Amazon's Man in the High Castle gets Season 3 trailer, 2018 release window

We finally have a look at the third season of Amazon's alternate-reality drama Man in the High Castle, which imagines if the Nazi's had won WWII. The footage dropped earlier today at New York Comic Con.

Also at New York Comic Con, the cast and crew spoke about Dick’s reality-bending themes, which are driving The Man in the High Castle to new heights (and depths). Season 3 follows on from the Season 2 reveal of Julianna Crane’s sister—the one who died back in the Season 1.

Alexa Davalos, who plays Julianna, said, “I love Philip K Dick, his perception, his questioning of reality in ways that are really next level.” Julianna meeting another version of her sister was enough, she said, to open the doors of the character’s mind.

Isa Dick Hackett--executive producer, as well as Dick's daughter--explains that questioning reality is only a part of what Dick focused on. Quoting her father, she said, “The enemy is fascism wherever it exists.”

As producer Dan Percival said, “Fascism wants to create one version of the news, one version of the truth.”

But as the characters in The Man in the High Castle are learning, there’s more than one version of everything.

The series will return to Amazon in a bingeable full-season drop sometime in 2018. The trailer, consisting of a 3-minute long clip, showed off a most foreboding interaction between Rufus Sewell's SS Obergruppenführer and John Hans Tester's Doctor Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician and Nobel Prize winner conducting research in Berlin.

This trailer-clip doubles down on the show's concept of alternate realities as Mengele shows Smith a sedated "film courier" from another universe (no doubt another agent under Hawthorne Abendsen) strapped to an examination table and hooked up to machines in an unsettlingly pristine labratory.

Mengele goes on to explain that she is being studied to help the Third Reich make a breakthrough in its attempts to "traverse the astral plane" and visit other worlds, which Smith likens to American science fiction writer, Fredric Brown. If the Nazis are successful in their endeavours, it will not just hurt the resistance, but a plague of institutionalized racism, bigotry and murder shall spread across the entire multiverse, which we got a little taste of with Trade Minister Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) last season. 

The real-life Josef Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death, would be an unlikely 106 years old today, and was a horrific war criminal, personally selecting prisoners for the gas chambers and conducting human experiments routinely. He was highly sought by the Israeli Mossad and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal in South America in the years following the war, but gave them the slip after becoming spooked by the capture of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s. He unfortunately eluded justice until his death in São Paulo, Brazil at the age of 67. 

Tester is not the first actor to bring Mengele to life onscreen in a fictional capacity. Gregory Peck played the conscienceless doctor in the 1978 adaptation of Ira Levin's novel The Boys From Brazil.

Jason O'Mara will also join the series as a new protagonist, Wyatt Price, whose family fled Ireland to NYC to try to escape the Nazis. Michael Gaston was promoted from recurring to series regular for Season 3, as well.

This is also the first season with new showrunner Eric Overmyer, who joins the show after Frank Spotnitz's abrupt departure during the shooting of Season 2.