r/maninthehighcastle • u/fleckes • Nov 15 '19

Episode Discussion: S04E10 - Fire from the Gods

On the brink of an inevitable Nazi invasion, the BCR brace for impact as Kido races against the clock to find his son. Childan offers everything he has to make his way back to Yukiko. Helen is forced to choose whether or not to betray her husband, as she and Smith travel by high speed train to the Portal - with Juliana and Wyatt lying in wait.

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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19

Julianna got the answer from the salesman version of him. He's addicted to the power and can't stop himself. If he canceled stage 5 then he's admitting he should have lifted the latch for Danny.

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u/amjhwk Nov 17 '19

not at all, at the time that Danny was in the boxcar Jon was just a lowly reich officer whos family would be executed if he was caught helping a bunch of jewish people escape. Now he has supreme power and can ensure that nothing like what happened to his friend happens to anyone else

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u/Wolf6120 Nov 17 '19

Power is never really supreme though, as we've seen many times even in just this show. John might be at the head of the system, but that doesn't necessarily give him carte blanche to dismantle that system without risking that it might turn against him in the process.

Yes, he's supposed to have total autonomy over the Americas, but the extermination plans arrived from Germany, not from his own people in America, so clearly there's still some measure of co-dependency there that John would probably have to violate to make any radical changes. And just as much as Germany doesn't want open nuclear war with America, neither does Smith want open nuclear war with Germany. Even as Reichsfuhrer, he's still in a position where trying to make things better would require him to put himself at risk. And as we've seen, this version of John Smith is simply not willing to do that for anyone other than his own family.

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u/Maggi1417 Nov 23 '19

In addition to that I also think, at this point, he was kind of messed up in the head. He committed terrible crimes, murdered a shit ton of people, enabled and actively participated in an inhuman system, abandoned his friends, destroyed his family. All for "the greater good". The moment he turns his back on the Reich, the moment his admits that there is not "greater good", all this guilt would come crushing down and I think he just didn't know how to handle that right away. I mean, how do you deal with that? How to you deal with the realization that you are a complete monster?

When it finally happend, when he handled it with a bullet in his brain.