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

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama — The Terror. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC.

The dilemmas of Chester Nakayama

The main character in Infamy is Chester, a US-born Japanese-American (Nisei) from Terminal Island, California. He’s trapped in limbo between the Old World of his immigrant parents and the New World life of an American college student. He’s “a proud, stubborn young man” who dreams of one day escaping his “tiny island” and exploring the world as a photographer for LIFE Magazine.

After the Japanese Empire’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Chester and his family have been relocated to an internment camp, and that’s where his world turns into an unsettling horrorscape. He, his family and the entire traumatized community are haunted by Yuko, a beautiful ghost who has something to do with Chester’s past. Here’s a Sneak Peek of the premiere episode (Season 2, Episode 1, “Chester’s Discovery”).

Is that the ghostly Yuko in that photograph? Chester has other big problems on top of the ghost issue: his girlfriend Luz (Rodlo) has become pregnant, which presents a cultural minefield for the m to navigate. He is born of Japanese immigrants and she is Latina — but the USA, like Nazi Germany in 1942, has strict miscegenation laws.

What are miscegenation (or anti-miscegenation) laws? They are laws that enforce racial segregation in marriage and personal relationships, criminalizing interracial marriage and even sexual contact between members of different races. Between the cultural tensions with his family, forced internment, American miscegenation laws and an infuriated supernatural being, Chester finds himself in an awful situation.