The Terror S2E01-Infamy: Kaiden

The first season of The Terror was fairly popular, centered in 1847, the fictionalized version of the real-life lost expedition of Sir John Franklin. I had the pleasure of watching the series, and its cinematography and set design fully entranced me. The second season delivers much the same of what the first season delivers as far as cinematographic quality and pacing, so if you’re a fan of the first season for that, you won’t be disappointed.

It’s not often you see a horror series, let alone a good one. There’s American Horror Story which delivered two really good seasons in the beginning with ‘Asylum’ and ‘Murder House’, and hasn’t truly reached that quality since then. There’s Scream Queens which is campy horror for campy horror’s sake, and those can only be as good as any campy horror film is. As far as good horror there’s The Walking Dead and The Haunting of Hill House, but none of these series do what The Terror did. The Terror, unlike any of these series, is a slow burn. It uses proper cinematography, lighting, and set design in order to create a creepy atmosphere for the viewer, and the show builds up to the scary moments of the show, and when they do happen they make the body shudder. A fair warning, The Terror isn’t a show that makes one jump back in fear. There are no jump scares. Every single horrifying moment of the show is drawn out to its fullest capacity. No other show, neither American Horror Story nor Scream Queens nor The Walking Dead nor The Haunting of Hill House delivers all that. It’s a slow burn in the greatest sense. Nothing happens quickly. If a character is killed it happens slowly, if something is revealed it happens slowly. But it never bores, everything single second being enticing for the viewer.

This wouldn’t be a review of The Terror: Infamy without mentioning George Takei’s performance. In his first return to the horror genre since the original Twilight Zone, George Takei’s performance, however surprising, actually packs a punch. Takei plays an old man, sitting in a chair on a fishing boat through most of the first episode. He is one of the best characters in the entire episode. He has a scene in which delivering a monologue about how he has the title as the best “Fish Boxer”. This is great not only because it packs a lot of humor and heart, and immediately makes me feel for the character.

One issue with the show so far is our main character. He’s seen as a likable character, with his demons, but likable otherwise. In this episode, he’s read as more of a trope then an actual character, and one time so far the good nature the writers so heavily try and imbue him with come off not as good-natured, but, more so bad-natured. This may be a result of two of the original creators not working on the second season and being replaced, but the end result is this. The main character gives a woman he’s slept with a liquid used to induce abortions. Then, he comes back, telling her not to take it, and that he was going to marry her and take her away from there and raise the kid. Nowhere beforehand is it discussed whether or not that is what she secretly wanted, so it comes across as more controlling than nice. Further, the father comes off as a conservative father trope and the man the father sells fish to is the racist white guy trope, and while most of these characters may change and get better, there’s no evidence to prove that that will happen yet.

Spoiler Warning: This next paragraph does contain spoilers for the end of the episode. The show ends by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the start of the Japanese internment camps, and some of the Japanese characters are being interned. One could compare that to the immigration detention centers that are occurring today. The basic premise is the same, people put in prison-like conditions on the basis of race. The main issue I have here is not with the idea of it, but a (hopefully unbased) fear I have that the show will lose quality with it’s overbearing desire to prove a certain point leading to preachiness, like what happened in Orange is the New Black, a show that is not about immigration detention centers suddenly being about immigration detention centers in its final season. The result was a lame, cheesy, desperate attempt from the creators’ part to sound relevant. While it isn’t possible to tell whether or not this will happen yet, there have been some clues, pointedly, the fact that the character that’s seen as the ‘racist white guy’ is seen as so average and cookie cutter in order to make one roll their eyes. Who’s to say that the presentation of the Internment camp won’t be the same.