than a follow-up to the shipboard paranoia
of last season, jumping quickly from shock
to shock (a gory death, a couple of super-
natural-seeming visitations) and present-
ing so many characters, relationships, and
scene-setting details in 52 minutes that it’s
hard to keep it all straight.
But then the internment begins, the Jap-
anese-American inhabitants of a Southern
California fishing village are relocated to a
stable, and Infamy settles into a mournful,
empathetic groove, holding the viewer less
through supernatural-horror elements
than its re- creation of a period of history
that TV has rarely touched. Our guide is
Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio), an aspir-
ing photojournalist and the son of Japanese
immigrants. More than any other major
character—save for his Mexican-American
girlfriend, Luz Ojeda (Cristina Rodlo), who
works at a Catholic orphanage—Chester is
torn between two worlds and uses his pro-
visional connections to power to try to get
answers and justice for friends and relatives
who are being herded and handled like live-
stock. “I apologize for the mess,” says Ches-
ter’s mother, Asako Nakayama (Naoko
Mori), referring to the filthy cell she now
calls home—one of many examples of a
character clinging to shreds of dignity in a
situation that won’t allow that sort of illu-
sion. Parallels to the current crisis at the
U.S.-Mexico border are not only inevitable
but encouraged, particularly when a soldier
confirms that the government is going to
imprison children, too, if they have as much
as “one drop” of Japanese blood. Star Trek
icon George Takei, who was interned him-
self as a child, is on hand to connect this
drama to lived reality.
The upshot is a series that is so mesmer-
izing when it’s being a stylistically conserva-
tive historical drama that when the manda-
tory inexplicable or ghastly moments arrive
(everything from a tea-leaf prophecy by a
strangely figurative-seeming character to a
blinding reminiscent of a curse from Greek
tragedy), they have less impact than the
scenes of people trying to live a normal life
in completely abnormal circumstances.
This is the most radical departure from sea-
son to season of a buzzed-about new series
since FX’s American Crime Story, which
started out by retelling the O. J. Simpson
case as a docudrama with elements of sat-
ire, then followed it up with an account of
the death of Gianni Versace and the life of
his killer, told backward à la Memento. 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 cul-
ture—one that now comes bubbling up
through our collective subconscious like a
monster visible beneath layers of ice. ■Visitusatartbag.com
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