The Terror: Infamy Review: My Perfect World (Season 2 Episode 7)
The Terror: Infamy Season 2 Episode 7, “My Perfect World,” endures an outbreak as things slowly start spiraling downwards.
One of the more significant problems with The Terror: Infamy has been the unclear explanation as to why this particular story has been set in an internment camp. Narratively, you want what’s happening with the spirit Yuko to be somehow connected to what is happening to the Terminal Islanders.
For the most part, that still isn’t the case. The correlation between the two forces — Yuko and the US government — seems to be mostly coincidental. This could have happened anywhere, and the only discernible reason that it appears to be occurring at an internment camp is to fabricate a pressure cooker for the characters.
That is still largely the case with “My Perfect World,” and it seems unlikely that will change over the final chunk of this season. While the reveal of Yuko’s origin in the previous episode was a good exploration of that spirit, there is a sense that it might have been a misstep for this story in how it can relate to the time’s horrific events.
If the internment camps for Japanese-Americans only exist in this story to be casual set-dressing, then that calls into question why you’d bother doing it at all. An internment camp shouldn’t merely be a setting that just so happens to have a haunting in it.
You could do that anywhere, and the problem is that the series has yet to justify why it’s specifically happening here. It’s not clear that it can do that at this point, though.
That isn’t to say that one section of the show isn’t pushing the other (and vice versa) in interesting and provoking areas. But the two just feel so disparate from each other right now. Yuko isn’t at work because of some fury at her descendants being rounded up and mistreated as if they’re cattle.
Instead, she’s just an angry spirit who doesn’t want to be alone in the afterlife. While there’s certainly a season where that would be a good story to tell, it’s becoming dubious whether that’s this season. It cheapens this shameful part of American history just to use it as a backdrop here.
That’s more of a criticism of the season overall and not so much this particular episode, which does blend these two antagonistic forces together in as well a way as one could expect. “My Perfect World” just chooses to pose a rather intriguing yet simple question: What if the people in charge became aware of the haunting?
It’s not the most inspired plot development, given that this will no doubt push characters like Major Bowen into slowly unraveling over the remaining three episodes of the season. It is, however, intriguing within the framework of this episode as the two plots of the season meet more and more in the middle.
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.