Perhaps by now you’ve seen the problem with all this: The allegory at work here is an absolute muddle. The prisoners in this internment camp are being stalked not by some punishing avatar of the crimes of American empire or even those Imperial Japan, but by…a spiritual representation of their own community’s small-mindedness and provincialism, derived from their own mythology and belief system. Horror logic does not have a strict one-to-one relationship with reality—and you shouldn’t trust any polemical horror story that does—but essentially, they brought this particular horror on themselves. Why set the story in an internment camp when you run the risk, unintentional but still very much a factor, of implying that internment is punishment for some original sin?
Indeed, by divorcing the central supernatural premise so totally from the show’s sociopolitical framework, The Terror: Infamy effectively argues itself right out of its historical context. After all, had Japanese Americans never been rounded up and held in concentration camps, wouldn’t Yuko still have risen from the grave to seek Chester and extract revenge against those who wronged her? She’d be just as much the ghost of his suicidal mother if the war never broke out and they were all back home on Terminal Island happily fishing, or even if they’d been permitted to get on board with the war effort like every other American subculture instead of being treated like the enemy within. Why bother with the internment camp setting at all?
I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. Despite showing some life in the supernatural department, it’s a mess.
Tags: horror, reviews, the a.v. club, the terror, the terror: infamy, TV, TV reviews