+1 on the Cultural Revolution parallels.  I really think that was primarily what the show was going for.

Given the immense changes to life in the North America and Europe many (most?) 20-year olds won’t have an alt-persona in the Nebenwelt. We could run a statistical model to get a the year when 99% of the troops could safely travel.

Are we all buying that Tamiko is just a chance love interest for Tagomi? Maybe this season has left me trusting nobody, but I kept having this nagging feeling that she is a plant/spy.

The GNR leadership is evil, but there are also clearly pragmatists in it too; that’s why Tagomi’s plan with the H-bomb test footage worked. To be confident of even getting half your invasion force through the anomaly would require massively depopulating the invasion target and, unless you have a traveler who can come…

this was more directly evocative of the actual nazi pogroms and rallies

I think that’s a fair read of Smith. He joined the Nazis because it seemed like the best option for survival once their invasion of North America was underway, but we haven’t seen anything so far to suggest that he was particularly pro-Nazi prior to the invasion. 

Himmler is a true believer (easy to do when your beliefs are running things), far from a cartoon.

Or Natalie mentioning one of her dresses was by Chanel.

I suspect major league baseball has been banned/abolished. Baseball played as a private sport still exists in the American Reich, but it’s considered somewhat degenerate. (I don’t remember the specifics, but in one of the previous seasons Thomas talks about baseball briefly and his father comments about how much…

Childan is also the only American who appreciates Japanese culture, if not spiritually then certainly out of respect for their sense of order and ritual approach to everyday routine, or at least to make a sale.

The trailer for Franklyn looked really intriguing, but I was seriously underwhelmed by the actual execution of it.

2015: Probably Age Of Ultron, but I’d like to see a write-up on Ant-Man.

You’re not the only one. I still consider TDK to be the Citizen Kane of superhero movies — it may not be the most fun (GotG), or the most flashy (Thor: Ragnarok), or even the one that I’ll watch the most often (Iron Man), but it is a truly great film with a depth that I would say only two MCU films have close to approa…

Gah! It won’t stop looking into my soul!!!

Counterpoint: Zero pickles. More onion. That’s the way rib sandwiches should be.

Fascist!  Socialist!

If it was occasional or isolated references it wouldn’t bother me at all. The issue is that there is a tremendous amount of stuff coming out these days targeted at kids where the entire premise of the work is meta/deconstructive or almost every scene depends on meta/deconstructive humor/references. My parents didn’t…

Thank you, that perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to think of to express how I felt when I saw the picture.

Did anyone else think Rockwell got to Cuba and settled in way too fast? Based on what we see in the rest of the show, it looks like he gets packed, goes to Cuba, goes straight to the bar to watch the show, and gets killed within no more than a day at absolute most.

The character of Smith doesn’t exist in the book and the show has pretty much completely left the book behind at this point. Not a complaint, I’ll emphasize, because the show is fantastic, but it should be kept in mind that (a) virtually the entire American Reich storyline is original to the show in the first place,…