Inviting officers from both ships, including the hated Sir James Fitzjames, to sit in, the drunken sailor asks them a favor. “I’m going to be unwell, gentlemen,” he tells them. “Quite unwell, I expect. And I don’t know for how long.” It soon dawns on his officers that he means to quit drinking cold turkey; the favor he’s asking is their help in covering for him in command, covering up the true nature of his illness, and above all refusing to let him talk them out of it. “We mustn’t stop until it is finished,” he says, drawing from an unexpected reserve of dignity and resolve, “and you musn’t let me.” His tone softens with rueful anticipation of agony to come as he adds, “I may beg you.” He slurs, shakes, grins, and cries his way through the scene, as if the ice of his addiction is slowly crushing the hull of his spirit, and he’s frantically trying everything he can to hold the ship together. Even Sir James seems deeply moved by the display, and considering the raw power of Jared Harris’s performance here, he damn well better be. If you’ve ever known an alcoholic who got sober, you know this moment. I do, and the recognition made me cry. There are all kinds of terror, after all.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club. Jared Harris, man. Jared Harris.

I’m spelling all this stuff out in detail because the details are there, and the material is designed to withstand this kind of scrutiny. The Terror could be coasting on survival-horror staples and period-prestige clichés. Instead, it’s using these extraordinary circumstances as a crucible for revealing character, not melting it away for cheap thrills and meaningless misery. It’s a miracle on the ice.

My review of this week’s episode of The Terror for the A.V. Club focuses on a worried-wife scene and a torture scene that the show elevates from rote to vital.

SPOILER WARNING

Many, and perhaps most, prestige television shows traffic in death. Name your top five dramas right now and chances are good the majority are about people who kill other people for a living, or at the very least on a pro-am basis. Yet for all their fixation on mortality, violent or otherwise, few shows bother attempting to answer the unanswerable question of what death feels like. The one that (maybe) gave it a serious try wound up doing something so strange by the standards of its peers that we’re still talking about it eleven years later.

Which makes “The Ladder,” The Terror’s horrific third episode, one of the year’s most impressive hours of television. Climaxing with the surprise death of a major character—a shock tactic you’ve almost come to expect from high-profile dramas—it takes the opportunity to root the viewer in the experience of dying, and dying horribly. Using dizzying camerawork, surreal editing, brutal gore, and a simple but staggering performance by Ciarán Hinds, the episode makes the killing of Sir John Franklin a real voyage into the unknown: the mind of a man who suddenly finds himself in the grips of panic and pain from which there will be no return.

Episode three of The Terror featured one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on television; I wrote about why in my review for the A.V. Club.

You don’t need to get clocked on the head by a hailstone the size of a grapefruit to think that there was something playful about The Terror this week. For one thing you wouldn’t have much of a head left, but it’s more than that. Titled “Gore,” the episode creates a sense of anticipation that something terrible, or at least disgusting, is going to happen from the start. This isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t the whole picture. In shades of the series title’s double meaning, Gore is the surname of the lieutenant to whom the horrible thing happens. What’s more, his death and disappearance at the claws of a huge, elusive bear takes place after eight months of nothing happening, apparently: Between the final shot of the premiere and the first shot of this installment, eight months have elapsed. A series with the confidence to take such a huge narrative leap this early in its run, and to make gallows-humor puns about the inexorable doom approaching all its characters, is a series worth watching.

I reviewed episode two of The Terror for the A.V. Club. It’s an impressive show.

“Past hope. Past kindness or consideration. Past justice. Past warmth or cold or comfort. Past love. But past surprise? What an endlessly unfolding tedium life would then become!” —Francis Wolcott, Deadwood

The men of the Royal Navy about whose lives and deaths The Terror concerns itself have set out on an expedition into the unknown, but the show itself is not. Carefully researched, meticulously art-directed dramas about the evil that heavily accented, infrequently bathed men did back in the olden days are as common across the TV landscape as ice in the Arctic. (At least, as common as ice in the Arctic used to be.) In too many of these cases, hitting that one note of grim, grimy gloom seems to have been viewed as sufficient by the filmmakers involved.

What The Terror gets right, and so many other works of period miserabalism—including executive producer Ridley Scott’s own Taboo, starring a soot-encrusted Tom Hardy—get wrong, is that you have to feel bad that the characters are so miserable in the first place. If you start them all at the same glowering, fundamentally mean-spirited place and just make things worse from there, that empathy can’t be generated; you’re left with the “endlessly unfolding tedium” that the granddaddy of the genre once described. Deadwood never fell into that trap, and neither, based on this opening hour, does The Terror.

I reviewed the crackerjack premiere of The Terror for The A.V. Club, where I’ll be covering the show all season. Most people I know who read Dan Simmons’s source novel enjoyed a lot of it a whole lot but have major problems that kept them from declaring it a truly great book, and I’m in that camp myself. When I heard they were making a show of it, I got excited not because the book is perfect, but because it isn’t, and a good show might be able to excise those imperfections. I’m happy to report that The Terror is, indeed, a good show. Remember that spark I said The Alienist doesn’t have? The Terror does. It’s got the magic.