High Castle

High Castle opens in 1942 at Southampton docks, where two young men board the merchant ship Eleanor Lee to siphon a few canisters from barrels labelled as brandy for the black market. The barrels hold something else, and the would-be thief is poisoned by what is inside them. The scene plants the episode's secret four years before the case begins.

By the time the plot proper starts, the Nuremberg trials are closing and William Knowles, a University College London professor serving as a translator at the trials, is found murdered in a London park. Foyle is brought in when the address of Clayton Del Mar is found on the body. Del Mar heads Global American Oil and is a figure of consequence to the British government, the man with access to the Shah of Iran at a moment when Britain is counting on him to keep Iran out of the Soviet orbit. Sir Alec Meyerson tells Foyle to give the American room. A second death follows: Hermann Linz, a German businessman on trial at Nuremberg for whom Knowles translated, is found murdered inside his high-security prison cell.

Foyle travels to Germany, to the site of Linz's business, the IG Farben works at Monowitz, the industrial camp attached to Auschwitz where the company hired inmates from the SS as cheap labour. Walking the abandoned site with a colleague, Alan Deakin, Foyle is shown crates of Zyklon B canisters. He establishes that Linz and Global American Oil were connected, and that the connection reaches back before the United States entered the war: the company's predecessor arrangement shipped tetraethyl lead, the aviation-fuel additive, from a plant in Britain, disguised in barrels and routed via Tenerife in the neutral Canary Islands to Germany for the Luftwaffe. The barrels in the prologue carried the additive, not drink.

Del Mar is himself shot dead outside his home by a Soviet agent, Leskov, who kills him to keep his influence over the Iranian oil talks out of British hands. The murders of Knowles and Linz are tied to the same secret, the professor killed because he had been drawn into it and the German killed to close the loop, and the record does not name the hand that carried out either killing; what is exposed is the crime the service had been willing to leave buried. MI5's protection of Del Mar, and of his father, an invalid admirer of Hitler, is shown to be the thing that let an old war profiteering go unpunished. The episode closes on conscience: Linz had bought Knowles's cooperation with diamonds taken from the inmates at Monowitz, money Knowles wanted for his wife's medical treatment, and asked whether he let her keep them, Foyle answers with a question of his own, What would you have done.

The strength is the alignment of the investigation with the real history of IG Farben and Monowitz, which gives the film a weight the earlier post-war episodes did not carry; the visit to the ruins is among the series' most carefully handled passages. Its weakness is that the villain is legible from early on, and several reviewers found the American casting, and the accent in particular, the weakest element, while the women's-employment material drew the strongest notices.

High Castle opens the final run, introduces Doctor Elizabeth Addis, Foyle's intellectual equal at UCL, and begins Sam's pregnancy, kept from Foyle. It is a howcatchem rather than a whodunit, and its concern is the grey line between wartime necessity and post-war convenience. It sets the question the run goes on asking: what the peace was willing to forgive.