Review: The Terror: Infamy Excels as an Indictment of American Oppression

The series is striking not only for its scope, but for how uncompromising it is.

The Terror: Infamy
Photo: Ed Araquel/AMC

In American history books, it’s no more than a footnote that, in a fit of racist paranoia after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government corralled Japanese-Americans like animals into concentration camps. And in the white-dominant engine of American pop culture, it’s been barely represented. In this context, The Terror: Infamy is striking not only for its scope, but for how uncompromising it is. Its radicalism for taking place primarily in those camps feels matter-of-fact, with a cast dominated by non-white actors, many of whom go long stretches speaking in subtitled Japanese. There is, in the six episodes provided to critics, no POV for some complicit yet intended-to-be-sympathetic outsider, and the series portrays Japanese traditions without breaking them down for an unfamiliar audience. There is, after all, scarcely anyone living in the camps who might need those traditions explained to them.

The Terror’s prior season, which fictionalized the disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s expedition to the Arctic in the mid-1800s, was also concerned with race; the ordeals of its characters invoked themes of colonialist hubris, the very specific terror of white men arriving by boat to new lands, eyes alight with thoughts of conquest. Though Infamy moves to another time, story, and place, its mind for terror is similar: What is the dominant race capable of when the minority is under its boot? It’s another “people are the real monsters” story, albeit one of impressive thematic weight, plus unfortunate modern relevance, given the resurgence of internment camps under the current presidential administration.

Displacement runs deep through Infamy, not just in the literal sense of how its characters are forcibly relocated, but in how—no matter where they go—they’re never really at home. Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio) is a nisei, or second-generation, Japanese-American man who, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, is constantly regarded with suspicion, followed by accusatory eyes set above mouths that spit “Japanese” like a dirty word. He and others like him are caught in between, rejected by the only place he’s called home under unfounded suspicions of espionage and disconnected from the culture that birthed his ancestors.

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For Chester, there’s nowhere left to go save for the fenced-in purgatory of those internment camps. Infamy understands the anxieties of race-related displacement, of not being accepted in places you naïvely believed would appreciate you, and with that understanding it builds a narrative of painful resonance. It gives form to the fears and hardships of Chester and his acquaintances both through family drama and violent, existential horror where people lose control of themselves, as their identities and actions are subsumed by something else.

Infamy is a story about exclusion and the cultural clashes it fuels, portraying not just conflict between the Japanese-Americans and their captors, but between old ways and new opportunities. Chester is stalked, seemingly no matter where he goes, by a mysterious woman (Kiki Sukezane)—a metaphorical specter of his heritage and a remnant of “the old country”—whose presence seems to bring only death. The Japanese-American characters embrace traditions and beliefs they expected to leave behind, like sprinkling rice to purify a household after seeing evidence of a malevolent force. They also reckon with new values, as Chester openly argues with his father, Henry (Shingo Usami, fantastic as a man boiling with feelings of confusion, grief, and anger), about going to college and leaving their small community on Terminal Island. The two have been shaped quite differently by upbringings that manifest contrasting expectations for their lots in life, and you feel the histories that inform their relationships, how the men are constantly pushed into reluctant positions by necessity.

Horror is more of a presence on Infamy than it was on The Terror’s first season, though to somewhat mixed success. Grisly deaths and general scares tend to arrive suddenly, with only the most basic moody buildup of anticipation. The series is prone to cutting to a character wandering around an empty space for a few moments, all the while leaning on eerie music and jarring sound effects in an attempt to pull atmosphere out of thin air. And such scenes are too clearly delineated from the central drama and character interactions to fuel any dreadful tension of what’s next; they mostly take place on the periphery, giving the impression that the series is stopping every so often, remembering it has to provide the terror promised by its title. Particularly in later episodes, some scenes are legitimately disturbing, offsetting the impatient pacing with imagery like a gnarled finger slowly unzipping a duffel bag from within. But on the whole, where Infamy excels is in its depiction of more earthly horrors.

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Score: 
 Cast: Derek Mio, Kiki Sukezane, Cristina Rodlo, Shingo Usami, Naoko Mori, Miki Ishikawa, George Takei  Network: AMC  Buy: Amazon

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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