The Terror: Infamy Review: The Weak Are Meat (Season 2 Episode 4)
The Terror: Infamy Season 2 Episode 4, “The Weak Are Meat,” ratchets up the tension within the camp and abroad, expanding the scope of this season’s overall story.
On a conceptual level, The Terror: Infamy started off with a remarkably simple yet evocative idea: What if a Japanese spirit haunted an internment camp?
This episode does what it can to push that idea outwards a bit more, making the plot have more to do with Japan as a focal point and with what the spirit within the Terminal Island camp wants.
For the Terminal Island portion of that, the episode seems to be constructed as an opportunity to focus more heavily on Luz as a character disparate from Chester, made all the more vital now that he’s in a completely separate area of the show. Luz is the one anchoring most of the camp plotline, but a lot of it feels like squandered potential.
By the end of the episode, you don’t really come away with any greater insight into Luz than when you came into it. The vast majority of her scenes center around her pregnancy and her long-distance relationship with Chester. But surely there’s more to the character than those things?
They’re important things for her, no doubt, but that can’t be the encapsulation of who she is as a person? One would hope that her existence on the show isn’t solely relegated to her status as a future mother and a love interest. If that’s the case, is her function to be a narrative device that gets pregnant with twins and loses them?
If that’s the case, and she was only ever needed to fill a role that the plot demanded and will be given even less consideration going forward, then that is the epitome of weak writing.
At the same time, the concept of twins within Japanese culture being, at the very least, unlucky is something interesting, but it really requires more time within this series to get into the nuances. The idea of twins in America is something that isn’t given a lot of thought beyond a kind of inconvenience, and the intersection of those would have been intriguing to dive into.
On the opposite side of the story, Chester’s plotline serves to push out a lot of the spookier elements of the show and makes the mythology of this season a bit more complicated than we might have perceived at first glance.
The spirits didn’t just follow immigrants from Japan to America but also play a very active part in protecting their land. It’s a rather fascinating look at how something ancient and unknowable could respond to the threat of war on its own shores as well as abroad.
Overall, “The Weak Are Meat” has solid potential to be something more but ultimately doesn’t quite reach it.
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.