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| “ | We've seen things... you and me. Other worlds. Other lives. We... we have that in common. It's unbearable. To be able to look through that door and glimpse all the people you could've been. And to know that out of all of them... this is the one you became. | „ |
| ~ John's last words to Juliana Crain before taking his own life. |
John Smith is the secondary antagonist of the Amazon Prime TV series The Man in the High Castle. He's a former American soldier who defected to the Nazi Reich after the fall of America in the Second World War, in an effort to keep his family safe, but ultimately lost his way in the power.
He is portrayed by Rufus Sewell, who also portrayed Count Armand in The Legend of Zorro, Adam in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Count Adhemar in A Knight's Tale, Urshu in Gods of Egypt, Eric Stark in Bless the Child, Crown Prince Leopold in The Illusionist, and Sir Claude in Blinky Bill the Movie.
Biography[]
Early life[]
John was born to an American family in 1914, and grew up in the poverty-stricken New York City during the Great Depression. He had a brother named Edmund whom he loved a lot, and who unfortunately developed severe muscular dystrophy. He became severely handicapped and eventually died in his and John's youth.
He fought in the US Army Signal Corps against the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II, fighting in the Solomon Islands. John and Helen got married in 1944 and fathered a child with her, and while on leave with her, he witnessed the German atomic bombing of Washington, D.C., and was among the last soldiers to resist to the German invasion of North America. When he was in the Army, he was stationed in Fort Monmouth with Helen and their son, Thomas. They moved before his daughters were born.
- Kido: The Solomon Islands. Why display a medal from your US military service?
- Smith: I keep it as a reminder. The consequences of failure of command.
- Kido: There were many casualties in that campaign. On both sides.
- Smith: Were you there?
- Kido: Yes, Obergruppenführer. I was. - Episode 2 of season 5
He turned to Nazism in 1946, when his commanding officer visited his home bearing a swastika armband. He gave him, Helen, their newborn son Thomas, and his military peers Bill Whitcroft and Daniel Levine food, and laid out spare armbands, and suggested they sign on to the Nazi regime, lest they face potentially deadly consequences for continuing holding out. Bill suggested they accept, while Daniel refused due to his Jewish faith, wanting to continue the fight. John reminds him of the Nazis' possession of the atomic bomb, and that they're too powerful to resist. John capitulated to the Reich while Daniel sadly escaped. Years later when John became a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in Nazi America (a satellite of the Greater Nazi Reich), he found out that Daniel had been captured, but refused to set him free. Daniel would later be executed and John would come to regret his decision.
In 1947, John, now Scharführer Smith, served alongside Rudolph Wegener in the SS, and the two took part in the North American Holocaust, effectively desensitizing John but psychologically tormenting Wegener. John quickly climbed the ranks of Nazism to Obergruppenführer of the New York Corps. He would also later father two daughters, Jennifer and Amy.
Season 1[]
In 1962, John sent SS agent Joe Blake to investigate the growing partisan movement by having he accept a role as a Resistance driver transporting objects into the Neutral Zone, an anarchic buffer state located in the Rocky Mountains between Nazi America and the Japanese Pacific States, acting as a double agent. In the Neutral Zone town of Canon City, he would have met another Resistance operative, to which he would have given the cargo. Joe frequently phoned to John, who meanwhile interrogated, torturate and killed the Resistance chief who sent Joe in the Zone, asking informations about what he did transport. The day after, John was caught in a trap attack by "Semite terrorists", most of which he did kill during the attack. John tried to interrogate a survivor, and used the interrogation as a psychological trick to find out that his assistant Erich Raeder was not involved in the plot. John started a big investigation, which led him to his friend, disillusioned Standartenführer Rudolph Wegener, and to the cruel mastermind behind the Holocaust, Oberst-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, whose goal was to kill most of the Greater Nazi Reich's leaders, including Führer Adolf Hitler himself, and declare war to the Empire of Japan, the only other country in the World. John warned Hitler and arrested Heydrich.
Season 2[]
John was greatly involved in the Reich's problems in later 1962, starting with him helping Resistance member Juliana Crain, who was escaping the Japanese Pacific States, in reaching the American Reich. He questioned her and creates her the false identity of "Julia Mills", while keeping the whole situation a secret from Joe Blake, who had met and fallen in love with Juliana in Canon City, Neutral Zone. He also ignited a friendly relationship between her and his wife and son, who was meanwhile subject of serious problems because of a diagnosticated muscular dystrophia, a genetical illness of which John's brother also suffered, and which, by law, required euthanasisation.
Season 3[]
At the end of Season 3, he stares out of his apartment window at the Jahr Null chaos happening below and looks lost. In Season 4, he seems to have forgotten that he is disgusted by the Reich and its propaganda.
Season 4[]
In Season 2, he refused to raze Savannah, saying, "I won't burn one of our own cities." Yet, he's willing to conduct attacks against people on the west coast in Season 4.
Season four picks up right where season three left off, with Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) being shot by Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell) just as she escapes to the alternate world where the Allies have won the war.
While Juliana spends a year in the alternate world, the power shifts between the Reich and the Japanese Pacific States leave an opening for Smith to consolidate his power. These shifts are thanks in part to the efficient and growing activity of the Black Communist Rebellion, a newly introduced faction of resistance fighters. The Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen (Stephen Root), is still in Nazi custody, forced to deny his life's work in the form of a propaganda campaign to demoralize the Resistance.
The last season is divided between giving a few more details (very quickly and depending on the viewer's concentration) about the points of contact between the parallel worlds: while some characters like Juliana and Togomi (the Japanese Empire's Minister of Commerce) have the ability to move between worlds through altered states of consciousness, the Nazis need heavy technological paraphernalia – a kind of underground tunnel based on quantum mechanics.
The Nazi ambition will now be to conquer all the parallel worlds – spies are sent to bring new technologies and sabotage the powers that defeated the alt-Nazis. This is the project “Die Nebenwelt”.
It is clear why hundreds of test subjects were sacrificed in the experiment: not all of them can pass to the other worlds – unless their alternative version does not exist or has died. This is the Doppelganger paradox: two alternative versions cannot occupy the same dimension.
Season 5[]
Alt-smith had to be killed off to allow him to visit our world. He visits the alt-world and has flashbacks to how he failed his Jewish friend, but at the end of the show, he was willing to set up concentration camps, again.
Finally, the serie actually killed both good and bad John, so not only do the Smiths have a depressing ending in the main world, but now alt-Helen and alt-Thomas have suffered, as well.
He was pushed into killing off the high leadership as Himmler had ordered Hoover to investigate him. Himmler truly did want to see Smith as his son and was disappointed that Smith didn’t truly believe in the Reich. The serie turned John Smith from a man who had serious doubts about the Reich and who never desired power into a man who wanted power and decided to set up camps, attack his own people, and to have his own "Reich."
Once he got autonomous control of North America he had to take over and integration with other races after two decades of hardcore indoctrination would have been very difficult to achieve. Keep in mind when he says don’t raze one of our own cities he is concerned about his own people... he means The Aryan Americans. Both Helen and Smith believed in Reich policy on racial purity and other BS until as she mentioned they became the victims with their son’s death. They had committed unspeakable evil to survive.
The concentration camps were likewise already drawn up before he got promoted, and when he said that he 'doesn't know how' to even stop it, he might be referring to the fact that he thinks he has to keep up the masquerade of the perfect Nazi, especially as Reichsfuhrer who still has ties with Berlin. He's just completely apathetic to their fate or well-being, being a 'Reich wants what the Reich wants' type of person.
John Smith in the end was an ordinary guy with the great skill of manipulating people whether through sales or rising power. I really believe the premise of this show is how ordinary people can so easily do extraordinarily terrible things and how desensitized they can become to evil.
Trivia[]
- The character of John Smith is arguably one of the series' most enigmatic ones. Wholly loathsome in his business and beliefs, John nevertheless manages to walk the fine line between villainy and complexity.
- John Smith is an original character in the series, not appearing in the 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick.
- Rufus Sewell turns in what is arguably the series' strongest performance, managing to make John equal parts fearsome and empathetic, particularly in his willingness to do whatever it takes to keep his family safe - no matter how unsuccessful certain attempts may be.
- Metaphysics, the banality of Evil and Politics - John is a high-ranking Nazi official who is tasked with investigating a potential resistance movement in the United States. He is ruthless and efficient, but he is also struggling with personal issues involving his family and his own mortality.
But there is an interesting theme that season 4 adds: we learn that the two versions of John Smith (the Nazi and the humble salesman) have certain tendencies in common – in Smith’s case, the attraction to Power. His alt version resisted this appeal, abandoning the US Army Signal Corps. While John Smith became “the worst alternative of himself”, as he bitterly confesses in the final monologue of the last episode.
We've seen things... you and me. Other worlds. Other lives. We... we have that in common. It's unbearable. To be able to look through that door and glimpse all the people you could've been. And to know that out of all of them... this is the one you became. - John from Juliana
The Man in The High Castle touches on a metaphysical theme originally addressed in the seminal Gnostic film Dark City (1998) – aliens imprison humans in an artificial city in which, daily, the identities of all the inhabitants are exchanged while they sleep: the aliens want to discover in the experiment our “souls”, that is, the permanent human essence behind the multiple identities that we assume in various existences.
More disturbingly, another issue raised is the banality of Evil, an expression coined by German political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). In the four seasons, we follow the two executioners on each side of this alternative Cold War: on the Japanese side, Inspector Kido, of the Japanese state police – the Kempeitai; and on the other, Obergruppenführer John Smith. Both are family men, sincerely concerned about their wives and children.
- John Smith's suicide at the end of season 4 could be a possible reference to Adolf Hitler's suicide in 1945 at the end of WW2 in our timeline.
Quotes[]
- Well, the Romans called Hannibal a primitive right up until he marched his army all the way from Africa on elephants and crushed them. In war, technology and wealth are no guarantee of victory. What matters is the will to win. - Episode No Masters But Ourselves
- Smith: [Silence] Tell me something, Chief Inspector. Soldier to soldier. You must have known before you came here that I would refuse your extradition request. Why are you really here? - Kido's Surprise Visit to John Smith