The men of The Terror did not, as they say, die as they lived. They lived as interchangeable cogs in the machine of empire—sailors in the Royal Navy of Great Britain, the largest imperial project ever undertaken by humanity between the ride of the Khans and the Pax Americana currently dying all around us. So the show based on their final misadventure dresses them in their blue uniforms, swaddles them in shapeless and face-covering winter gear, allows the cold to redden their faces and lengthen their beards, until distinguishing between them requires an expert’s eye and ear. (Or at least a thoroughgoing knowledge of English and Irish character actors.)
They lived their final years trapped in the frozen waters and barren lands of the Arctic, searching for an open lane of water that would bridge the Atlantic to the Pacific without the need for Her Majesty’s Ships to sail around the tip of South America to get there—the fabled Northwest Passage. (Only one of them would actually live, and not for long, to see the Passage, and only by accident.) So the show shoots them against endless uniform vistas of white and gray, with snowblinding daylight or soulcrushing darkness alternating for periods that lasted months at a stretch.
And in the end, they lived their final weeks, days, hours, minutes, moments dying from the same things: malnutrition, food poisoning, disease, starvation, exposure to the cold, murder at one another’s hands…and, in some cases, mutilation and consumption by ferocious hulking thing on the ice, out for their English blood. (Fee-fi-fo-fum.)
But when they died? When they died, it was different. They were different. Replacing the uniforms and the uniformity were visions as unique and beautiful and terrible and individual as people are themselves, deep down inside.
I wrote an essay on the many deaths of The Terror for Decider. As you’d expect for a piece on character deaths, there are many spoilers. I tried to do this magnificent show justice and I hope you enjoy the result.
Tags: decider, horror, reviews, the terror, TV, TV reviews