S02.E06: Taizo

[jewel21]

Airdate: 2019.09.16

A story of the past provides insight into the present evil that stalks the Terminal Islanders; Chester returns home to his family; Henry and Asako are faced with a difficult decision.

[Dowel Jones]

So, Chester/Taizo has this spirit chasing him across land, sea, and air, and it's not going to be over until it's over.  I kind of have the same feeling as with season 1 when the monster was revealed to be a gynormous polar bear, and that is just that everything else will be formulaic from here on out.  I hope not.

Did all the camp guards go home for the night, and there was no one to notice a huge wooden building totally involved in flames?

I was rather stunned at Chester's outburst toward his "father", denying him that role.  He raised you.  He is your father.

Chester mentioned, I think, that he had been honorably discharged when he emerged from the Army truck.  It sounds horrid, but would that necessitate him being held in the camp as an internee now?  I assumed he was there on a visit.

[foxfreakinmulder]

5 hours ago, Dowel Jones said:

I was rather stunned at Chester's outburst toward his "father", denying him that role.  He raised you.  He is your father.

I didn't like that, I thought it was really mean of him to say that.

Did I blink and miss how Chester escaped the zombie that was coming at him when he was trapped under the jeep? Or was that just dropped?

I thought the actress that plays the spirit looked really pretty without her makeup when she was in the garden. But that was creepy as hell when she climbed out of that grave.

I am a little lost with the different looks the spirit has. How can she appear sometimes as the pretty girl we saw in episode one that killed herself on the dock and then we see the creepy zombie looking thing that was in the duffel bag. That can't be her physical body that killed her self on the dock if she jumped off the bridge right? The body they burned was Chester's adopted moms sister or the one who jumped? I'm actually more lost than I thought.

Does the spirit need an open grave to travel back to the garden and how convenient was that to have one. Now we know what she was planning on doing with Chester's babies, but since they died I guess she thought any baby would do until she found out it has to be from the same blood line to travel to the garden.

I agree about the fire, where were the guards and looky-loos. Maybe the fireworks show kept them away. By the way, that was a long fireworks show the ones I've been to lasted 15 minutes at the most.

Well, this is the last episode I'll be able to watch until it hits HULU. I had to cancel the app on my ROKU I was watching it on to save some money. Until then I'll continue to read about it on here.

[Claire Voyant]

6 hours ago, Dowel Jones said:

So, Chester/Taizo has this spirit chasing him across land, sea, and air, and it's not going to be over until it's over.  I kind of have the same feeling as with season 1 when the monster was revealed to be a gynormous polar bear, and that is just that everything else will be formulaic from here on out.  I hope not.

Did all the camp guards go home for the night, and there was no one to notice a huge wooden building totally involved in flames?

I was rather stunned at Chester's outburst toward his "father", denying him that role.  He raised you.  He is your father.

Chester mentioned, I think, that he had been honorably discharged when he emerged from the Army truck.  It sounds horrid, but would that necessitate him being held in the camp as an internee now?  I assumed he was there on a visit.

I'm wondering if  people like Chester were sent back to the camps for their own safety from paranoid citizens as anything.   People often seem to choose to kill first and ask questions later.  Scary, but true. 

I'm sure the Japanese people were considered less than dogs during the war.   They certainly weren't treated very kindly.  To this day, they are often referred to as "Japs", which I find disturbingly distasteful. 

One more episode, right?  Aside from the education regarding our treatment of the Japanese, this has been a disappointing story.   Even knowing her sad, little tale of woe, I couldn't  muster up much sympathy for our yurei. 

She wasn't the brightest bulb and came fully loaded with her own selfish agendas.  Not a scintilla of thought for anyone other than herself when she was alive and nothing changed after she "died".   Heck, she was intent with offing the other spirit who may have been her own mother for all we know and all that poor thing ever did was try to feed her some tea and soup.  🤷‍♀️  

[Mr. Sparkle]

2 hours ago, Claire Voyant said:

One more episode, right? 

Four more. 

[Claire Voyant]

4 hours ago, Superclam said:

Four more. 

Thanks.  👍

[Mr. Sparkle]

The ratings are abysmal. I can't imagine there will be a 3rd season. 

[foxfreakinmulder]

11 minutes ago, Superclam said:

The ratings are abysmal. I can't imagine there will be a 3rd season. 

That's too bad. I really wished they would've kept the story about ships in the 16th and 17th centuries. I would've like a season on the Mary Celeste. I know the Dyatlov Pass mystery didn't take place during the 16th or 17th century but the supernatural would fit in that story as well.

[nitrofishblue]

This season's story  line has been terrible. I enjoyed season 1 but not season 2.

[Mr. Sparkle]

I didn't see Season 1, and full consensus here and elsewhere is that it was much better than this one. So far, I'm as "meh" as everyone else. A few cool moments, but mostly it's been boring. 

[jewel21]

I thought this episode would answer a lot of questions for viewers but I'm still confused. How is it the Yurei survived the fire?

And yes, where were the soldiers when the cabin was burning? 

I thought I heard them say Chester was medically discharged. Maybe I need to use close captioning. 

Lastly, I agree with those who said it wasn't cool of Chester to tell his 'father' that he wasn't his dad. The man raised you, even though you share no blood, you should be thankful, dude. 

[tennisgurl]

5 hours ago, foxfreakinmulder said:

I would've like a season on the Mary Celeste. I know the Dyatlov Pass mystery didn't take place during the 16th or 17th century but the supernatural would fit in that story as well.

Yeah in retrospect, I wish they had done another historical mystery like in season one, like the aforementioned Mary Celeste or the Dyatlov pass mystery, or something like the medieval green children or the dance plagues, or about a million bizarre and unexplained disappearances throughout history. I get them wanting to do a story about the internment camps in WWII and incorporating in Japanese mythology, but it loses something when its not, even loosely, based on a real historical mystery with a supernatural bent. This season isnt bad, but last season was so great, it makes this season look less impressive in comparison. 

I did like getting backstory for Yuko and understanding more about what is actually going on here. Yuko escaped the creepy afterlife her dead ancestor trapped her in, only to become a vengeful spirit who wants revenge on the man who rejected her and left her homeless which led her to have to give up her baby, and her sister who raised her son as her own...which you would think would be something she would be decently happy about, as her son has a good home, but whatever, vengeance spirits gonna vengeance spirit. The afterlife with Yuko was cool and creepy, although why sometimes she can be a pretty ghost like she was in life, and why sometimes she looks like a zombie, I am not sure. 

I get that its a lot to take in Chester, but dont be such a dick to your dad! Yeah he isnt your biological dad, but he loved you and raised you for your whole life, he is still your father.

Edited September 18, 2019 by tennisgurl

[cdnalor]

22 hours ago, foxfreakinmulder said:

I am a little lost with the different looks the spirit has. How can she appear sometimes as the pretty girl we saw in episode one that killed herself on the dock and then we see the creepy zombie looking thing that was in the duffel bag. That can't be her physical body that killed her self on the dock if she jumped off the bridge right? The body they burned was Chester's adopted moms sister or the one who jumped? I'm actually more lost than I thought

If you mean the woman who killed herself on the dock with a needle through the ear, that was Furuya's second wife who he married after rejecting the pregnant Yukio.  The zombie is Yukio's body that was retrieved from the water after jumping off the bridge and was buried in the graveyard.  She reanimated her body after escaping the afterlife and (somehow) fashioned a lifelike mask which we saw her stitching up in a previous episode.  The body that was burned was indeed Yukio's zombie shell, which should have stranded her spirit in the afterlife, but she appears to have escaped at the end of the episode.  Whether she escaped as a spirit or she managed to get her body out of the fire is unclear to me.  We did see footprints in the ashes so I'm guessing we will be seeing her fire-damaged body in the next episode.

Edited September 18, 2019 by cdnalor

[foxfreakinmulder]

Thank you cdnalor that helps. :-)

[lidarose9]

This episode helps a bit, but still I have no idea who are the bad guys here and who are the good guys. I have been assuming we are meant to be rooting for Chester, but who knows. How can this spirit be in Guadalcanal and also at the prison internment camp at the same time, and if she needed to possess someone to take her body over to the Solomon Islands, how did she get back to the prison internment camp with Chester? So many questions...

[Dowel Jones]

Maybe it flies around on (ahem) Spirit Airlines.  Likely a good reason why it is so pissed off all the time.

[iMonrey]

This episode was . . . dare I say it? Pretty good? Comparatively, anyway. I really enjoyed the first half of it, it was like an episode of Black Mirror. The visual of Yuko clawing her way out of the grave and into a bloated, distorted by drowning corpse was really well done, and creepy as hell. That said . . .

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 How can this spirit be in Guadalcanal and also at the prison internment camp at the same time, and if she needed to possess someone to take her body over to the Solomon Islands, how did she get back to the prison internment camp with Chester?

This. I mean I'm glad to have some backstory now on Yuko but this still doesn't make a whole lot of sense. They aren't even following their own logic as dictated by the dialogue. She's been possessing people left and right too, so seemingly she doesn't need her own body. 

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Did I blink and miss how Chester escaped the zombie that was coming at him when he was trapped under the jeep? Or was that just dropped?

Dropped like a hot potato.

Quote

Four more. 

Ugh! This story did not merit ten episodes. 

Quote

I would've like a season on the Mary Celeste.

Oooh! Me likey!

[BusyOctober]

Overall, I was really glad to get some answers about Yuko.  I liked the whole explanation of “paradise” and how Yuko became the spirit.  But it is still pretty messy storytelling.  In addition to the questions above (NO ONE came running to the fire? Why was Chester such a dick to his dad? How did Yuko get back to the US after the Jeep crash?), I have others...

* what did Yuko’s ancestor do to end up in the spirit world?  Did she kill her daughter in “real life” and end up there as punishment?  Or was her daughter in the limbo/paradise with her mom, then they had a fight and mom let daughter go to the underworld? 

* what happened to the baby’s mom who was watching the fireworks after Yuko took the baby? Is her dead body just laying around somewhere in camp? 

* what happened to that baby after Chester found the grave?

* how’d that open grave get there, and no one noticed it?

* so Yuko revenge-killed her husband 21 years later for tossing her out in the streets...I can understand her vengeance in this case.  But why did she posses the body & kill his 2nd wife? He beat the second wife and cheated on her ( I think that was mentioned in first episode), so it wasn’t a lovey-dovey relationship Yuko envied as ‘what could have been’ had she stayed in place as Wifey #1. 

*  why did she posses the other older man/ family friend and cause him to get shot by the guards?  Who was he to her backstory?  What advantage did Yuko gain from getting him killed?

I will stick with this series til the end, but I won’t be happy about it.  Maybe I will rewatch Season 1 after this one is over.

[Corgi-ears]

Am I in hell?

[iMonrey]

Quote

* what happened to the baby’s mom who was watching the fireworks after Yuko took the baby? Is her dead body just laying around somewhere in camp? 

I forgot all about that. I was expecting some kind of followup, at least showing the mother of the baby lying dead somewhere. Continuity is not this season's strength. 

[cdnalor]

13 hours ago, BusyOctober said:

so Yuko revenge-killed her husband 21 years later for tossing her out in the streets...I can understand her vengeance in this case.  But why did she posses the body & kill his 2nd wife? He beat the second wife and cheated on her ( I think that was mentioned in first episode), so it wasn’t a lovey-dovey relationship Yuko envied as ‘what could have been’ had she stayed in place as Wifey #1.

I think Yukio killed the second wife because she was the one who prepared the potion that Chester gave to Luz for the abortion, which Luz didn't use.  You don't mess with Yukio's descendants!

[Slovenly Muse]

Ok, last season, my biggest criticism of the show was that the historical and supernatural elements of the story did not seem to mesh very well. In fact, they seemed to dilute each other. If they had invented a fictional expedition and had the sailors encounter a supernatural force, and just committed to the fantastical, it would have been better. OR, if they had done a straightforward dramatization of the Terror and Endurance's expedition (and terrible fate) and made it a full-on psychological thriller, it would have been better. Instead, we got this mishmash of "man vs man" and "man vs evil spirit" and also "man vs nature," which did not work for me at all. In the wise words of Ron Swanson, "Don't half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing."

I feel like the same thing is happening here. A historical drama about the Japanese Internment during WWII would be awesome. Or a supernatural story about a demon haunting its ancestral bloodline preying on children could be awesome. But in this case, the two seem to distract from each other, and neither one is achieving its potential.

And, yes, I DO have to be this person, but my second-biggest complaint about season 1 is how poorly its female characters were treated. And yes, I know, a story set on a historical ship crewed exclusively by men leaves little room for female characters. I totally get that. But the show seemed to also get that, so they invented a female character to become an integral part of the story, only to render her mute and sidelined halfway through the series. (Again, a product of half-assing the two stories.)

NOW, we have a story with many more female characters in it, and yet the problem persists. Luz is apparently the female lead, and was only important to the story when she was pregnant (and once she lost the babies she went cuckoo-bananas baby-crazy with grief and seems to have been shuffled off elsewhere out of the way of the real story), and in the VERY NEXT EPISODE we discover that the demon is actually the spirit of a woman who died without getting to be a mother, went cuckoo-bananas in the afterlife from, presumably, chronic lack-of-child, and is now back from the dead to haunt her bloodline and try to steal babies to take back to the other side with her? (The other side, where she had previously met ANOTHER spirit who was a mother gone mad in relation to lack-of-child/presence-of-dead-child?) Is there NO female character this season who is important in her own right, and not just in her capacity as mother/wife/girlfriend to a man?

I'll finish the season, but honestly, this show loses me more and more with every episode.

[iMonrey]

Excellent synopsis, Slovenly Muse. I was one of the few who was not overly enamored of the first season, for many of the reasons you listed. I think in both cases the supernatural element is not fully fleshed out, and the writers are just going for atmosphere rather than logic. As has been pointed out upthread, the mechanics of how Yuko functions have been wildly inconsistent. She had to have her bloated, rotting corpse carried in a duffel bag to get to Guadalcanal and yet she was also back in Oregon at the same time somehow. I never fully understood the supernatural element of the first season either. 

Given the ratings and response to this season I highly doubt there will be another.

[Bruinsfan]

During the scenes in the afterlife I was thinking "Wow, Dichen Lachman has finally learned how to act!" But when I looked her up to confirm, turns out it was Natsuki Kunimoto playing Chiyo.

[Kel Varnsen]

On 9/19/2019 at 11:41 PM, BusyOctober said:

why did she posses the other older man/ family friend and cause him to get shot by the guards?  Who was he to her backstory?  What advantage did Yuko gain from getting him killed?

I really didn't get that, nor did I get what happened in Guadalcanal. For that matter how did the army decide that Chester wasn't a traitor trying to escape with his buddy? Actually this episode might have lost the season for me. I mean I'll probably watch the last few episodes eventually at some point, but now it is low priority. 

Also what was the deal with the afterlife. Was it supposed to be Yuko's punishment for killing herself or was it just some shitty luck of the draw because of a crazy ancestor? Like if you are going to do a big info dump episode at least explain things better.

[Dowel Jones]

2 hours ago, Kel Varnsen said:

For that matter how did the army decide that Chester wasn't a traitor trying to escape with his buddy?

I think there was a quick frame of the other guy holding a gun on Chester, and it was visible to the guards as they drove by.

[TheGourmez]

The lack of resolution of the jeep accident scene is the first time I've watched this show and was truly annoyed at an unexplained plot thread. There should have been immediate followup on that, not a time jump to Chester coming home.

I didn't expect him to be so heartless to his father - it made no sense. Because his mother, who also lied to him his whole life, is blood, somehow she deserves more respect from him? But then, I've never quite understood the reverence folks pay to their bloodlines.

I've no problem with the historic and horror plots living together. It's not the best story ever told, but it's a fresh one to me.