I'll Keep It With Mine:The Terror:Infamy.

"You live in two worlds but are home in neither. You are a sparrow in a swallow's nest"

A dead body falls out of a coffin at a funeral, a tongue is bitten off, someone comitts hara-kiri, a woman undergoes a traumatic birth, a man has a disturbing hallucination regarding the loose thread in his suit jacket, someone gets frostbite, a man is stranded in an icy lake in North Dakota, and another man tells a story about punching a tuna in the face.

With episode titles as promising as All the Demons are Still in Hell, The Weak are Meat, and Shatter Like a Pearl, The Terror:Infamy (BBC2/iPlayer, created by Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein with Ridley Scott occasionally warming the Executive Producer's chair) is as grotesque as it is often surreal but what it's not, at least until the last few episodes when the ante is impressively increased, is particularly scary. Or particularly gripping. The first series of The Terror had me hooked from the start but this one (which is neither a sequel nor a prequel and, in fact, has none of the same characters - all the two series share is a story of people in dire circumstances being preyed on by a force beyond their understanding) is much more of a slow burner.

Many won't have the patience to get to the end. We begin on Terminal Island in San Pedro, California just before World War II. The small Japanese-American fishing community is home to Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio) and his parents Henry (Shingo Usami) and Asako (Naoko Mori). Henry's fallen in love with, and impregnated, a pretty young Mexican girl called Luz Ojeda (Cristina Rodio) and in the paranoid atmosphere of post-Pearl Harbor USA that's a dangerous thing for him to have done.

 

Stories of bakemono (shape shifting creatures in Japanese folklore, dismissed as "old country stuff" by the younger Japanese-Americans) are already in the air but it's a very slow build up and in the first few episodes there are more hints, than sightings, of preternatural happenings. Lots of omens and warnings before people start mysteriously dying or going blind.

The Japanese citizens are, under Executive Order 9066, removed from Terminal Island and put in an internment camp while those who are American citizens, like Chester, either move to Los Angeles or sign up for active service with the US Army. Chester finds himself sent to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands to work as a translator, leaving him estranged from Luz (which saddens him) and his parents (which does not).

It's not just on issues regarding the old country stuff (which he thinks should have been left behind on the other side of the Pacific) where Chester and his father Henry find disagreement. Henry never seems to leave, or have any desire to leave, Terminal Island. As one of the few Japanese there to own a car, he's a big fish in a small pond and he proudly drives his Packard around the island to prove it.

Chester sees a bigger world and wants a slice of it. But could the mysterious Yuko Tanabe (Kiki Sukezane) be holding him back from that? Or could she hold the key that will unlock the world of possibility for Chester and Luz? Certainly, she appears to be possessed by something and the scenes in which she features, with quicksand and frankly disturbing masks, tend to be the eeriest of all.

While the Nakayamas wrestle with the supernatural, they and others are forced to live a meagre existence in an internment camp that is ruled with an iron fist by Major Bowen (there can't be a single item of scenery that was not chewed up and spat out by C. Thomas Howell in this role) who threatens his charges, or inmates, with indefinite imprisonment for perceived treason.

Some of the internees, naturally, retaliate and the chief insurrectionist is Ken Uehara (Chris Naoki Lee) who's in a relationship with Chester's friend Amy Yoshida (Miki Ishikawa). This storyline plays very much second fiddle to that of Chester and Luz and that's (a) fine because it's a little less interesting but also (b) something of a pity because Ishikawa is a better actor than the somewhat wooden Mio.

To begin with, he's so stiff in his acting it's hard to warm to him but once he's been the victim of multiple very unpleasant travails you find yourself at least wanting to believe him. Even rooting for him. Like almost everyone else in The Terror:Infamy, even babies, Chester is visited upon by a litany of indignities but, to begin with, the moodiness (and squeamishness) does not cross over into tension or empathy.

There are nice cars, smart suits, a wise elder in the form of George Takei's Yamato-san and a ludicrously over the top bullying boss in Stan Grichuk (Teach Grant). There's echoes of the film Carrie, there's some stuff about the idea of the camera as a soul stealing weapon, and there's also, running the risk of cliche, a lot of suicide. 

But it's not until halfway through, probably later, that the whole thing starts to make any sense and even then it's hard to be totally sure what is happening at all times - which at least puts us, the audience, on a level with most of the characters. When Chester returns from active service The Terror:Infamy does, eventually - and you really have to put a shift in, become genuinely chilling and truly moving. 

When, early in the series, Chester's mother Asako says to him "life is hard, you cannot do it without family" he can have no idea of the depth of meaning those words convey. By the end of ten episodes, nobody will have any doubt about the importance of them. In a drama whose themes include internment and redemption, it seems only right to say that enduring all the pain was worth it in the end.