Entertainment & Arts
The Complete Guide to The Man in the High Castle Season 3 – Premiering 10/5
WW2 historian Paul K. DiCostanzo breaks down Amazon’s upcoming The Man in the High Castle season 3, and the hidden WW2 history driving it.
Joe Blake & Martin Heussman: The Son Escaping the Fate of His Father?
Amazon Studios Joe Blake and Daddy Dukes, Martin Heusmann.
Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) is one of the most morally ambiguous characters that the audience has encountered. Joe is a man whose genuine superpower is the ability to simply survive in one piece. Though conflicted, the benevolent side of Joe’s nature seems to extend only insofar as it benefits him. With very few exceptions, Joe comes off as a magnificently awful bullshit artist – other than the moment of, “Daddy, don’t unleash a nuclear Holocaust.”
Joe Blake bears a great deal of personal guilt, self-loathing and intense pain of abandonment regarding his father. What Joe wants and believes is never clear or perhaps even consistent in his mind, let alone to the audience. However, The Man in the High Castle Season 3 will likely provide that clarity in Joe’s character given his largely unwitting role in events far greater than himself.
When last we left him, he was being dragged off along with his traitor father to some dark and high security cell in the bowels of Berlin. Though Joe did not commit any crime personally, his relationship to the recently removed focal point of power is guilt by association, a common and ultimately damning charge during everyday life in the court of a despot.
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It is truly unknown how Joe will escape his shackles and return to the world of the living. However, you can be certain that he will. Joe Blake will find some way to escape his prison shackles, plunging right back into the fray for The Man in the High Castle season 3.
Nickelodeon/Amazon Prime/TGNR However, it still doesn’t answer the burning question: Why are Kirk Fogg from Legends of the Hidden Temple and Joe Blake the same person?
His father may well be another story, but even former acting Chancellor Martin Heusmann (Sebastion Roche) is far from finished. As a character clearly based in part on both Nazi architect and Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and Nazi-Germany SS and US NASA rocket designer Wernher von Braun, he was chosen to be Acting Chancellor by Hitler in the event he was ever incapacitated due to Heusmann’s apolitical nature and unquestionable loyalty. Yet Heussman ultimately takes advantage of this arrangement, undertaking a coup in league with the notorious “Hitler’s Hangman,” Reinhardt Heydrich.
Bundesarchiv (Left to Right): Albert Speer, architect and Armaments Minister. Wernher von Braun, German SS Rocket Scientist, and later NASA employee who put Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon.
In so far as we know, not all of Heusmann’s co-conspirators have been identified. More to the point, leadership of the Reich has not been determined and is far from certain. That being said, the fight for succession to the post of Führer will most definitely play a central role in the events of The Man in the High Castle season 3. It is one of the grand story arc’s in the series that has been alluded to since the very first episode.
It would seem likely that Himmler is the front runner to become the next Führer. As the head of the SS and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), all of the levers of the security apparatus are in his hands. In a totalitarian state, that is a very clear way for one to fill a vacuum of power – with the exception of Soviet NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria.
Though we can also reasonably conclude that there are other remaining contenders for the position of Führer, including the Propaganda Chief/evil genius Dr. Josef Goebbels. It also stands to reason that a significant Wehrmacht figure might emerge in the struggle for dominance as well. History can attest it wouldn’t be the first time such a figure rode the barrel of a tank to ultimate power.
makeagif.com Except Michael Dukakis, of course…
