Everything you need to know about The Terror: Infamy on AMC

Naoko Mori as Asako Nakayama, James Saito as Wilson Yoshida, Alex Shimizu as Toshiro Furuya  – The Terror. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

A dark chapter in the history of the United States.

America has had many great moments, but we’ve also committed many mistakes we’d prefer to forget. “You have to confront a lot of very uncomfortable truths in order to tell the story in any, intimate detail in the classroom, so often it just doesn’t get told at all,” says showrunner Alexander Woo.

Woo doesn’t want the viewers to feel safe. He wants them to feel what it was like for innocent American citizens and legal immigrants to be ripped away from their homes and relocated to concentration camps where they were treated with suspicion, like an enemy. “But, this is America,” we whisper now in disbelief. “It was 1942, it was wartime.” But we should remember the harrowing experience of the Japanese-American internment camps, and we should understand.

INDEPENDENCE, CA – DECEMBER 09: A sign is posted at the entrance to Manzanar National Historic Site on December 9, 2015 near Independence, California. Recent presidential campaign rhetoric against Muslims in the wake of terror attacks has drawn comparisons to World War II era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of ten internment camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were incarcerated from 1942 to 1945 during World War II. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In the first Terror series, the most powerful sense of horror did not arise from the attacks of the supernatural being; it came from the psychological corruption of the sailors themselves, and the depiction of what men can do while slipping into starvation and insanity. It seems likely that Infamy plans to follow in that tradition, opening our eyes up to the human toll of the Japanese-American internment in 1942 through 1945, and how societal pressures can tear a culture and a people apart.

While The Terror: Infamy is a work of fiction, it is important to remember that many of the Japanese-Americans working on the series had family members who were interned during the war. Lead actor Derek Mio’s grandfather and great-grandfather were rounded up and detained. George Takei was interned when he was five years old. A poll was taken and it was discovered that the largely Asian American cast and crew had 138 immediate relatives who had been forced into the camps by Executive Order 9066.

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The Terror: Infamy premieres on AMC on Monday, August 12 at 9/8c. Watch it with us here at WiC!

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