We’re at the mid-point of this “season” of newsletter programming, so, as something of an interlude, I’m running an essay that I wrote in 2020 and included in one of my weekly newsletters. I think the piece still holds up and fits in with whatever the theme of this season of newsletters is about. Besides, it’s never a bad idea to revisit one of the five best individual seasons of television that has ever aired.
The Terror
King William Island—New York City
I.
For a little over the past two years, I have spent part of my time living in the North Pole.
I haven’t actually physically set foot at any longitude considered part of the Arctic Circle. I am too much of a coward, too weak physically and mentally, and also have a pretty busy day job, all of which have kept me from venturing to the North Pole as a physical place.
Instead, my mind has lived there. In waking moments, I have imagined myself moving slowly and solemnly over barren and unending stretches of ice and rock. When winter wind has blown down New York avenues, I’ve braced for the cold in my face, accepted it, and then continued walking, pondering what kind of paralyzing cold might grip me if I ventured out of shelter along the coast of Nunavut or Melville Island. Other times, I think about the frozen bays and straits and other bodies of water. The freeze of winter sets in quickly in the Arctic Circle (or so I’ve read) and the waterways can turn to ice and become treacherous in almost an instant. What once was a beautiful shade of blue, is now stacks of jagged and towering glaciers.
But I also think of the thaw. I think of King William Island, stretching vertically like a severed thumb from the rest of North America. When the ice melts—and yes, sometimes it does melt—the land becomes a sinking mud pit dotted with stone. I think of how the Arctic Circle is like another planet, and that NASA uses Devon Island as a stand-in for what exploring Mars would be like.
Why do I think of all of this? Because of a television show.
II.
The Terror came out on AMC in the spring of 2018. The 10-episode drama was based on the 2007 novel of the same name by the author Dan Simmons. The novel and the show are fictionalized accounts of what happened to the ill-fated crew aboard two British naval ships searching for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s: The Erebus and The Terror.
I’ll give you a very brief history here. The expedition of The Erebus and The Terror was led by Sir John Franklin. Franklin was a decorated officer of the Royal British Navy and Arctic explorer who was eventually made governor of Tasmania where his reputation was somewhat tarnished due to political machinations. In an effort to redeem himself, he led an expedition to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. He was joined in command by Captain James Fitzjames and Captain Francis Crozier. However, the ships were caught in ice in the fall of 1846 and, though notes from 1847 and 1848 were found in nearby cairns updating on the crew’s condition, none of the men survived. Eventually search parties were sent in the ensuing years, but neither ship was found until The Erebus was located and excavated from Queen Maud Gulf in 2014; The Terror was found “in pristine condition” in Terror Bay off King William Island in 2016.
If you want to know the entire story of The Erebus and The Terror there is plenty of literature out there for you to read. After watching The Terror, I read a book called Ice Ghosts by Paul Weston that details the entire story of the ships, their doomed expedition, and their eventual discovery.
This story fascinates me for a variety of reasons. First, the fact that 129 men on two different ships perished and disappeared with very little trace is eerie and unsettling. Second, imagining what the conditions of the Arctic Circle must have felt and looked like with the technological and equipment of the 1840s is terrifying in a way that my brain can barely comprehend. Third, just thinking about the actual history, that at the time finding the Northwest Passage through maybe the most inhospitable place on Earth seemed like a good and noble idea in the service of discovery and commerce, that these men were encroaching on waters and hunks of land that very few humans had touched, that there were native people living there, surviving, and calling those lands home, living their own history and experience of the vast world, that it was not even 200 years ago, makes me feel weak at the unapproachable force of time and the universe.
The Terror manages to bring all of these vague feelings and sensations to life. Even though the show was shot mostly on a soundstage and on an island off the coast of Hungary, every scene feels as if you are isolated in the Arctic with the expedition. The pancake ice feels real; the shales, packs, and mountains of ice feel real; the barren, craggy, islands the men eventually make it to both feel reassuring away from the void of ice, but also daunting in their desolation. One aerial shot at the end of the first episode, once the ships are trapped in the pack, makes you glad you were never there.
On the show, the men have to survive the elements, tuberculosis, zinc deficiency, lead poisoning, each other, and also the presence of a supernatural beast: the Tuunbaq. The Tuunbaq did not exist. But when you watch the show, and are immersed in the extraordinary setting, the sense of dread that permeates nearly every scene, it seems plausible that nearly anything could be possible for the demise of these men. Why couldn’t the Tuunbaq be real?
The show presents Tuunbaq as a fact of life in the Arctic Circle. It’s a part of the religious beliefs of the Inuit (In reality, Tuunbaq isn’t part of actual Inuit beliefs but a creation of Dan Simmons.) And when Mr. Blanky—one of the crew members of the ship and one of the best characters on the show—faces off with the creature at the end of episode 5, you’ll start believing in Tuunbaq too. It is one of my favorite sequences in television history. From the swirling snow, to the way the action is shot, to the haunting score, it is a scene I will never forget and always return to.
Though Tunnbaq is a source of much of the horror (and violence, so much violence) on The Terror, the show is ultimately more concerned with the limitless depravity of men, especially when faced with extreme circumstances and the breakdown of leadership, order, and law. What comes across over the 10 episodes is that men can and will be convinced of anything under the right circumstances, and that maintaining a sense of right and wrong is seemingly the ultimate challenge when one has to decide whether to continue living or to give in and die.
III.
The Terror concludes with a haunting image. The lone survivor of the expedition (again, in the book and in the show; in real life there were no survivors) is seen sitting on a frozen body of water, hunched above a sealing hole, waiting with his spear for one to swim by. The synthesizer score begins to build and swirl. And soon the camera pulls back slowly. The vast whiteness of the terrain, with the sunlight glinting through the open and endless sky, starts to take on hues of gold and faint shades of purple. The effect feels almost hallucinogenic. And then it’s over and you’re left empty, haunted, and moved.
AMC aired a second season of The Terror in 2019. The setting and story were different and the series will now potentially be used as an ongoing anthology. I haven’t watched the second season. And I still haven’t read Simmons’s book.
That’s because the first season of The Terror remains holy to me. It stands alone in a pure and contained way. It is a story and season of television I will go back to time and time again (I’ve already watched it three times all the way through). Though it came out to critical acclaim two years ago, it still feels like people didn’t and don’t talk about it nearly enough.
The Terror’s first season is one of television’s masterpieces. Its depiction of one of the great mysteries of sea exploration has forever gripped my imagination. So, in some way, I will always be living in the North Pole—both attracted to and in perpetual fear and awe of a part of this planet that I will never know. And one that seemingly may vanish, taking all of its mystery, and all traces of the limitless depravity of men with it.