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8 hours ago
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There’s an old adage that adventure is extreme discomfort remembered from an armchair. But what if there is no armchair waiting at the end of your journey? What if you never return at all? Well, then you have the first season of AMC anthology series The Terror. Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, who died last month, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846. After that, the entire expedition vanished – both ships and all hands lost – a sort of Victorian-era MH370 that has fascinated historians, geographers and artists ever since.
Simmons’s 2007 reimagining of this story, as well as the 2018 TV adaptation, speculates on the ultimate fate of the ships and their crews, using historically accurate names, dates and locations but embellishing the tale with Lovecraftian horror. Not only are the men contending with a subzero wasteland and suspected lead poisoning from their diminishing tinned food supplies, they are also being stalked by an enormous polar bear-like creature known to the local Netsilik people as Tuunbaq, “a spirit dressed as an animal” made of “muscles and spells”. For the Tuunbaq, the icebound ships are a year-round buffet and the Englishmen aboard are high-protein snacks.
AMC may be better known as the network that gave us Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead, but season one of The Terror stands shoulder to shoulder with the very best of 2010s Peak TV. It features easily the finest writing this side of Deadwood, all of it delivered by a cavalcade of world-class “That Guy!”s. There’s That Guy from Mad Men (Jared Harris); That Guy from Game of Thrones (Ciarán Hinds); That Guy from The Crown (Tobias Menzies); That Guy from Sex Education (Alistair Petrie); and even That Guy from the underappreciated, nihilistic masterpiece that is Channel 4’s Utopia (Paul Ready).
There are some true discoveries as well: Greenlandic musician Nive Nielsen plays Silna, known to the English as “Lady Silence”, a Netsilik woman with a mysterious connection to the Tuunbaq. And Adam Nagaitis is phenomenal as Cornelius Hickey, the conniving Caulker’s mate with delusions of grandeur who winds up as chief mutineer and the epitome of a populist leader; stoking division and craving power for power’s sake alone.
Through the ideological clash between Captain Crozier and Hickey – as well as the very notion of blindly carving a path through uncharted, Indigenous land – The Terror becomes a grand treatise on colonial folly and masculinity in crisis. (Men would rather sail to the Arctic and spend three years going mad being hunted by a nine-foot, soul-eating polar bear than go to therapy, etc.) This show could all too easily have ended up as Predator on Ice, a chest-beating tale of western military might conquering a savage wilderness. Instead, a show populated almost entirely by white dudes forcefully positions itself as a brutal corrective to colonialist fantasy.
It’s only when the officers abandon their airs and graces that they become true leaders. It’s only when the men band together not out of duty, but decency, that they find true brotherhood. It’s only at the ends of the Earth that they all become equals. On King William Island, an 800km walk away from the safety of the nearest trading post, Tobias Menzies’s James Fitzjames laments his life of self-serving conceit. Egotism, at scale, has led them all there: to a place beyond their dominion and beyond their spiritual understanding, a place well past the limits of where even the hungriest civilisations should ever vie to reach. They have arrived, as he puts it (in one of the greatest scenes ever committed to television), “at the end of vanity”.
The expansion of Empire requires the labour of disposable bodies. These bodies must be driven by some animating force. The Terror suggests that, more than money or resources, it is the promise of legacy that has historically spurred these bodies into action. In early episodes, the officers on Terror and Erebus sit around in their heated quarters, eating tainted food off fine China, dissecting the memoirs of fellow adventurers while planning their own; imagining how this story will sound when recounted from that elusive armchair. Even much later, as one of these characters succumbs to lead poisoning, the greatest comfort his companion can offer is: “There will be poems.” As it turns out, he’s right: The Terror is a poem, haunting and magnificent, one that sticks to your insides like a frozen spyglass to an eyelid.
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The Terror S1 is available to stream on Stan in Australia, ITVX and Shudder in the UK and Prime Video in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
