reich and just playing along to stay alive. Again, no big shock. We know roughly what's going to happen after the show ends.

But what's with the flood of people coming through the portal? And what did they mean by coming from "everywhere"? Has their repeated use of the machine created a nexus point of some kind, which tends to draw in travelers using the same anomaly from other dimensions? Like a well worn path. You tend to end up on it by default.

They looked like regular folks, not scientists or military. I really wish they gave us some hint as to who they were and why they were arriving right then. Almost literally the first moment they could've shown up and not been shot or captured by Nazis.

Well we aren't getting a season 5 to find out. I'm not clear why they canceled the show, from what I understand it was pretty popular - although streaming platforms aren't terribly transparent and don't publish viewership data.

What does everyone think about the way they ended things? Any questions you wish had been answered that weren't? Do you think Smith finally seeing himself for who he really was and taking his own life was a fitting end for the show's leading anti-hero, or would you have preferred to see Juliana kill him?

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I was hoping Smith would abdicate and go live a better life in the alternate world.

Not sure what the portal scene was all about. Why were people just strolling in? How did they know it was safe?

I was expecting a Nazi army from a different world led by Smith or Joe to attack through the portal.

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And live a lie that was dependent on alt-Helen never finding out this imposter (whose henchman killed her real husband) had taken his place and stolen his life? No. In just a couple of days he'd already put a huge strain on his alternate's marriage. She could sense he was different, it would never have worked out for long. The other John put himself at risk to help a friend. Something he wouldn't do - as we saw in his flashbacks, he could've opened the latch and no one would have been the wiser but he wouldn't stick his neck out.

If I had to guess, those people coming through the portal were refugees. They looked to be ordinary civilians, some of them children. Nuclear war, plague, asteroid impact, or whatever else, made them desperate enough to evacuate to a parallel Earth. It seems weird that they showed up just as the facility changed hands and the Nazis were gone though. There's not going to be a season 5 so they really should've given us some kind of backstory about these people. Who they were, why they were coming. Surely one traveler could have stopped to chat on his/her way by!

Actually, I was expecting either an advanced world to come through and render aid against the Nazis, or some kind of higher interdimensional life form would reach out, bring Juliana into that vision world and assume the form of Tagomi to communicate with her. She said "something's coming" right? But I suppose they did foreshadow what actually happened when she saw all those figures in her dream, approaching in the distance.

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I really, REALLY appreciate that this show answered the questions and completed the story in a way that Lost, The X-Files, Twin Peaks and others so utterly failed to do, but I think you're giving the writers a little too much credit. We learned in Season 2 that you're reduced to jello-goo if you try to cross into a world where you're alive. How much goo is back there in the portal now? I think that last scene was just supposed to be strange or symbolic, and it just didn't work for me. Even "refugees" would have been looking around with big eyes, asking questions of the "new world's" inhabitants... they looked like they were sleepy and walking into a familiar supermarket. I wish it didn't end with that scene. It didn't ruin it, but it left me not cheering for all the answers we DID get.

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The natural travelers don't die when they try going somewhere another version of them already occupies. I think they just can't get there. Some worlds are accessible to them, others aren't. Remember that machine they strapped the "volunteers" into basically forced them into the portal - and if the passage was impossible they were cooked. Someone walking toward the open portal instead, who can't go to the world it's currently opened onto, may feel some resistance or discomfort as they get close. As long as there's no moving wall pushing you in, there's no way you'd go any closer. Too painful.

The refugees looked shell shocked. They often are, in real life. Who knows what they've seen and experienced in the days and weeks leading up to their evacuation. I'd expect their leaders to be in front though, asking those on the other side to please not shoot, they mean no harm, so on and so forth. They should've given us a basic idea of who those people were and why they were coming at that moment.

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I was very satisfied with the show overall, how it tied up the major story lines and answered all the weirdness presented in the first two seasons. I didn't like John Smith's end. Yes, he'd just lost a lot, but he had two daughters and that just didn't feel right. And I found the portal scene utterly bizarre. Why were those people just strolling in like the mall just opened? They didn't even look at our heroes, ask "where is this?" or look even remotely concerned or puzzled. They just crossed universes, and they're in a big, boring cave. Shouldn't at least a few of them have turned around and gone back? I also didn't get the second-in-command immediately calling off the strike on San Francisco, with no one in the room even expressing concern. Was John Smith really the ONLY guy who had turned full Nazi? I don't feel betrayed or "Lost," but I think the storytelling in the last episode was a little sloppy and incomplete.

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They were originally supposed to go for two more seasons after this, but three seasons ended up becoming one. I suppose we should be grateful Amazon told them before production began that four was going to be the end. The abruptness of both the Reich and Japan losing control of their respective empires was an artifact of that accelerated timetable.

They should've taken more time to explain the coup in Berlin. We knew John Smith and his friend Wilhelm Goertzmann were up to something but it was a shock when they took out Himmler's entire leadership cadre and seized control. They would've had to turn numerous bureaucrats and lower ranking officials to their cause in order to cover themselves, blame some radical group or other, and make it legit. All we know is, Smith tells Himmler he's never thought of him as a father, just a failed chicken farmer, then kills him with poison gas that's been placed there for the purpose, and when he goes outside everyone else is dead. Almost all the planning was glossed over because there wasn't time.

Ditto with the number of American officers ready to turn on a dime. There was no time to explore that in depth. In all fairness it's not hard to swallow, but collectively this stuff had kind of a rushed feel to it. And - again - the complete lack of explanation for the Portal People after foreshadowing their arrival from the season's first episode, that I found frustrating.

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The portal scene on its own is confusing, but the final season trailer declares "The end of all worlds is coming," so I assume we're to conclude that the closing of the portal brings about the end of all the parallel worlds. And then I got the feeling when Hawthorne Abendsen's eyes lit up that he expected to find Caroline alive somewhere, meaning that he somehow knew the worlds had merged into a happy peaceful whole where everyone who died is alive again. It was strange how dazed everyone seemed though, because Juliana's visions made it seem like the people in the distance were approaching with a very specific purpose.

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It would make no sense that every other world suddenly ended, I think that "end of the worlds" with the crumbling John Smith statue was just meant to be catchy. I gathered this was an evacuation from a particular parallel world that suffered some kind of apocalyptic scale disaster. Juliana's dimension happens to have been the site of extensive genocide which left a lot of vacancies. If you were planning a mass exodus you'd locate such places, which could accommodate large numbers of your people. They may have sent groups out to several other worlds too.

At least this is what I assume is happening. They never explained it. I hope the producers will eventually reveal who the portal people are in an interview, at a convention, on their social media accounts, wherever. It's not technically a spoiler anymore since the series is over.

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Maybe the only way it would make sense that all the parallel worlds suddenly ended is if God or the Creator or whoever created the universe grew so disgusted with what was going on in all the worlds and the arrogance of the Nazis' plans to invade other ones that he shut the whole thing down to start fresh and only kept his favorite humans alive to populate the new world.

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You'd think he would pick a better world to be the one survivor. Someplace nice, where people got along and were kind to each other (almost any of them would be better candidates than Juliana's timeline!). 😎

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I don't know if almost all the other worlds would be better candidates than Juliana's timeline, since we saw other timelines where Joe executed Frank with a shot in the head and where Joe shot Juliana in the cave. Maybe it's just that God's merged the worlds and cleaned everything up, so when they go back out there all that's left are the people who'd get along and be kind to each other, along with a peaceful world that would naturally happen with all the powermongers gone. The fact that Hawthorne Abendsen, who seemed to know he had some kind of spiritual purpose, was still alive and happily expecting to see his wife alive somewhere, could be a sign that they've won the big spiritual battle they were fighting and we're free to imagine the best outcome, as vague and open-ended as the ending was. In that case, it would be nice if God would just let people know that's what happened, so they don't have to walk around in a daze wondering and worried there might still be Nazis or other sociopaths amidst them.

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I don't see why we should assume that a nearly infinite number of alternate timelines suddenly collapsed. There is some significance to the arrival of all those refugees, but maddeningly we're given no clue what it is after their appearance was foreshadowed from the beginning of the season. I hope the producers will spill those details at some point. Especially considering the series has ended. We won't be seeing whatever ideas they had play out on screen, so why not just tell us?

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Like I said, the only clue we really got was when the series finale trailer announced "The End of All Worlds is Coming." I know you thought they were just trying to say something catchy, but we can also take it literally and make our best guess, even if it isn't easy with the little they gave us to work with.

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If everyone from every world suddenly spilled into one, it would become infinitely overpopulated. Even if most people couldn't cross over (because a version of them already exists here) each and every timeline would contain at least a few individuals who were never born in yours. That would be enough to do it. My own take is that it's an evacuation from a world that suffered an apocalyptic level disaster. But I've seen speculation that these were all the victims of Nazi genocide come back to life (walking back out of the light as it were). Among other interpretations. There are a bunch of theories, and no way to know what the producers intended without actually hearing from them.

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The ending kind of pissed me off. It felt hasty and incomplete, like a Star Trek episode where the last ten minutes are concluded quickly and to everyone's satisfaction. I literally felt "that's it?????????"

And the portal part was befuddling, and makes no sense. The only thing I can imagine is that all the people the Nazi's had killed were coming back (which they could, since their counterpart was gone).....but even here it was mostly white people I saw, and if I'm not mistaken, the Nazi's killed most of the minorities.

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Lots of people die in wars. Organized genocide just made things that much worse. This group coming through the portal seemed like a random sampling of civilians off the street. All ethnicities, all ages (including children), no obvious soldiers or scientists, which I why I assumed it was a refugee caravan, fleeing a post-apocalyptic scenario where their own world is no longer suitable for life.

Because they compressed what was supposed to happen over three seasons into one, there was a definite hurried feeling about it all. The Japanese and German control over their respective slices of North America fell apart very quickly. The coup in Berlin was sudden and not set up for viewers as extensively as it should've been. Taking out the Führer and all his close advisors would've required a lot of planning. The idea that American Reich officers would be ready to revolt when they saw a real chance isn't surprising. As one of them pointed out, they now had quite a few nuclear weapons based in their territory which would make them a world power in their own right. Germany could be stalemated (good old mutually assured destruction) to keep them from re-invading. It makes sense, it just happened very abruptly given the much more gradual worldbuilding of the first three seasons. Oh well. At least Amazon gave the producers advance notice, so they knew they had to wrap up the story.

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Another single point not wrapped up: Joe killing Juliana in the cave with the whispered "trust me". I'm sure they would explain it as "that happened in a different world", but I would still like to know what the "trust me" part means. It seemed like a story detail of Joe knowing something that would bring them back together or something, but only after death.... or something like that, but we'll never know. If it had to that in another world so they could be together in *this* world, I guess he didn't know that she was going to cut his throat early on.

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You could take this as a glimpse of another reality that's also a warning not to trust him. There may not be anything more to it than that. If an alt-Joe was intended to factor into the story at some later point ... they just ran out of time.

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I thought there was gonna be a final season and watching it from this angle, I was surprised to see how John and Helen wound up dead in the season 4 finale. I expected we would see John making amends for his transgressions and trying to end the third reich.
As for the portal: What's so moving about people coming to this world? Wasn't the alternate reality without the Nazis occupying the USA a better reality? Refugees from where? The writers say they left it ambiguously on purpose. I say lazy writing.
As for Juliana: no epilogue? No final few scenes about her reflecting what had happened the past seasons? The show would have deserved at least another episode. But that way we're left with an abrupt ending without any real closure.
A season 5 would have been good.

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