The Terror: Infamy Review: All the Demons Are Still in Hell (Season 2 Episode 2)
The Terror: Infamy Season 2 Episode 2, “All the Demons Are Still in Hell,” is focused on building atmosphere and taking stock of the change in status quo.
So far, The Terror: Infamy seems to have two main motives pushing it along: illustrating many of the injustices that occurred during the Japanese Internment during WWII and also setting that within the prism of a ghost story.
Let’s focus on that first part for a bit, since it gives rise to some of the juiciest and most unsettling parts of the episode. From the beginning, The Terror: Infamy has been a season with a clear agenda. Telling this story at the same time the U.S. government is doing something unquestionably similar to internment camps is a very conscious choice.
The show is drawing a parallel between the way that we contained Japanese citizens in America and how the government is currently locking up families who are crossing the border from Mexico. The Terror: Infamy can’t show us what it looks like for a child to be locked up now, but it can demonstrate what it looked like back then.
This comes through especially powerfully during a scene when armed forces come to round up orphaned Japanese children and bring them back to what is referred to as “relocation camps.” It’s a stark reminder that this kind of racial paranoia only ends with children caught in the middle of it all. Their only crime is that they exist.
The parallel is clear: History doesn’t view America as the hero in this particular story, and we’ve still learned nothing from it.
On the other side of things, a different kind of paranoia is taking hold of the Terminal Islanders as more and more of them believe that a spirit is at work, although this is a much more founded fear. They’re afraid of a Japanese spirit that has them jumping at shadows, making them suspicious of one another.
“All the Demons Are Still in Hell” does a good job of showing that the convergence of the superstition, the spirit, and the current political situation is a pressure cooker that will lead to disaster, sooner or later. Whether this comes about from them slowly turning on each other or forcing them to rise up more and more against their guards remains to be seen.
A lot of the atmosphere for this season is working so far, but soon it needs to hit a higher groove. It’s difficult not to compare this to the first season, but the escalation of events there was so utterly effective that this feels a lot slower in many ways.
A part of that comes from the nature of the differences between the two stories. Whereas the previous season was essentially a monster attack story with everything that entails, here it’s a methodical ghost story that is more of a slow burn. Ultimately, it will just take a bit of time to get used to the fact that these are two very different tales.
What did you think of this episode of The Terror: Infamy? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Terror: Infamy airs Mondays at 9/8c on AMC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.