Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Terror: Infamy’ On AMC, Where Japanese Internment Camps Are Far Scarier Than Angry Spirits

The Terror has given viewers an interesting twist to the horror anthology series: Take real events, fictionalize them, and mix existential dread with supernatural elements. It has definitely been a daring way to go, but the show’s second season, Infamy, will also add an element of sad parallels to current events to the formula. Read on for more…

THE TERROR: INFAMY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A Japanese woman puts on makeup, and, dressed in a traditional robe, puts a sharp chopstick in her hair. Then she stumbles out the edge of a dock, takes the chopstick out, and kills herself by slowly pushing it into her brain through her ear.

The Gist: The woman who killed herself was Masayo Furuya (Yuki Morita), who passed homeopathic remedies to the Japanese residents in the tiny fishing village on Terminal Island in San Pedro, CA. No one is quite sure why she killed herself, but after her funeral, a wind comes through and knocks her out of her casket. The folks in the village who moved there from Japan in the previous decades think the ancient spirits are sending a message. Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio), born and raised on the island, thinks that’s bunk.

It’s 1941, and Chester works on the fishing boat his father Henry (Shingo Usami) has been operating since leaving Japan in the ’10s. Part of the family on the boat is Nobuhiro Yamato (George Takei), who people call “Pop” or “Yamato-san,” who talks about boxing a massive tuna onto the boat when he was a young man. When Stan Grichuk (Teach Grant), the manager of the local cannery, starts to deride the quality of Henry’s recent catches in order to pay a lower rate, Chester steps in and offers to go through the catch himself. Henry glares at his brash son, feeling it wasn’t his place.

There’s a life beyond the island for Chester, anyway. He’s a photographer and a college graduate, and he wants to travel the country. He’s derailed after Luz Ojeda (Cristina Rodlo), the woman he’s seeing on the mainland, gets pregnant. He went to Mrs. Furuya for a potion that will stop the pregnancy shortly before the woman killed herself; he feels the shame of that drove her to it. Still, that won’t keep him from trying to live his own life, much to his father’s dismay.

More mysterious attacks happen. Mrs. Furuya’s abusive husband Hideo (Eiji Inoue) gets blinded, and Grichuk is found dead, wrapped up in one of Henry’s fishing nets after threatening to out Henry to the government as a spy (he’s not a spy, but didn’t register his boat when Japanese fisherman were required to). Chester keeps finding a weird presence in his photographs, and an encounter with a young Japanese woman named Yuko (Kiki Sukezane) at a brothel leads him to completely rebel from his parents, and even encourage Luz to travel with him and their child (she refuses).

But on December 7, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the village has other concerns; Henry and all the other non-citizen males on the island are rounded up by the FBI for their “protection.” Of course, the families on the island aren’t aware of what’s to come, when they’ll all be living in internment camps in one of the U.S. most shameful actions against its own residents and citizens.

Our Take: The second season of The Terror takes its historical horror anthology theme to a level that hits much closer to home with Infamy. Not only is it closer to home because this takes place in a more recent past than the first season did, but it also happens in the United States… and not-so-coincidentally echoes what’s going on now with our country’s immigration policies, making the internment camp part of the season a whole heck of a lot scarier than any of the supernatural elements.

Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein, who created the second season (Woo is the showrunner) already establish in the first episode that, while the ancient spirits are going to be lurking around, they’re certainly not the scariest thing we’re going to see this season. We’re going to see the U.S. government, paranoid that the Japanese people residing in the country will spy for their home country, round up loyal American residents and even citizens and lock them up.

Having Takei, who spent time in one of the internment camps as a child and has tried to raise awareness about how terrible they were, as part of the ensemble gives the story Woo and Borenstein are telling a stamp of authenticity. Yes, the story itself is fiction, but the experience the families that were interned in those west coast camps is likely to be very authentic, and the fear that they feel about their fate will also be very real. Nothing can feel scarier than your government imprisoning you even though you’ve done nothing wrong, and it feels like no vengeful spirit would be able to rival that feeling. So the encroaching dread Woo and Borenstein can give Chester and the rest of the island as the feds keep rounding people up will be palpable.

The performances, especially by Mio and Usami, bring you into a world where the new and old butt heads; Chester wants to break away, and not be under the thumb of white men like Grichuk, but Henry feels that he’s toiled too long to build what he has and refuses to let pride get in the way of that. The first generation Japanese-Americans tend not to believe in the ancient spirits, but their parents still think they hold sway. How this will all translate to the dynamic inside the camps will be fascinating to watch.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: The young woman from the brothel tears her skin as she takes off her makeup, showing some weird stuff beneath. She sews it up using a needle she bent herself. All of a sudden, the stitches are gone.

Sleeper Star: We keep forgetting how good an actor Takei is, but his brief scenes as Yamato-san reestablishes that in our minds. We also liked Miki Ishikawa as Amy Yoshida, a neighbor and friend of Chester’s who’s just as resistant to the old ways as he is.

Most Pilot-y Line: Teach Grant sounded like a Chinatown-era Jack Nicholson when he was playing Grichuk, and we don’t know why.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Terror: Infamy will thrive if it leans on the fear of the families while they’re in the camps, because of how real and relevant it feels to viewers.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream The Terror: Infamy on AMC