The Terror: The Horror of Discovery
What does Dr. Ian Malcolm say about “discovery” in Jurassic Park?
What is so great about discovery? It is a violent, penetrative act that scars what it explores. What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world.
Ah yes. Well, if that’s the case, then The Terror is a story about an expedition caught with its pants down. For this one, I also considered “The Horror of Men” and even “The Horror of Capitalism”. All are intertwined though.
AMC has a pretty amazing track-record of hit shows, but The Terror doesn’t get brought up nearly enough when discussing them. It’s something of a stalled anthology series, producing only two seasons. Since I’ve never seen season two (The Terror: Infamy), my focus will be restricted to season one. The first ten episodes are adapted from a book of the same name and offer a fictionalized account of the ill-fated 1845 British naval expedition of the HMS Terror and Erebus. I’d previously streamed The Terror a couple times, but I wanted to revisit an episode or two this morning before I started writing. I ended up binging seven.
I hope readers will be moved to watch the series, so I’ll try not to give too much away. In episode one, we find the crews of Erebus and Terror, and their Captains Sir John Franklin (Ciaran Hinds) and Francis Crozier (Jared Harris), searching for the Northwest Passage. Despite Crozier’s warnings, they find themselves facing an early winter and get stuck in the ice pack. This is just the start of what are to be many and varied troubles for the men. The following Spring, a party is sent out to help locate dry land and end up being startled by and killing an Inuit shaman. To make matters worse, they are subsequently attacked by what they believe to be a polar bear.
Back at the ships, then crews continue to be attacked and they soon realize that this is no normal bear. For one, it is many times the size of even the largest of bears. It also appears to materialize out of ice itself and has cunning beyond that of any animal. The dead shaman’s captive daughter eventually lets them in on the secret: it is Tuunbaq, a monstrous spirit creature, later described as being a “thing made of muscles and spells”. It’s sufficiently freaky looking — like a giant polar bear with a creepy human face.
As I’ve hinted at, Tuunbaq is just one of many troubles the sailors face. There’s, of course, the cold, but also a mutinous sociopath and stowaway at work, rampant lead poisoning, and the constant threat of scurvy. If you don’t know anything about scurvy besides it being a jokey pirate-era disease, do yourself a favor and google it. Scurvy is a fascinating and uniquely cruel affliction. As time goes on and the ships remain stuck in the ice, all of these troubles compound until the crews are forced to begin an 800 mile march toward rescue. It’s while on this journey in the second half of the series that things get increasingly fucked up and inevitably turn to cannibalism.
In flashbacks, you see Sir John arrogantly ignoring warnings from men who’d been bested by the ice. Hubris again turns him from life-saving advice from his 2nd, Captain Crozier. All they get for their troubles is stuck in Inuit territory, rightly hunted for their transgressions by an Indigenous avenging spirit. There are stretches of time when they aren’t plagued by attacks, but they just can’t seem to stop poking the bear, so to speak. And even Tuunbaq, who is basically a god, is poisoned, literally, by the visiting white men. The lead building up in their systems from poorly soldered canned goods (the Navy went with the cheapest supplier) is hard on the beast’s belly when he consumes their bodies, and the blackness in some of their hearts is cancerous when he, on occassion, takes their souls.
And what was this all for?! For Queen and country? To expedite trade routes? Some of the men of this story are evil characters (or too easily turned toward evil), but many are just soldiers who were sold a “grand adventure” in the name of supposed progress and discovery. It’s an interesting coincidence that the phrase “manifest destiny” was coined in the same year this real-life expedition set off. While that is a term specific to the history of North America, the same heart that drove it also drove the leaders behind this expedition. They were going to exert their will over the wilds, the seasons, and any Indigenous populations that got in their way — and they all died for it.
That’s less a spoiler for the show than a fact of history. We don’t know if the crews of Terror and Erebus really faced off against a giant spirit bear, but they did all perish, one way or the other. Most of these men had little power in the world and they, too, were victims to the ambitions of those who sought to profit off of their labor. Of course, discovery is a violating act for the violated, but it can also be devastating for the pawns of those who sanction it.
There’s a scene early in The Terror where ice gets stuck in one of the ship’s propellers. Their solution is to send a man down in a suit and dive helmet (sort of a proto aqualung) to dislodge it. The scene is very unsettling (Marcus Fjellstrom’s eerie score sets the tone), and ends with the sailor seeing something horrifying floating toward him under the ice. When he’s pulled up, Sir John asks the man what it was like? He tells him “it was like a dream”— probably meaning, more specifically, a nightmare. The Captain praises him and confesses his envy that the man was the first to see this unknown world beneath the Arctic. What should, supposedly, be a feather in this man’s cap is an experience that haunts him throughout the series. It’s a nice juxtaposition between the romantic notion of discovery held by those in command, and the traumatic version of discovery carried out by those at their disposal.
Is it scary? More unnerving than scary, but it carries with it a sustained sense of dread that never really lets up. Tuunbaq creates some suspense and action, but it’s the men themselves who commit the most unsettling crimes on one another.
Streaming: For now, The Terror is available on Hulu. I have to figure it will end up on AMC+ before long though.
