S02.E09: Come and Get Me

[jewel21]

The Terminal Islanders return home to find that things have changed since they left; the Nakayamas, still tense from the pain they've inflicted on one another, must come together to battle the spirit that threatens their future.

Airdate: 10.07.2019

[Mr. Sparkle]

1. How exactly does it work, that the spirit can float through the air to take the baby? Did she go in utero? Does she not need her body? These are rhetorical questions; we're not going to find out next week. 
2. Are they really going to use the atomic bomb testing to kill this thing? This one we will find out next week. 

I've come this far, so I'm certainly watching the finale, but I'm not going to miss Chester and the gang at all. 

[rhofmovalley]

I think she transported to the baby when the priest touched Luz' belly.

[Straycat80]

I thought maybe Chester’s mother would be the one to destroy this ghost but I guess not. And the ghost can just fly into everyone’s bodies whenever she wants. I was glad Luz’s baby was born alive, I couldn’t have handled another dead baby(s). 

I’m so glad the finale is next week, I don’t think I can take anymore of the this show. If there’s a S3 I probably won’t watch. 

[Mr. Sparkle]

5 hours ago, rhofmovalley said:

I think she transported to the baby when the priest touched Luz' belly.

That makes the most sense out of anything this season. I may have missed it, but why did she need to transport her body to Guadalcanal, when she didn't have to here? Where is her body? Who's in the heaven/hell place with Chester's brother? Can she be two places? 

Edited October 8, 2019 by Superclam
Clarity

[Robert Lynch]

Whoever cast that kid as Chester’s brother deserves credit because they are really spot on the features.

[Bruinsfan]

I wonder if Jiro is going to remember his life after the photo was taken, and take on the age/mentality he would have had at the time of his death. He could have died at any time from his apparent age to nearly Chester's, and I'm thinking as a young man in the internment camps is more likely than as a boy. In any event, maybe history will repeat itself and he'll drop Yuko into the spiritual quicksand in her garden.

[meep.meep]

4 hours ago, Superclam said:

That makes the most sense out of anything this season. But I may have missed it, but why did she need to transport her body to Guadalcanal, when she didn't have to here? Where is her body? Who's in the heaven/hell place with Chester's brother? Can she be two places? 

That's what's so maddening about this - you don't understand the rules that the yurei operates under.  The story isn't so bad and the acting is fine, but monsters have to operate with rules, otherwise there's no chance to defeat them.

[Dowel Jones]

I'm sure glad the US Government had such loose security out there at Trinity test site, where anyone could drive up to a control post and walk right in.  And that Chester could go walking about in the moonlight, shouting in Japanese, and not attract any attention at all.

I wonder if Chester had succeeded in killing himself, would the spirit have abandoned the baby right there and dragged him off to the eternal home with Jurio?

Chester's father sure smacked him down when they met.  "You married a fool (to Luz).  The only saving grace I have is that he is not my blood."

Wouldn't someone have told the Terminal Islanders that their home wasn't there anymore?

Historical note:  The bomb tested at Trinity was the Fat Man model, not the Little Boy.  The scientists were so sure of the Little Boy working, they just built it and shipped it off to the South Pacific. 

[stacyasp]

Ugh so over this version of the Terror, compared to first season this has none of the “terror”!  Every week it’s the same scenario Yuko inhabiting someone’s body and they die blah blah blah 

[rhofmovalley]

I did love the brother or whoever he was  bear hugging the priest so everyone could get away. 

I also lol'ed at Chester leaving his big ass car parked right in front of the bunker they were "hiding" in. Why not send up  flares or draw a map??

[Mr. Sparkle]

2 hours ago, Dowel Jones said:

And that Chester could go walking about in the moonlight, shouting in Japanese, and not attract any attention at all.

Well, there was an odd drunk British guy, Mr. Exposition. 

Edited October 8, 2019 by Superclam

[raven]

I'll watch the final episode but I'm just not that invested in Chester and Luz just seems to be around to make babies.  They didn't even have to begin the show in the internment camp (unless I'm forgetting something); the story as we see it could have played out anywhere, really.

I wish the focus had been on Amy and her struggle in the camp; working in the office and being true to her family and friends while maybe dealing with the yurei.  I don't dislike Chester and Luz, they're just kind of there; I found Amy more engaging.

It seems a waste of a good cast. 

[Mr. Sparkle]

Agree on both. The internment camp was just a setting that had very little to do with the yurei story. Like everyone else has said, they should have picked one or the other. 

I don't know the actress who played Luz, but she didn't impress me here and neither did Chester for that matter. I love George Takei, but he was wasted here. 

The actress who played Amy was the best one, IMO, but her arc was a side story and as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with the main story. 

[calliope1975]

I feel absurd typing this, but I liked the Teen Wolf story line about the nogitsune better than this season. This cast is great, and if they had done something like what I spoiler tagged below, I think it could have been pretty good. Alas. 

Spoiler

In The Fox and the Wolf, it was revealed that Noshiko Yukimura was responsible for summoning the Nogitsune in 1943, when the aftermath of the riots at the Oak Creek internment camp (and the government's subsequent cover-up of the deaths of the internees) made her so angry that she prayed to her Kitsune ancestors to allow a powerful Nogitsune to imbue her injured body with power and heal her so she could take revenge on those responsible for the deaths of her fellow internees.

However, instead of possessing her as intended, the Nogitsune actually possessed the body of her recently-deceased lover, Corporal Rhys, who then went on and killed the remaining campers and employees at Oak Creek before Noshiko and her friend Satomi Ito neutralized the Nogitsune by expelling it from Rhys' body with Noshiko's magical katana, causing him to revert to his fly form, which was then trapped in a jar and buried in the roots of the Nemeton. The Nogitsune would remain a prisoner in this jar until Stiles Stilinski, Allison Argent, and Scott McCall's surrogate sacrifice ritual, in conjunction with Jennifer Blake's geokinetic abilities causing the Nemeton's root cellar to collapse, unintentionally released the Nogitsune in autumn of 2011.

[BusyOctober]

Like others here, I'm in this til the end, but I'm not happy about it.  The story got so lost and murky and jumbled that I don't think even the writer(s) could competently explain WTF this is.

The whole reason I was intrigued to watch this was b/c it was based around the Internment Camps.  That is a part of WW2 history I knew little about, and I was interested in learning more.  Plus, I really likes the first season.  However, this was less about what the Japanese Issei and Nisei and their inhumane treatment.  It turned into a 44 min session of "Wait...what??? Why? How?" every Monday night.  By the 10th episode it will end up as "Monday night Meh".

How is Yuko so fluid with her body jumping?  How does she escape the ghost underground so easily?  If it's so simple to move between the realms, then are all the yurei doing it?  When she is busy hunting down Chester (and his various family/friends/ tertial characters), who's watching poor little Jirou to make sure he doesn't slip into the Quicksand of Doom?  Why did she need a 3rd party transport to bring her rotted corpse to Guadalcanal, but never any other time? Why did Yuko start her crazy body snatching- revenge-kidnapping plot when Chester was grown? She committed suicide before the families were rounded up and imprisoned, right?  Or was SHE imprisoned by HER mother underground all the time in between jumping off the bridge, and crawling out of the ground?  Why does her face look stitched together sometimes, and smooth others?  How does she go from fresh young Yuko to rotting zombie? How the fuck did she embody the priest, the baby, Abuela and Luz so quickly?  When the priest first came to the house, he knew the secret passcode song...he said the yurei could "only speak one tongue".  One, how the fuck would a Mexican Catholic priest know about the language abilities of yurei? Did he double major in "Japanese Folklore" at the Seminary? Two, that's obviously BS b/c she can speak Japanese and English, and apparently Spanish. Was the priest possessed by Yuko on that first visit? Why is Chester so hostile to his dad?  Did they always have a contentious relationship?  Why is he pissed at his (adopted) mom for taking him out of an orphanage and raising him in a good home? How does one randomly wander into a nuclear test site and not draw attention (or gunfire)? How did Chester know about the underground facility?

And perhaps the most puzzling of all questions, why do I care enough to ask?  Pretty obvious the writers and editors don't care one damn bit.

[Dowel Jones]

1 hour ago, BusyOctober said:

Why is Chester so hostile to his dad?

This is the only question I think I can answer.  I think it's because neither parent told him that he was adopted out of the orphanage until this late date.

[iMonrey]

Quote

I wish the focus had been on Amy and her struggle in the camp; working in the office and being true to her family and friends while maybe dealing with the yurei.  I don't dislike Chester and Luz, they're just kind of there; I found Amy more engaging.

And what the hell happened to Amy's story anyway? I'm assuming someone is eventually going to find C. Thomas Howell's body, right? I'm not even sure if he's dead. She just walked out of there and into oblivion. Why did they write an entire story around Amy just to drop it like that?

BusyOctober your summary is spot-on. Good grief, what a mess this season was.

I firmly believe they didn't even conceive of the twin brother until halfway through writing the scrips then didn't even bother to go back and insert the idea into the earlier episodes. That little revision just came out of nowhere.

Everything to do with Yuko has been slipshod and inconsistent. 

[BusyOctober]

18 minutes ago, Dowel Jones said:

1 hour ago, BusyOctober said:

Why is Chester so hostile to his dad?

This is the only question I think I can answer.  I think it's because neither parent told him that he was adopted out of the orphanage until this late date.

Thanks, that makes as much sense as any of this!  However, I know up until the 80's or 90's, it was very common for families to keep adoption a secret.  My 70 year old cousin just found out he was adopted after his 98 year old adoptive mother discussed it on her deathbed, then passed away.  No one in the family knew about it until they found the papers in her safe deposit box! 

[Mr. Sparkle]

Damn, @BusyOctober, you are dead-on with all of those questions! 

And I don't have a single answer. 

[Token]

I don’t understand how the ghost person got into the baby.  She was clearly still in the priest when they were all fighting and she killed the brother.... by which point everyone had driven away.  This show doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  And it’s so dark that I usually can’t even see what’s going on.  I’m disappointed because it sounded like a good idea but the reality is so boring.

[tennisgurl]

Wait, are they going to NUKE Yuko to finally get rid of her? That would at least be a unique ending to the season, I would certainly have to give them that.

There was a lot about this season I liked. The acting was good, Yuko was creepy and had lots of good effects, and the focus on Japanese mythology and the Japanese Internment Camps in WWII is a good idea for a season, mixing the supernatural horrors with the real life horrors of injustice and racism, thats a solid idea to start with. Unfortunately, the camp and the ghost had very little to actually do with each other, so the story ended up being rather disjointed, with plot points just appearing and disappearing, and a lot of interesting ideas left unexplored. And really, what does Yuko have to do with what is actually happening? In the first season, the monster was both a literal threat to the characters, and also a representation of imperial powers going into places they had no understanding of and that being a disaster for everyone, as well as representing the beast inside of all people (as humans become just as if not more dangerous than the monster or the elements) as well as the elements themselves and its danger of cold and starvation. What does Yuko represent that ties into the greater story of Japanese internment? She is a ghost from Japan who wants babies, and maybe you can tie that into her holding onto the old ways and the old world, but even then, what does that have to do with unjust imprisonment of Japanese Americans? Yuko showing up right before and during the war and internment just seems to be a coincidence!

And, as others have pointed out, I still have no idea how the supernatural stuff really works. I dont need to know everything, but I need to at least know the basic rules!

I kind of love how over Chester his dad was when he saw him. "Oh Hi Luz, sorry you got shackled to this loser, thank God he isnt actually related to me, right Not Son?" Its hard to blame him, considering Chester's big "your not my real dad!!!" temper tantrum.

Can we get back to Amy now? 

Edited October 10, 2019 by tennisgurl

[buttercupia]

this is so frustrating. the visuals are amazing, the acting ranges from fine to sublime, the sets and atmosphere is spot on, the cinematography is beautiful, and the story is a hot gotdam mess.  

[jewel21]

I laughed out loud when Chester's father saw Luz and told her he was sorry she married a fool, heh. It was hilarious. 

[Bruinsfan]

Yeah, if for nothing else Henry has won some respect from me for doing an about face regarding Luz and treating her with sympathy rather than hostility since she lost the twins.

[nitrofishblue]

I have watched every episode and to be honest I feel confused about the story line. It has not made much sense to me. I liked the first season but this one has been a hot mess.

[Kel Varnsen]

Along with what everyone else has said what bugs me is that no one has really even tried to come up with any kind of plan for getting rid of the evil spirits. Between Japanese beliefs and Liz's family's beliefs there isn't something they can use like the equivalent of garlic for vampires? Chester was in New Mexico for close to a year right? And he never came up with anything.

Also why was it in some scenes there house was boarded up like a bunker with passwords to get in, then in the next one Chester and his dad are just hanging out on the back porch having a chat.

[TheGourmez]

I don't think the twin came completely out of nowhere - I think Luz having twins was meant to be a hint, as twins are often common along the same family line. But I think they are matrilineal, not patrilineal?

I don't know why I'm defending this.