Summary
“Come And Get Me” was a wheel-spinning penultimate episode of a season that desperately needs to be over.
A season’s penultimate episode is, in many ways, more important than its finale; it has to set up all the things that’ll be paid off in the climax. The penultimate episode of The Terror: Infamy, “Come And Get Me”, didn’t really do that, but then again most of the second season hasn’t really built towards anything either. It was just a hodgepodge of ideas strung haphazardly together with random time and location jumps. Any internal character and narrative logic has long-since been abandoned in favor of last-minute ass-pull twists and vague horror tropes. Next week’s finale will feel more like a mercy killing.
Anyway, we’re in 1945. The Japanese are allowed to leave the camps — though expected to be thankful for their stay there — and return to the barren wasteland of Terminal Island. Chester (Derek Mio) is working as a gardener and Luz (Cristina Rodlo, so much better than this) is about to give birth. Naturally, Chester is concerned about Yuko (Kiki Sukezane) terrorizing the sprog, so he calls up his mother and father, whom he is somehow able to locate, for help. They arrive in record time so that Henry (Shingo Usami) can have more circular arguments with Chester since we all enjoy those so much.
After naively allowing Yuko to infiltrate their domain in the guise of a priest, everyone is forced to flee to an abandoned bunker where the bulk of “Come And Get Me” takes place. Luz enjoys the shortest labor in the history of the human race and Chester has his elaborate security plans foiled by a rat. Yuko possesses the baby and then Luz’s grandma, and we eventually get the big revelation of the episode, which is that Asako (Naoko Mori) was the one slated to marry the abusive alcoholic Furuya, and switched the paperwork so that Yuko got shacked up with him instead. In other words, in historical fiction explicitly intended to equate real-life xenophobic horrors with made-up supernatural ones, it was all the fault of the Japanese. Yikes.
At least it all builds to something resembling a setup for the finale. Yuko makes off with the baby, having possessed Luz, presumably to unite it with Chester’s brother in her own personal Hell. But Chester believes — and this actually makes a degree of sense — that if he sacrifices himself Yuko can take his soul and thus leave his son alone. If only he’d thought of that nine episodes ago, we’d probably all be better off.
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