The Terror: Infamy Review: My Sweet Boy (Season 2 Episode 8)
The Terror: Infamy Season 2 Episode 8, “My Sweet Boy,” leans into some of the more traditional horror elements of the series as it sets up the endpoint of the story.
For everything that “My Sweet Boy” might do well, there’s a feeling that some of this is being bungled in some way that truly matters. That mainly comes from the sense that the part of this show that dealt with the internment camp didn’t truly matter that much within the scope of this season.
It added ambience and narrative restrictions — and of course there was the timeliness of it all. But as it seems like that important section of American history hasn’t substantively added anything to the series, it makes you wonder why it’s been included in the first place.
The internment camp is off-putting and unsettling, but what’s the point of that within the context of this show? Is it just set here for the sake of being set here? If that’s the case, this dark moment in US history really deserves better and more weight. It’s not wrong to put it in, but there’s just something missing in how it’s handled.
The internment camp setting either needs to relate back to Yuko in some way or it needs to play up the antagonistic elements of the American military. While it has somewhat done that with Major Bowen, it needs to hit that point just a bit harder. As it stands, it feels a lot like standard set dressing, like this season could have happened anywhere.
There hasn’t really been anything that makes it seem like this story needed to take place in the internment camp and — as the season moves on from that with the Supreme Court rulings of the time — it’s entirely doubtful that will happen now.
Beyond that, the episode does work well when it leans into some of the more genre aspects. To stay on the internment camp, the confrontation between Amy and Major Bowen has a nice kind of brutality and menace to it that a lot of this season has been missing.
That scene might be irrelevant to everything else going on and Amy has never been a character that the show has fully gotten a grasp on, but it is thrilling to watch. For that sequence to work, you have to believe that Amy could very well not walk away from that and, for what it’s worth, you do.
On the more supernatural side of things, the opportunity to introduce other cultures’ “superstitious” beliefs on top of what is already happening with Yuko is a welcome one. It hits at a theme that the season could be hitting on stronger but is that the individual beliefs of other beliefs can so wonderfully intersect and complement each other if we let them.
The sequence itself — with Chester finding his brother’s spirit — is touching and lovely… until it isn’t anymore and becomes something chilling. Like Amy, Chester is a character that also hasn’t always worked as well as the show needs him to, but you’re still completely on board with him being thrilled to play baseball with his brother.
All in all, “My Sweet Boy” gives us a clear picture of where this season is headed in its final episodes — and it does seem promising, if nothing else.
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.