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.
Mark Sampson: A Noble & Courageous Bad Ass
Amazon Studios Mark Sampson
According to the powers that be for The Man in the High Castle, Mark Sampson (Michael Gaston) will be a frequently reoccurring character in Season 3. For a figure that has had a very limited role in the first two seasons, Sampson’s impact has vastly outweighed the small amount of screen time he has had thus far.
While it’s largely impossible to predict how the writers will choose to use Sampson going forward, it could not be more fantastic that they’re doing so.
Sampson is a figure in the narrative who can and has provided some much needed depth in regards to world building. More importantly, Sampson is a practicing Jew secretly raising his children Jewish. Yet it’s his recollections that have been so haunting, and so good.
Sampson was living in Boston at the beginning of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the US eastern seaboard, and his retelling – while brief – is highly alarming. As an American, it is the pinnacle of disturbing to visualize a pogrom occurring in Boston Commons in an act of anticipatory obedience; a behavior seen in other nations occupied by the Axis during the Second World War.
Though Sampson’s greatest value takes the form of his ability to see the bigger picture with his very genuine confidence, who proves very sagely in those assessments:
• “I don’t plan on dying, Frank. But you can’t live your life in fear. I was back east at the end of the war, in Boston… Yeah. You had to see it to believe it, Frank. Overnight, lynch mobs were murdering Jews because suddenly we were less than human.”
• “And Hitler and the Nazi’s – I mean, I don’t care how it looks. They won’t last. One thing I realized about my people is we got a different sense of time. These may be dark years, but we’ll survive. We always do.”
• “Well, those of us who came out in one piece. We buried service weapons underground, well wrapped in oil, and we vowed revenge.”
This man is a genuine bad ass, and can only be part of the solution. His increased role in The Man in the High Castle Season 3 will only improve the narrative. It is fair to say, under the circumstances of this alternate 1962, Mark Sampson is one of the few people you would want to share a foxhole with. Sampson is confident, wise, inspiring, brave, and a true leader. One cannot wait to learn more about him, and how he will fit into the mesmerizing bigger picture.
Speaking of learning more about characters, no two characters throughout the series have been more defined by their contrast to each other than Ed McCarthy and Robert Childan. Both of which are threads in the tapestry of the narrative The Man in the High Castle Season 3 is set to address.
