WiC Watches—The Terror: Infamy

Episode 204: “The Weak Are Meat”

RECAP

The boldly titled “The Weak Are Meat” opens with Chester now stationed in Guadalcanal, serving as a translator/codebreaker for the US Army; he isn’t close to the front lines, but he and fellow Japanese-American serviceman Arthur Ogawa (Marcus Toji) are eyed warily by their fellow soldiers. Chester can’t sleep, and he’s certain there is a yurei stalking through the jungles around him.

Back at the interment camp, Luz struggles to gain acceptance from Chester’s stubborn father, Henry, but finds support from his mother, Asako. Luz is still seeing the Japanese midwife (actually the demon in its pretty Yuko disguise), who seems too intimately attached to the unborn baby. When an MP later stumbles across the increasingly decaying Yuko, she enters his body and throws him off a watchtower as if he’s drunk. Blaming the prisoners, the racist camp commander Major Bowen (C. Thomas Howell) has his troopers turn the place upside down looking for contraband sake, and end up arresting Walt Yoshida (Lee Shorten).

Luz continues to see the midwife/Yuko, who appears to be able to maintain her pleasant appearance in her presence, and announces that she’s having twins. Luz later finds out that twins are considered a curse in Japanese tradition, but she also forges a connection with Henry by honoring him.

In the Pacific, a sleepless and hallucinating Chester figures out how to locate a missing American sergeant named Crittenden (Josh Hudniuk), who is recovered spouting vicious Japanese curses. Later, Chester is assaulted by a group of hateful US soldiers, but the attackers are all killed by Crittenden, who is apparently possessed by a Japanese yurei and serving an Admiral Takahashi.

Luz goes into labor and Yuko hijacks the body of the attending nurse in order to be involved. The two infants do not survive. Chester’s family closes ranks around Luz in their mourning. As the Obon festival commences at the internment camp, the horrific version of Yuko arrives to possess the body of Dr. Kitamura and forces him to commit suicide.

REVIEW

The Terror: Infamy has so far been quite watchable despite some issues, and the show finds a more solid footing in “The Weak are Meat.” The time given to the characters and their personal dramas is paying off, and helps the largely standard horror elements pop better on the edges. The Chester-in-the-army storyline is a bit clunky, but the interment camp sequences — often focused on Henry and Luz — have found their emotional and logistical grounding.

We see the being Yuko for what she really is (or is it just another version of what she actually is?): a decaying corpse with great supernatural power. Yuko is the beating heart of the mystery surrounding Chester; within her intense mysteriousness there is a superb mix of brutality, grotesqueness and tortured beauty, and her gentleness as Luz’s midwife is deeply spooky. Luz has a big part in this episode, and the scene where she honors Henry is profound and touching. This installment serves up a healthy dose of horror, but once again, Infamy works best in its quietest moments.