WiC Watches—The Terror: Infamy

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Episode 205: “Shatter like a Pearl”

RECAP

It’s February 1943, and Chester is still stationed in Guadalcanal; he’s learned of the deaths of his twins in childbirth and he’s resentful and disgruntled. At the Long Beach Embarkation Center, a yurei  (Yuko) has infiltrated the ranks of the new Japanese-American interpreters shipping out for the Pacific island. Chester and Arthur interview a crazed Japanese POW named Ota who claims to be some kind of blood-drinking, threat-spewing spirit pursuing Chester and everyone related to him.

The interned population of the Colinas de Oro internment camp is forced to fill out a citizenship questionnaire, though a number are being jailed for non-compliance. Amy has begun an affair with the wealthy Ken Uehara (Christopher Naoki Lee) and secretly changes his defiant questionnaire answers that could condemn him. The emotionally destroyed Luz wanders the grounds in her nightclothes; her sympathetic father Bart Ojeda (Ruben Garfias) arrives to inform her that her brother has been killed in Africa, and he wants to take her home.

Christopher Naoki Lee as Ken Uehara – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

Chester takes a photograph of Ota and it develops without a blur, so he believes the prisoner isn’t a yurei. After a violent screaming match, Ota relinquishes his undead facade and the two men bond in a quiet conversation about family and baseball. Meanwhile, the new Japanese interpreters arrive. The zombie-interpreter is carrying a duffel bag with the decomposing corpse of Yuko inside.

At the camp, Ken is humiliated when he is left behind as his fellows are rounded up and taken away to a higher security camp due to their questionnaire responses. Once Amy confesses to altering his answers, Ken appears to end their relationship. In Guadalcanal, Chester frees Ota, giving him his ritual blade so he can commit seppuku. Chester’s commanding officer covers for him, but the yurei-zombified Arthur attempts to abduct Chester in a jeep. Arthur is killed (or discarded) when the jeep crashes, and the corrupted form of Yuko crawls out of the duffel bag, reaching for the trapped Chester and saying, “It’s time to go now, Taizo.”

Derek Mio as Chester Nakayama, Marcus Toji as Arthur Ogawa – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

REVIEW

The specter of the yurei, both real and imagined, is everywhere in “Shatter like a Pearl.” From the initial claims of the strange POW Ota to the zombified bodies of the Japanese-American interpreter and Arthur to the arrival of the ghastly Yuko herself, this installment is largely dedicated to the mysteries of the show’s thus-far unknowable ghost. But even with the horror stuff firing on all cylinders, the episode founders because characters are making questionable decisions in their universe to move the TV plot forward in ours.

If Luz is so obviously deranged by her trauma, why is her loving adopted family allowing her to wander the swamps half-dressed and unattended? Would any sane interrogator (Chester) actually release an enemy prisoner (who had been acting insane mere hours before) and then hand him a knife, leaving himself unarmed at the same time? The choices result in some fine visuals (Luz’s pond-visions) and dramatic scenes (Chester’s witnessing of Ota’s suicide), but its all undermined by poorly constructed motivations.

Miki Ishikawa as Amy Yoshida, C. Thomas Howell as Major Hallowell Bowen – The Terror _ Season 2, Episode 5 – Photo Credit: Ed Araquel/AMC

One of the biggest things The Terror: Infamy had going for it was its clean and crisply-moving narrative, but the flow both bogs down and scatters here. The questionnaire storyline involving Amy and Ken is just too static and eats up eating a lot of screen time. The one-dimensional turd of a racist camp commander, Major Bowen, offers up little beyond what we expect of him. Chester’s interrogation of the Japanese prisoner Tetsuya Ota (played with terrifying and later sympathetic aplomb by actor Kazuya Tenabe) is a deftly unsettling sequence, but it suffers from being constantly intercut with the bland internment camp story.

One of the episode’s last scenes is its best: when Henry abandons his stoicism to embrace Luz as she departs the camp, followed by a knowing nod between him and Bart, two older characters who understand the agonies of life. The despair soaking this moment, harsh and heavy and emanating from the characters, decisively fuels every action; Infamy needs more of that kind of storytelling moving forward.