“A Sparrow in a Swallow’s Nest” is the first episode of the second season of the TV show “The Terror”, which was named “The Terror: Infamy”. It’s broadcast in the USA on AMC Studios and in other nations on Amazon Prime Video.

Note. This article contains some spoilers about “A Sparrow in a Swallow’s Nest”.

A woman’s suicide shakes the Japanese-American community of Terminal Island, California, where she lived. Events that other inhabitants of the community interpret as omens make the situation even worse. In 1941 living in the USA and being of Japanese ancestry is becoming increasingly difficult and someone thinks that an evil entity is working against them.

After the positive reception of the first season, an adaptation of the novel “The Terror” by Dan Simmons that had its own conclusion, from audience and critics, it was decided to create an anthology show with a completely unrelated second season. The new story also has supernatural connotations and at the same time is linked to historical events, in this case the internment of many Japanese in the USA after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Actor George Takei, famous above all because he played Sulu in the Star Trek saga, as a child was also interned along with his family in one of those internment camps before being transferred to another one. As a character in “The Terror: Infamy”, he’s not only playing a role like any other but he’s also going over a chapter of history that he directly experienced. For this reason, he also worked as a consultant in the development of this story.

“A Sparrow in a Swallow’s Nest” is basically a prologue that itnroduces the life in the Terminal Island community in 1941, with the growing tensions against the Japanese-American inhabitants. The historical setting is well built and the most important characters immediately start getting characterized. In particular, at the center of this beginning of the story there’s the Nakayama family, where the differences in attitudes of Henry (Shingo Usami) and Asako (Naoko Mori), born in Japan, are shown compared to their son Chester (Derek Mio), who was born in the USA and has very different desires and ambitions from his parents’.

We can see mainly through Chester Nakayama the cultural identity problems of that generation of Americans children of Japanese at a time when there’s a growing risk of being suspected of spying on behalf of the Japanese Empire. A further complication for Chester is a lstory with Luz Ojeda (Cristina Rodlo), a Latin American girl and therefore a relationship at the time forbidden. Hoenstly that seemed to me the weakest part in what’s supposed to be a dramatic episode because it was a bit cheesy.

Something better comes from Chester’s meeting with Yuko (Kiki Sukezane). The conversation between the two of them doesn’t shine in subtlety since among other things it’s explicitly explained that he’s like a sparrow in a swallow’s nest but in various ways it leads to an interesting progress in the plot.

In this beginning of the second season the historical reconstruction seemed to me the most interesting because it digs into a dark moment of American history trying to offer a portrait of the Japanese-American community before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a baseline that will be useful in the next episodes after the internment in the camps. The supernatural elements are restricted to a few moments, so even more we’ll have to wait for developments, hoping that they’ll not abuse the clichés of the horror genre.

Overall, “A Sparrow in a Swallow’s Nest” seemed to me quite didactic but it may make sense in the first episode to make the audience understand the historical situation well. For me that’s more than enough to keep on watching “The Terror: Infamy”.

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