WiC Watches—The Terror: Infamy

The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 2 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Episode 202: “All the demons are still in hell”

Episode 2 of AMC’s The Terror: Infamy wastes no time in getting to the supernatural scares, as did the first episode. A Japanese elder sees the mysterious Yuko, and Yamato-san swallows old world prayer protections and warns of ancient Japanese phantoms such as the obaki.

“All the demons are still in hell” opens with the Japanese-American population being shipped out of their homes on Terminal Island and temporarily being housed in hotels. The elder Wilson Yoshida glimpses the ghost of Yuko, so we know what his future holds. Some of the men, including Henry and Yamato-San, have been separated from their families and taken to a camp in North Dakota. Chester returns to school to see his sympathetic mentor, Professor Henkoff, and shows him the strange blurry images appearing in his funeral photographs. Henkoff offers little guidance:

"Well, if you ask my old professor, he’d say it’s a combination of a slow shutter and a shaky hand; if you ask my old Jewish mother, she’d say you’ve been taking photos of things you shouldn’t be."

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama, Cristina Rodlo as Luz Ojeda – The Terror _ Season 2, Gallery – Photo Credit: Maxine Helfman/AMC

Chester runs into Luz in the school hallway, and she’s very much visibly pregnant, which could be a complication. Chester and Luz find a quiet place to talk things over; the chemistry between these two characters continues to be one of Infamy‘s strongest elements.

When the Japanese-Americans are informed they have 48 hours before being relocated to crude facilities at the Edendale racetrack, Chester takes on his father’s role in the family. Upon arrival, the families are billeted in a dung-spattered horse stall. Yuko appears at the racetrack cam. She seems to have both the Yoshida and Furuya families in her vicious sights.

Chester and Luz try to make a run for it, staying in hiding with professor Henkoff for a while, but neighbors tip off the FBI and Chester is arrested. Luz confesses to carrying his mixed-blood child, and she is interned with him. At the racetrack camp, Wilson sees Yuko, whom he recognizes, then steals a rifle and forces guards to kill him. Yuko, her head bleeding and nails discolored, appears to be deteriorating. Loaded into a convoy of buses, the Japanese-Americans are relocated to an internment camp at Colinas de Oro, Oregon.

So far, Infamy has drawn early and often from the ghostly well of kaidan Japanese folklore. The blurry camera images, freaky deaths and the weird nature of Yuko are loud, familiar and effective, but there’s also an undercurrent of unnecessary urgency pushing it along, as if the storytellers don’t trust their material enough to allow the supernatural elements to surface more slowly and naturally. If we look back at the first season of The Terror, the otherworldly horror of the Inuit-beast appeared later, and was far more enigmatic (even if, ultimately, it proved to be somewhat underwhelming). It took a back seat to the trials of the beleaguered men of the Franklin expedition pretty much from beginning to end.

There is a great story of damaged, courageous, mistake-prone and hopeful human beings flowing through The Terror: Infamy. This episode excels not in its rather familiar spookiness, but in its quietest, character-driven moments: Chester walking through the now hostile corridors of his school and witnessing Luz’s advancing pregnancy and the wrenching sequence where Luz see the army removing the Japanese-American children from St. Jerome’s orphanage “for security.”

Though episodes one and two have a slight by-the-numbers feel, the story progresses at a good clip, and contains some powerful imagery. The removal of the orphan children by American soldiers is brutal, and the look of the Oregon “war relocation center” parallels that of Nazi concentration camps. Infamy has the fuel to deliver immense, punch-to-the-gut dramatic power.  And if at first I worried that the show might lean too heavily on its supernatural spookiness to the detriment of its wrenching human story, by the end of “All the demons are still in hell,” I am confident that isn’t going to happen.