Jared Harris in The Terror. Courtesy of AMC.
I had no idea what this series was about when I started watching it. I had merely heard from reputable sources, such as The Internet, that it was one of the best shows of last year. Given that the title shared a lot of similarities with John Carpenter’s The Thing (for instance they both have a noun preceded by a definite article) I assumed it was going to be about an alien who killed people in Antarctica. Turns out, that was not a bad guess!
The Terror actually tells the true-life story of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus which set out in 1845 to try and map the last unknown parts of the Northern Passage. Due to a combination of bad luck and bad leadership and bad planning and possibly a demon-spirit animal, they got stuck in the ice and were never seen again… until recently, when modern wreck-hunters discovered them off the coast of King William Island.
While not required, the show does assume a fairly healthy degree of preexisting familiarity with these ghost ships and I found myself scrambling during the first two episodes to look up all sorts of stuff about British naval history, often in response to my wife demanding to know why one bearded gentleman was bossing around another one. As a side note it is literally impossible to tell most of the secondary characters apart, as the cast is massive, people are constantly dying and they are all sporting the kind of exquisite facial hair that has really proved, over the long arc of history, to be the 19th century’s greatest contribution to humanity.
Anyway, nobody really knows what happened to the crew although the small amount of evidence collected over the years indicates they all died, possibly from lead poisoning, and may have eaten each other. This gave author Dan Simmons, who wrote the source novel, quite a bit of freedom to indulge his obvious obsession with murderous spirit creatures (see: the Shrike). But the killer polar bear in this show is something of a MacGuffin, even though it provides plenty of layers of tension and commentary on the intrusion of modernity into traditional lands and such.
This story is fundamentally about exploration, fear and solitude. It echoes the themes of Lost City of Z, or Aguirre: Wrath of God, or Heart of Darkness, which are heady, existential meditations on upper-case Man, the quest for knowledge and the price paid to acquire it. “Fear is a choice Mr. Mustache!” one character exclaims to another similarly bearded character at one point. And that is the ethos of this show. Fear must be conquered in the interest of advancing human knowledge and our understanding of the world. But where do you draw the line? While we were watching the show my wife kept touching on that question, asking “Why are they doing this?” as if freezing to death while trying to map the Northwest Passage was something only an idiot would do.
To be fair, history is on her side. It turned out trying to navigate the Northwest Passage by ship was something of a fool’s errand until more modern times, and with an assist from global warming. But at the time the only way to know that was to try. Either you would succeed or you would fail, but either way it would yield valuable information. It is devilishly hard for modern audiences, who can pull up a high-resolution satellite image of the Northern Passage on their phones while streaming The Terror online, to understand what motivated explorers in the mid and late 19th century. Humanity was still struggling to make sense of the physical world we inhabited then. And the only way to do that was to push the boundaries of that world until the edges were located. People often died in this process, but ultimately their deaths helped form a more complete picture of the world.
The genius thing about The Terror, is that is drills down into the human cost of that progress. Sure, it introduces a mystical spirit animal that kills white people as an interesting plot device, but the real terror in this show is psychological. It is the terror of being stuck, alone, in a cold and unforgiving part of the world, the terror of knowing that a slow cold death is coming and being forced to come to terms with it. That is the terror of the title, just as when Marlon Brando utters “The horror, the horror!” he is really alluding to the existential dread of being alive.
This show is infused with the raw emotion of terror, like the feeling that maybe this was all for nothing, that your sacrifice won’t matter, or that you made a mistake coming to a place where you didn’t belong in the first place. Like all great meditations on unanswerable questions, it’s more interested in provocatively raising these issues than making a definitive ruling on them, though it is pretty categorical about what will happen if a spirit animal eats the soul of a serial killer.
The Terror dives into these heady issues, and it does so with elegance and impeccable craft. I am a sucker for a good period piece, and the attention to detail in the production design on this show is just a level above. It’s marvelous. The whole world of the show is basically confined to two ships - surrounded by deafening expanses of ice, water and rocks - and as the viewer you feel you are really inhabiting them alongside the doomed sailors and that makes the psychological tension and the drama pop even more. The world building is tremendous, and it sucks you right in.
Then of course the cast is stacked. They are all good but I’ll just mention Jared Harris, who apparently has a rider in his contract that requires any character he play be killed or constantly be under imminent threat of death, is great. He evinces such an interesting mix of resigned weariness and fatigue and sadness, laced with just the right amount of charisma and authority - exactly the kind of focal point a story about sailors reduced to eating their own boots and then their friends needs.
It is difficult to fault this show. Great cast, great production design, thematically provocative, and a world that sucks you into its dreary existence and forces you to ponder whether it was fair that some poor ship’s boy had to eat lead poisoned food and die in the ice trying to find the Northern Passage just so you could sit around on the couch 150 years later watching cat videos on Youtube. And that, my friends, that is the hallmark of great television.