The Terror: Infamy Review: Gaman (Season 2 Episode 3)
The Terror: Infamy Season 2 Episode 3, “Gaman,” attempts to adjust to the current circumstances in the concentration camp, as the Terminal Island residents try to combat the spirit haunting them.
So far, The Terror: Infamy has one single, definable problem: It feels like the sentence above could describe just about any episode of this season. There’s very little give or take. You have the internment camp and you have the spirit. That’s it.
Beyond that, what you’re left with are the characters, and that becomes an issue when it doesn’t feel like you have a very good sense of them. If anything, Chester is the one that is supposed to drive you from scene-to-scene. But he’s been extremely broadly drawn, in the same way that many of the faces on this series have been.
There’s little use in a series that doesn’t have solid characters to carry you through the plot. That being said, The Terror: Infamy isn’t quite useless or bad; there’s just not a whole lot going on with it. That’s part of the curse of telling a ghost story, especially a Japanese one — not too much can happen all at once.
The story has to rely mostly on the atmosphere. There can’t be a scene where a character gets dragged down a hole by a bear monster, like what happened in the first season. This story is plodding and claustrophobic with more and more characters slowly coming around to the idea that there is a paranormal force in their lives.
This is the kind of season where the payoff will probably be worth it in the end, but getting to that point will be a bit torturous. Since the plot can’t do too much with the spirit yet, it has to rely more on the characters and the situation that they’re in, which has a certain limit to how ultimately interesting it can be. You can only go to that well so many times.
On the other hand, the moments when The Terror: Infamy chooses to be the horror series that it sets out to be are truly frightening and unsettling. It only comes in a handful of scenes when characters become possessed by the spirit and you see the stiffness in the way they walk or speak.
Of course, that is nothing compared to the image of the spirit biting off Hideo’s tongue and leaving him there to die. It’s chilling and disturbing and completely telegraphs what is about to happen, only serving to make it that much more terrifying.
The Terror: Infamy has these little moments that allow you to see the fright that it might be able to inflict, but you can feel the show really holding itself back most of the time. It’s as if the series is a car and the person driving isn’t willing to step down on the accelerator just yet.
At its core, this is shaping up to be a perfectly fine season, in and of itself. But the restraints the show is putting upon itself are starting to be frustrating.
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.