The Terror: Infamy

“The women of The Terror: Infamy feel clumsily sketched.”

Title: The Terror: Infamy
Episodes Reviewed: Season 2 of The Terror
Creators: Max Borenstein 👨🏼🇺🇸 and Alexander Woo 👨🏻🇺🇸
Writers: Max Borenstein 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Alexander Woo 👨🏻🇺🇸 (2 eps), Tony Tost 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Shannon Goss 👩🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Naomi Iizuka 👩🏻🇯🇵🇺🇸 (2 eps), Steven Hanna 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), and various (2 ♀ and 1 ♂)
Directors: Josef Kubota Wladyka 👨🏻🇺🇸 (2 eps), Michael Lehmann 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), Frederick E.O. Toye 👨🏼🇺🇸 (2 eps), and various (2 ♀ and 2 ♂)

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3.5/5

The first season of AMC’s historical horror series, The Terror, dug its claws into me from the get-go. While slow at times, it paid off handsomely (and gruesomely) by the end of its self-contained fable. So when I heard the show—and its high production values and eerie surrealism, presumably—would be applied to another dark chapter in history, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans by their own government during World War II, I couldn’t wait to see what showrunners Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein would do with the all-too relevant material.

Season 2, called The Terror: Infamy, curls into existence like heady, ominous smoke and quickly ensnares with its central mystery: What malevolent spirit is possessing and hunting Japanese Americans—and why?

Woo and Borenstein skillfully dangle this hook in front of audiences, leading us through a tale of Japanese American persecution both from outside forces like the U.S. military and from within, as old world superstitions come violently to life. But early vim soon begins to echo the weaknesses of The Terror’s first season as pacing degrades to a zombified trudge. Overly abstract myth-building, and the skipping back and forth to an alternate universe, stymie plot progression. While I’m normally game for a spatial and temporal jump—something that HBO’s Watchmen and Hulu’s Castle Rock pull off to great effect—Infamy spends far too long in this other world, giving off the sense that writers had either runtime to kill or were chasing a dead-end narrative.

Had the story been packed into a tighter format, such as the four episodes that mimic a long movie in When They See Us on Netflix or the 8 episodes that British dramas generally cap out at per season, Infamy could have trimmed the fat to expose more emotional heft. Given its harrowing backdrop of true-to-life atrocities against an American demographic, Infamy simply should have felt more moving than it did.

Gender: 2.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

More than its pacing issues, Infamy disappoints through a reliance on old horror tropes built on a foundation of misogyny. The violent spirit, or yuurei in Japanese folkloric terms, terrorizes the lead character Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio) in her maniacal pursuit of reuniting with the twin sons she’d been unable to care for while alive.

This portrayal of motherhood as animalistic and psychotic has footholds all over the genre. Amanda Scherker gives a fantastic rundown in the video essay “Why Motherhood Is So Terrifying in Horror” where she shares how “the hysterical mother archetype reigned supreme in the 1970s,” first established in classic films like The Exorcist (1973) or The Brood (1979). She goes on to detail recent films that challenge such entrenched misogyny in the genre, citing The Babadook (2014) or Hereditary (2018), among others, that feature mothers as complicated humans rather than flat villains.

Infamy clearly falls into this newer wave. Writers give the yuurei, Yuko Tanabe (Kiki Sukezane), a full-fledged backstory and asks its audiences to sympathize with her plight. However, simply humanizing Yuko through a tragic past fails to dispel the issues outlined above. Scherker translates for us: “[In horror, the] stakes of bad mothering are so high that loads of people will literally die if you mess it up.” This remains overwhelmingly true in Infamy, seen through massive body count left behind by Yuko’s deranged grief.

Other story arcs for women also fail to resonate. Chester’s girlfriend, Luz Ojeda (Cristina Rodlo), finds very little interiority and spends almost the entire season with her hand on her baby bump, as she goes through two pregnancies that diminish her to mere vessel. It’s a shame because her character begins with so much potential; during her stay at the internment camp, where she surrenders herself in order to be with Chester during her pregnancy, she works to win over Chester’s parents who disapprove of their interracial relationship. Unfortunately, once that plotline resolves (with wonderful catharsis), her independence quickly evaporates. What’s left is a flat figure who, like Yuko, becomes consumed by motherhood.

Neither did I enjoy watching the sexual harassment of family friend Amy Yoshida (Miki Ishikawa) at the hands of her boss, a high-ranking military officer, especially as it progressed to kidnap and threats of rape. Thankfully, writers never cross the line and the camera refrains from lingering on her capture and bondage, thus avoiding the sexualization of violence against women that even well-intended stories, such as the tragic killing of a geisha in Westworld’s “Akane no Mai” (Season 2, Episode 5), still regularly stumble into.

Among the main female characters, only Chester’s mother, Asako Nakayama (Naoko Mori), feels written with sophistication. She’s nurturing but hardly an angel, and her storyline produces some of the most complicated feelings about any one character on the show.

It’s too bad that despite significant screen time, the women in Infamy feel so clumsily sketched overall. From its genre tropes to bland renditions of pregnant women, Yuko, Luz, and Amy all deserved better.

Race: 5/5

Not only does Infamy take place against a backdrop of rampant xenophobia, its handling of immigrant themes swagger with bone-deep realism. Relatable scenes of culture clash between first generation parents and their Westernized children find voice through the friction between Chester and his father. Authentic casting lends further depth, with Japanese roles played exclusively by actors of Japanese heritage and the Chicana character of Luz played by Mexican actor Cristina Rodlo.

A show’s commitment to truthfulness can almost always be surmised from its approach to language and accents, and Infamy gamely rises to the task. Chester’s spoken Japanese sounds audibly American, as it should, and Issei and Nisei—or Japanese immigrants and their children, respectively—switch between languages as the situation dictates. They do lean toward English, more so than may be realistic such as when Chester’s father and two other Issei men converse in accented English rather than switching to their native tongues. And the most noticeable concession to story over linguistic accuracy arrives in the form of actor George Takei, who was born in Los Angeles. He plays Yamato-san, one of the Japanese elders, and is clearly meant to be an immigrant. But neither his Japanese fluency nor attempts at accented English sound remotely convincing.

Nitpicks aside, though, Takei lends so much more than just acting to Infamy. Along with the stories of others who worked on the project, Infamy layers real history into the show and Takei serves as one of the few with firsthand experience, having been incarcerated at two different internment camps as a young boy. Meanwhile, the character of Chester combines attributes from actor Derek Mio’s great-grandfathers. Altogether, Woo shares the sobering fact that “there were 138 immediate relatives of our cast and crew who were interned.”

Screenshot of ending credits from “Into the Afterlife” (Season 2, Episode 10)

On top of its unflinching gaze at the injustices experienced by Japanese Americans, Infamy finds time to explore how a Japanese man might meet and fall in love with a Mexican American woman in California, complete with the difficulties of hiding an interracial relationship during a less progressive era. In fact, Woo and Borenstein feature Mexican and Chicanx characters in pivotal roles.

Intentional or not, Luz’s decision to follow Chester into incarceration recalls the real story of Ralph Lazo, a Mexican American high schooler who became the only known person to voluntarily live at a Japanese internment camp. And when Chester and Luz later tap the mysticism in their respective cultures to defeat Yuko, it successfully incorporates an American ideal: working across cultural divides to achieve great things.

LGBTQ: 2.5/5

Infamy sticks to entirely straight and cisgender narratives onscreen, but it casts Takei, who is openly gay, into an important role as one of the Japanese elders. His character of Yamato-san receives fewer scenes than others in the main cast and feels more like a cameo or guest star, but does still appear in all ten episodes of the season.

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.44/5

Aspects of Infamy are hit-or-miss, but Woo and Borenstein resoundingly succeed in their heavy reminder to Americans that not all horror is fictional—that human atrocities have happened in U.S. history and continue to take place today. In this way, Infamy mirrors the first season of The Terror, as both weave cautionary tales that speak out against xenophobia. Given such important subject matter, I can only hope AMC decides to give The Terror a third season.

Like The Terror: Infamy? Try these other series that cover bloody chapters in history.

Grade: CLiMarch 8, 2020Great for: Race