@consolation & @lookingforward, I get irritated too. I didn’t finish the first season of Bloodline (a CC favorite) never got past the first season of The Americans (another CC favorite) and gave up on Downtown Abbey after season 3.
@doschicos @Fishnlines29 Don’t you mean… ‘Peaky Fookin’ Blindahs?!" I liked the first two seasons a lot, especially whenever the lead and Tom Hardy were in scenes together, those guys have great chemistry. 
I’m happy to watch ANYTHING with Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy in it.
When I was at the movies yesterday there was a trailer for Dunkirk which will be out later in the year. I will be going.
^^ you are not invited to TV night at my house. I love all of those.
@twoinanddone I’m assuming you were pointing to @katliamom 's response?! I haven’t seen the first two but sounds like they’re up my ally
If you are in the mood for something with a completely dysfunctional family then Shameless is the show for you! I am very amused with this show while realizing at the same time how awful it would be to have them in the neighborhood LOL
I finished season 3 of Mozart in the Jungle last night. I can’t believe I have to wait 11 more months for my next fix of this show!
I agree that Season 2 of The Man In The High Castle was, on balance, better than Season 1. The strengths of the series are really the richness of its imagined alternate history and the nuanced complication of the supporting characters, especially the senior Japanese and American Nazis. The three central 20-something protagonists are very attractive but fundamentally lack character – maybe that’s an accurate reflection of their youth – and the more the show focuses on them, the antsier I get. Fortunately, Season 2 gives them less screen time than Season 1, and practically no screen time with any of the others, so I didn’t get annoyed by their fundamentally boring love triangle. And they find a way to deepen the most interesting relationship in the series – Juliana and the Japanese Trade Minister – while at the same time using Juliana to explore life on Nazi Long Island.
I’m a little disturbed by how much more violent the Japanese are portrayed in comparison to the Nazis. The rounding up of civilians for public executions in response to resistance was a classic Nazi tactic in occupied Eastern Europe (my family lost relatives in one such action) yet here it’s given to the Japanese. (Not that the Japanese didn’t have their own horrific reprisals.) The Nazis in the show – with their awesome NYC buildings and clean, safe suburbs are deliberately made to look attractive and seductive, yet their bloodthirst so far hasn’t been brought to the forefront.
MITHC is going to be one of those shows where I can’t remember enough of the details to figure out what’s going on. Sometimes I try to find good recaps and run through them first.
@2VU0609 , I have already rewatched the last episode several times. 
I’m thinking to writers of the show are clumsily trying to contrast attempts by the Nazis to conceal more of the brutal aspects of their roundups, torture, etc and to “maintain appearances of civility” to the German civilian populace/rest of the Reich and world along with the more limited/diffused powers of the SS, SD, and Gestapo as opposed to the Japanese Empire and the Kempeitai* which made far less of an effort to conceal the brutality of their conduct/actions not only in the occupied territories, but also in Japan itself.
The nature of the brutality within the ranks of the Japanese armed forces…including the Kempeitai which was a branch of the Japanese army was much more so than in the Wehrmacht(German Armed Forces…not just the Army) which factored into how they later treated POWs (Allied POWs had a much higher survival rate in Nazi run POW camps than they did in the Japanese-run POW camps) and civilians both in occupied territories and to a somewhat lesser extent, back home.
One good illustration of this was how physical beatings such as being slapped were considered acceptable and normal means of disciplining not only enlisted men by NCOs/Officers, but also officer cadets and officers themselves at the hands of superior officers.
One firsthand account from a senior wartime Japanese Naval officer recounted how while he was a first-year cadet at the Naval Academy, more junior cadets…especially first-year cadets were routinely slapped and violently beaten by more senior cadets.
One classmate of his became well-known in their class for receiving ~1000 punches from more senior cadets before the end of their first year. Those memories of brutality during his Naval Academy days were so bad he refuses to attend any alum related events after several decades. And this is even after one considers he was subjected a militarist educational system which emphasized militarization/training from middle school onwards to prepare students for military service with the associated brutalization sanctioned by higher authorities.
Another account from a former Army field-grade officer was how Major Generals would slap/punch colonels, colonels would do likewise to lt.colonels/majors, lt. colonels/majors do likewise to captains, captains do likewise to lieutenants, lieutenants to NCOs, NCOs to privates, and Japanese privates to non-Japanese soldiers such as Koreans drafted to serve as guards in POW camps.
And this culture of brutality didn’t always flow top-down as junior officers…including some military academy cadets were inclined to insubordination or to sometimes even kill military superiors/senior government officials they felt weren’t militaristic enough. Incidentally, this was one reason why Admiral Yamamoto was made commander of the combined fleet after his stint in the Navy ministry was an effort by the Navy to protect him from assassination attempts by Army militarists who hated the fact he publicly opposed the Axis pact.
While the Wehrmacht and the SS were unquestioningly brutal and hazed their own men to some extent…including officer candidates, it was nowhere to the extreme level of brutality the Imperial Japanese armed forces meted out to men at all ranks…including officers up to the senior field grade ranks.
- The Kempeitai as a branch of the Japanese Army in some ways combined the policing/intelligence gathering/authority of the SD, Gestapo, Abwehr(German military intelligence), FeldJaegerkorps(military police), SS, etc with wide ranging authority to police military and civilians in both the occupied territories and Japan itself. A part of this is the effect of the Japanese Empire being an effective military dictatorship from the early '30s onward.
And their notoriety for unsubtle brutality and wide ranging powers(Kempeitai officers and enlisted men had stipulated powers to investigate and arrest military personnel…including those who outranked them by up to 3 grades without warrant/approval from above) was such even the most grizzled/hardnosed Imperial Japanese military personnel…including senior officers were terrified of them.
One bit of related interesting trivia is that before General Hideki Tojo became Prime Minister, he served a stint as the head of the Kempeitai in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo(Manchuria) in 1935-37…well after he was promoted to Major General in 1934.
@cobrat:
I can’t speak about the organization of the Japanese Kempetai, I am sure there are a lot of things that might not add up historically, wouldn’t surprise me. As far as the US capitulating, you have to look at what happened (in that timeline), Roosevelt had been assasinated and you would assume that Henry Wallace would have been the president at that point, someone who historically was associated with a pacifist viewpoint. More importantly, in this timeline the Germans developed nuclear weapons and they nuked Washington (the second season has John Smith witnessing the destruction of DC on holiday with his wife) and presumably may have nuked other areas (in the timeframe of this show, set in the early 1960’s, presumably the nuked areas were rebuilt). Given that context, it wasn’t just a German invasion, it also was being nuked that caused the US to capitulate.
As far as the violence of the Japanese, one of the more irritating aspects of World War II history had beem whitewashing that was done about the nature of the Japanese during the empire phase, that in a sense being told that the Japanese were nowhere near as brutal as the Germans in the Nazi regime were and this especially has been used in the years since to try and paint a picture of the use of the atomic bomb as unneeded, that the image of the Japanese willing to fight to the death, etc, wasn’t true. The reality was that the Japanese military was brutal, and the casual brutality you see was what happened all over its empire, they had nothing but disdain for the people they conquered (stupidly; in the Pacific they occupied all these places that didn’t exactly have any love for the colonial powers that ran those places for a long time, and had the Japanese treated them with a modicum of respect they might have found allies, but instead they treated them like garbage and the people in the pacific became the eyes and ears of the allies), the same way that Hirohito was not the victim of the Japanese military he has often been portrayed as. The Japanese may not have had organized genocide like the Nazis had, but the toll of their occupation might as well have been, not to mention their treatment of POW’s and things like medical experiments on people that rivalled anything Mengele did. In the show, when the head of the Kempitei gasses Frank’s sister and kids and does so expressing regret while not really caring, it says a lot to the nature of the brutality of that society.
From discussion boards I have been on one of the things people object to is this idea that Americans would never easily accept the casual brutality of either the Nazi or Japanese society in this country. Yet the show shows this all over, John Smith aka Obergruppenfuhrer Smith, was a dedicated US soldier, you see it where the woman is at this place where it seems to be snowing, and a person casually mentions it is the ash from the crematorium where they are getting rid of the bodies of ‘defectives’ and so forth, or the family doctor for John Smith’s son who obviously was practicing medicine for years before the occupation, yet is thoroughly behind euthenizing “eaters” despite the fact this goes against the very ethics doctors are supposed to uphold, Looking at John Smith’s suburban Long Island, how different is the vision you see there then the one promoted during the 1950’s, the suburban conformity, mom doing gardening wearing heels and a dress (Donna Reed, anyone?), or the not so quiet ignoring what happened to a lot of people (not to mention the casual racism expressed by some of the women), in some ways the Nazi ideal wasn’t all that much different than the ideal suburban society being promoted at the time (or looked back on with nostalgia these days). I tend to agree with the view in this series, that while there would likely be a resistance, many people would in the end shrug their shoulders, ignore the horrible things going on, and would blissfully go on leading their lives, perfectly happy with the yolk the Nazis would put on them.
My view is the High Castle scenario could only occur if the Nazis and Japanese had far greater industrial and military mobilization which would have required a historical divergence BEFORE 1933 AND the US rump government was exceedingly weakwilled, incompetent, and oblivious to the great resources, landmass, and angered aroused armed population* which could usher in far greater levels of guerilla wars/resistance than existed in occupied Europe, China, or Taiwan**.
- One documented concern among Nazi military and political leaders was how gun ownership and disdain for higher authorities in the US was such that they'd have a much harder time pacifying it if they attempted an invasion and occupation.
Also, post-war surveys of German and Japanese urbanites whose cities were bombed carried out by US Army Air Forces to determine the effectiveness of strategic bombing of cities found contrary to their preconceptions, the massive carpet bombings of cities actually caused most to be more inclined to resist/hate the allies/fight for the regime rather than be inclined to give up to the Allies.
This was also underscored by the vehement anti-Nazi/German reactions of the British populace to the Blitz in 1940…some of which continued for decades after the war or the lasting hatred of the Japanese among those who suffered bombings by their air forces from the '30s onward in Asia and the US populace after Pearl Harbor.
While the atomic bomb did play a part in strengthening the “pacifist” faction among Emperor Hirohito and his ministers, a larger reason was the rapidly deteriorating geopolitical situation with the Soviet entry into the Pacific theater of operations and not only loss of vital raw materials/weapon supplies from occupied NE China, but also Soviet invasion and consequent turning Japan into a Soviet satellite and complete eradication of the Japanese imperial family and social order. Especially after considering what happened to ex-Czar Nick II and his family a few decades before.
** When the island of Taiwan was ceded to the Japanese Empire by the Qing Dynasty after its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the local Taiwanese population despite having no industry and very limited arms/support managed to tie the IJA down in a nearly 2 decade guerrilla campaign that was only put down with extreme brutality and high casualties through combat and tropical disease.
When the IJA started the invasion of China in 1937, what PM Konoe assumed would be “an easy 3 month operation” ended up effectively tying down 1.25 million Imperial Japanese military personnel(~25% of their entire forces) for 8 years.
And both were far less advanced or industrialized or have as many well-armed citizens skeptical of higher authority compared with their US counterparts in the same period.
This is another part which wasn’t realistic as SS screening for personnel…especially officers is that they’re at least free from physical “defects”.
A bit problematic considering he had an older brother who was physically disabled from childhood by a genetic-based muscle wasting disease and he kept photo albums of his brother in a wheelchair.
Considering the thorough background checks the SS conducted on its members, it’s doubtful Smith would have been able to conceal that fact especially considering he kept those photos rather than hide/burned them to conceal that aspect of his family.
BTW: The occasion of Smith in US army uniform with his wife in the motel wasn’t a holiday. It was his reporting to the pentagon to await new orders/assignment.
^^
Correction…war department as the Pentagon wasn’t created yet.
Can we not turn this into a history thread? Thanks.
Yes, we don’t need a history lesson in a thread about binge-watching TV shows. Take it outside, guys. [-X
I think it’s probably not for this thread, but I found it interesting, and would read a MITHC thread.
@OHMomof2 …glad you are enjoying Friday Night Lights. I have received great suggestions from this thread I never would have watched. The ending is just as satisfying as Parenthoods, just thought buoy would like to know that. I’m always skeptical of starting a series when someone says the finale us bad or the last season isn’t great. I’m going to try “reign” next if it’s on Netflix. I don’t get prime.
Anyone watch Canada’s Worst Drivers? It was just added to Netflix. Sadly they list they are showing season 1 but it is season 8.
I have never seen my Ds physically cringe so much.
I tried Reign but couldn’t get past the first 15 minutes. It looked like 90210 or Baywatch of rennaissance period. Maybe I’ll try to watch again.