The Terror: Infamy
Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein
Initial release: August 12, 2019-October 14, 2019 (Second season, 10 episodes)
Network: AMC
In 1942, months after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States, by presidential order, put about 112,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them living on the west coast, into concentration camps, seen as spies and traitors. As moral failures of America go, this is pretty high on the list, yet it remains a lesser-known entry on a litany of national sins. But not everyone is keen to sweep it under the rug; in recent decades, a growing movement to recognize the inhumanity of this act has gained a lot of momentum. The internment camps was a move that continues to haunt the national conscience, providing an all-too-appropriate backdrop for The Terror: Infamy, an unexpected second season to the hit AMC miniseries (thus turning it into a historical horror anthology) in which a Japanese-American family is tormented by the ghost of past sins. It's a plot right out of gothic horror, proving that the genre most definitely is not dead yet.
Prior to America's entry into the war, Terminal Island, a little spit of land off the coast of Los Angeles, was home to a community of Japanese migrant fishermen. The story begins with a suicide; the Nakayama's sweet neighbor killing herself, leaving behind her drunken brute of a husband and their teenage son. As the community mourns and puzzles over her motive, a series of mysterious incidents and ill omens begin to pile up. As Chester Nakayama, an aspiring photographer split between two cultures, begins to wonder if he might be cursed, the whole family is rounded up and shipped off to an internment camp in Oregon, including Chester's reluctant, pregnant girlfriend Luz.
Life in the internment camps isn't great, with the camp commandant a rough-hewn old bastard whose racism, sexism and resentment simmer beneath the surface, belying his "reasonable authority figure" act; in a very real way, he's worse than whatever haunts the Nakayamas. Little by little, the truth behind the hauntings is revealed, the family's tormentor being a bakemono, a sort of shapeshifter, in this case a revenant whose perpetually rotting corpse is merely the primary vessel for a body-hopping ghost with a serious grudge against the family and a particular fixation on Chester in particular.
The original season of The Terror is peak television, adapting Dan Simmons' historical horror novel of the same name into an incredible ten-part miniseries that smooths out a lot of the book's rough edges and bad ideas. While reception to the second season hasn't been nearly as universal in acclaim, I still think it's a solid show. The main issue with Infamy is in its pacing; the first few episodes are as slow a start as can be, because everything seems come together in the final four or five episodes. I love slow burns, but they can be hard to get right; ironically, I think this story would work better if it had at least a couple of more episodes in the middle.
Nevertheless, The Terror: Infamy is everything good television should be: generally solid writing (definitely better than the show's most relevant competition, American Horror Story, even if that's a low bar) with a solid cast (including Naoko Mori and George Takei) and some really great directing, with the final two episodes (directed by Frederick E.O. Toye) being quite stunning looking. A great use of set design certainly doesn't hurt either, particularly given the limited use of settings (similar to the original season spending most of its runtime on two icebound ships.)
Regardless of how one may feel about The Terror: Infamy as a show — most fans of the original season seem to hate it — I find it refreshing; blending J-horror with American prestige-TV sensibilities is a great combination, but more than that, it's a daring message show that juxtaposes the creeping dread of the yurei and the old sins at the root of her fury with a national shame that we have yet to fully come to grips with. In an America that seems to be getting more and more unequal every day, possessed by the ghosts of old racial and class hatreds, shows like Infamy are important in bringing new voices, especially to a genre with a long history of uneven representation of the minority experience.
I liked The Terror: Infamy. You may or may not. But I think we can at least agree that a show like this deserves to exist; as the Nakayama family grapples with the ghost of their past, so too must we grapple with the ghosts of our national histories.