The Terror

It’s captivating, provoking and complex, as eager to earn your stunned silence as it is to send you pushing back from the television in revulsion. Most importantly, it never sacrifices story and especially character in pursuit of those reactions.

One of the many remarkable elements of AMC’s “The Terror: Infamy” is how it balances a history lesson with the parts of it that you would never learn about in school. At its best, it intertwines the two, suggesting that one begets the other, and it holds a mirror up to 2019, forcing us to wonder what will be unleashed by the current horrors in our country.

Borenstein and Woo show a great deal of trust in the core story, the grand production design, and the modern parallels to carry most of “Infamy’s” emotional heft. While each beat of the story may play out as you expect, that inevitability largely makes the action itself more haunting.

Infamy falls back on horror clichés whenever Yuko shows up, but its vision of encompassing paranoia is scary enough.

Moments of visceral body horror were used sparingly and to shockingly good effect in a show that is carefully choreographed to unnerve viewers from the off.

In its most successful episode, Chester confronts a Japanese prisoner of war who taunts, threatens, and ultimately bonds with him over their shared love of baseball and their exhaustion with the battlefront. It’s a deeply compelling episode of television and warrants a place for The Terror in any list of the year’s must-watch series. But it has nothing to do with ghosts. I wish The Terror had done a little more work to make its ghosts feel as necessary as its timely history lesson.

“The Terror: Infamy” takes great pains to depict the full horror of internment, including the psychological toll it took on detainees. ... “Infamy” is thematically rich beyond that, especially in how it navigates the old ways, the new, and the messy realities in which they collide. The struggle between assimilating and honoring one’s cultural history is painful and knotted for many immigrants, and it’s given room to breathe here.

By largely following a single family, “Infamy” also finds a way to make a staggering historical event that can sometimes feel too big to comprehend feel as personal as it truly was. ... Despite having significantly less material to work with than Mio, Mori, Usami, and George Takei find nuanced, deeply affecting ways to portray their characters’ building trauma. ... Kiki Sukezane’s Yuko is brittle, chilling, and eventually, as the show begins to unveil her backstory, heartbreaking.

With its powerful depiction of once-proud families uprooted and separated, the series is gut wrenching enough, even without the scary stuff. And yet by weaving ancient terrors into is all-too-relevant story of prejudice and fear, this fable feels as fresh and original as it is frightening. [5 - 18 Aug 2019, p.10]

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

It's a campfire tale that won't jolt you immediately, but it packs an unsettling punch that lingers. Woo and Borenstein have also illustrated how The Terror is, indeed, a franchise beyond that original yarn Dan Simmons spun.

With its elongated timeline and frequent shifts in locale, Infamy is a somewhat less intense experience than what I’ve seen of the first season with Jared Harris, but the franchise as a whole is proving a potent combination of what scares us in our imaginations and what should scare us in the world outside our windows.

The series doesn’t minimize the internees’ hardships, even if it somewhat underplays them. But it’s also a little strange to see the only major piece of pop culture about Japanese-American incarceration imply that its characters have even scarier things to worry about.

Long stretches of this season of The Terror don’t quite work, but you always appreciate the attempt to confront an era that has largely been avoided in American popular culture—one that now comes bubbling up through our collective subconscious like a monster visible beneath layers of ice.

It’s a well-crafted, beautifully made season, and while the scares themselves may not measure up to the stunning genre work in Season 1, Infamy firmly establishes The Terror as a worthy anthology rooted in the terrors of the human condition, capable of evolving into as many horrors as the human mind can hold.