The first season of “The Man in the High Castle,” Amazon's television adaptation of Philip K. Dick's alternate-history novel, was an oddly muted exercise in reorientation — in altering the audience's assumptions about Nazis and World War II by bringing to life a world where the war ended much differently. The plot of the first season was not terribly interesting, but that was beside the point; the point was seeing Nazi America on the Eastern seaboard, while the Empire of the Sun shone over California.

It's in its dreamlike vision that the show “Man in the High Castle” has anything in common with Dick's story — in its details and grace notes, it is about the fungibility of culture, and how some values and aesthetics can become embalmed in hegemony, while others become curiosities to wonder at behind glass display cases.

It was weirdly enchanting to be immersed in a cinematic portrayal of Nazis and fascism that wasn't tinged by war, but rather the immaculate bureaucracy of totalitarianism in peacetime. What is most fascinating about “Man in the High Castle” is that it is not trying to eradicate either Nazism or Hirohito's empire, despite how hateful both can be. Instead, at its finest, it wonders what it would be like to really live there — as a human who, like most of us, has to invest at least a bit in the world around us in order to find some apparatus of survival.

All-American patriot John Smith (Rufus Sewell) becomes a high-ranking Nazi, the obergruppenfuhrer stationed in New York City, while secretly Jewish Frank Frink (Rupert Evans) makes money counterfeiting Americana for Japanese collectors. It is a drama of normalization, that word that has been bandied about a lot since the presidential election. It is about life proceeding apace, even when Jewish families and children with congenital ailments are carted away to be gassed, while Japanese officials make plans to secretly transport nuclear material on passenger buses.

But it's not solely about that, and that's when “Man in the High Castle's” ambitions start to get the better of it. The show attempted to incorporate a complicated and lovely idea into its first season — loosely derived from the book — wherein reels of banned film circulating around the world, depicting alternate histories of what could have happened or might still happen to the world.

The first season introduced this supernatural device without, apparently, having much of an idea of where it would go. The second season does have an idea of where it would go, and … well. The show is fond of using the noise that projectors make when they run out of film in the reel, and keep clicking desperately waiting for new material. The second season feels a little bit like that noise. It lays an interesting foundation and builds up quite a head of steam by the final few episodes — but you can feel the projector sputtering with a kind of desperation as the final hours spool out. Season 2 produces more answers and more action than Season 1 — but those answers are curiously flat, following what has been hours and hours of little more than texture. And it ends with a bait-and-switch that is both too expository and too frustrating, the exact kind of twist you hope a show will not pull.

More often than not, “Man in the High Castle” doesn't seem to know what it's about — the show did lose its showrunner Frank Spotnitz midway through filming Season 2, and did not replace him — but to its credit, it still manages to engage with its ideas in interesting, evocative ways. The show can sometimes produce moments of astonishing and quiet loveliness, even when the scope of the plot has gotten strangely overbearing.