As the season moves on, though, it fails to sustain the intense and wordless fear so neatly captured in these first moments. Some reviewers have written that the show, while ambitious, is “unwieldy” over the first six episodes made available to critics. Others have argued that the series doesn’t “especially need” a supernatural specter, or have said the show has “more potential as a historical drama.” These reactions all point in some way to the fact that Infamy’s dual sources of terror don’t quite cohere into a single story. Part of the problem may lie in the writing and plotting. But the show—by its very nature as a grim series about the United States turning on its citizens and their families—also seems to offer different things to different viewers, depending on their own proximity to such real-life experiences.

The supernatural horror of Infamy comes mostly from an otherworldly antagonist named Yuko (played by Kiki Sukezane), who is introduced in the first episode. She’s an unsettling yet frustratingly vague menace. Is she a ghost? A demon? Is she a culturally specific villain who requires a basic familiarity with Japanese folklore, or is she more of a typical, vengeful spirit? Even the Japanese words that the older characters use to describe her shift, utterance by utterance—obake, yuurei, youkai, bakemono—as they try to figure out what she is.

Beyond issues of taxonomy, Yuko’s powers are inconsistent. In some scenes, she appears only as a creepy interruption, while at other times, glimpses of her cause characters to go insane or hurt themselves. This isn’t to say that Infamy must define its villain early on in the season, or even at all. (Season 1 of The Terror similarly featured a mystifying monster, but had a better grasp of its main narrative.) And yet, it is hard to take Yuko seriously when it’s unclear how she fits into the story or how she can affect the characters. Even when the series develops her further, Yuko primarily inspires speculation and confusion—an effect that dampens, rather than amplifies, the show’s horror.

In sharp contrast to its treatment of Yuko, Infamy renders the internment in painstaking detail, as if to suggest that this is what should really scare audiences. The forced relocation and detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II was shameful, and Infamy depicts the many indignities an entire community suffered. The stakes are high from the first episode, which builds to the events of December 7, 1941. When news about the Imperial Japanese Army bombing of Pearl Harbor breaks, two of the main characters—a young man named Chester Nakayama and his father, Henry (played by Derek Mio and Shingo Usami, respectively)—happen to be at a U.S. naval base to answer questions about a Yuko-related death. The room erupts in chaos around the father and son, who have no idea what has happened; only viewers know what history has in store for them.