How the Act of Dying Made ‘The Terror’ One Of The Year’s Best Shows

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.

One of the first to go is Mr. Young (Alife Kingsnorth). Aptly named, he nevertheless succumbs to the lead poisoning that will take so many of his fellow sailors. He is told by kindly surgeon’s assistant Mr. Goodsir (Paul Ready), will see a bright light, and the faces of beloved family long gone. When he says he never knew his family, Mr. Goodsir suggests the proverbial flights of angels will sing him to his rest. Instead, he sees a stranger, a sorcerer, a shaman from the Netsilik people whose homeland the Navy has sent two ships to explore and invade. He sees a terrible warning, though about what no one can say.

When Mr. Goodsir’s time comes, years of misery later, it’s a time partially of his own choosing. Forced to aid a band of mutineers in butchering and eating their fallen and murdered comrades, he covers himself with poison, fills his belly and bloodstream up with more, opens his veins, and waits to succumb. He sees the white light he promised that poor sailor, but neither family nor angels are in it. Instead there’s an orchid, a seashell, a crystal — vegetable, animal, and mineral, the natural world he loved reduced to its gorgeous essence.

Lt. Jopson (Liam Garrigan), a good and loyal man, sees something much uglier. He’d spent the entire time the voyage was trapped in the ice and then stranded in the wasteland loyal to his captain, Francis Crozier, even when Crozier was a sour and incompetent alcoholic. With Jopson’s care and help and trust, Crozier broke his own addiction and became the martial and moral leader he was always supposed to be. But in his deluded, hallucinatory final moments, Jopson envisions Crozier at the head of a full banquet table, feasting contentedly while Jopson, starving and abandoned, can only crawl and grasp at air.

Captain James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies, pictured above) has an altogether sweeter, and more accurate, view of his fellow captain when he dies, even though it’s Crozier who kills him. Poisoned and malnourished beyond hope of recovery, he asks Captain Crozier, his rival turned confidante, to do him the kindness of ending his suffering. Fitzjames had already entrusted Crozier with his deepest secrets and insecurities; now he trusts him to take them, and everything else that pains him, away for good. No white light, but an angel of mercy for certain.

No such luck for Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds), leader of the voyage and the first captain to die. His final moments, which we witness through his own eyes in a disorienting and almost unbearable death sequence unlike any I’ve ever seen before, arrive as he’s dragged through the ice and snow in the jaws of a beast called Tuunbaq—a bear-like entity that serves roughly the same role in The Terror as the shark in Jaws or the extraterrestrials in Alien and The Thing. His vision is a kaleidoscopic cacophony: his home in England, the people waiting for him there, the unchanging and unfeeling white nightmare of his surroundings, whatever glimpses of the creature that’s killing him he catches as he’s slung around like a ragdoll, the fire he collides with, the icewater he’ll drown in, his own blood and body parts.

As the expedition’s designated diver, Mr. Collins (Trystan Gravelle) has seen things that would pass for visions if experienced by anyone else; his glimpse of a corpse floating around beneath the surface of the icy water is one of the show’s early nightmare visuals. As the pain of starvation and poisoning starts affecting his mind as well as his body, he chugs a medicinal cocaine-and-wine concoction and spends much of his final day on earth laughing hysterically at god knows what. That changes when Tuunbaq catches up with him, eating him alive so slowly that the world warps and wavers around him. It’s as though he’s watching everything end, not just himself.

Dr. Stanley (Alistair Petrie), the expedition’s lead surgeon, sees the flames in which he’s deliberately engulfed himself, burning a dozen sailors to death along with him in his madness.

Mr. Blanky (Ian Hart, pictured above), the expedition’s ice master and Captain Crozier’s oldest friend, sees two things of note: the Northwest Passage, which he’s gone too gangrenous to relate to anyone else; and Tuunbaq, which, after wrapping himself in wire and sharp silverware to turn his body into a human booby trap for the beast’s belly, is exactly the thing he wanted to see.

Lt. Irving (Ronan Rafferty), the Marine who’s just made contact with a Netsilik family that could lead the starving survivors of the abandoned ships to food and shelter, sees Mr. Hickey, his supposed comrade, stripped down to his underwear despite the cold to avoid getting blood on his uniform when he stabs the Lieutenant to death.

Mr. Hickey (Adam Nagaitis)—murderer, impostor, queer-bashing victim, mutineer, self-minted captain, and would-be shaman—sees Tuunbaq reject the sacrificial offering of his self-severed tongue to eat his body instead. The monster sees the monster.

Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen), the Netsilik woman whose attempts to corral Tuunbaq after her shaman father is accidentally shot to death by the Englishmen, sees…well, we will never know. When Tuunbaq dies from countless internal and external wounds, she too must die, and she walks into the wildnerness to do so. Her death is a private affair.

And Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) does not die, not during the show anyway. He is our last vision, as he sits alongside a child from the Netsilik community that has adopted him after every other man from his voyage has died, an island of life in sea of emptiness and death.

Adapted by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh from the novel by Dan Simmons, itself based on the true story of the lost Franklin expedition—which was last seen by white men in 1845 and disappeared entirely until the sunken wrecks of its two ships, Erebus and Terror, were finally found in 2014 and 2016—The Terror sometimes uses death like any other horror story, to frighten and disgust and horrify. But in its story of doomed men sent on a doomed voyage on behalf of a doomed and blood-soaked empire, it finds ways for death to coax out the individuality and humanity their brutish and dehumanizing business had so long denied them. This not an easy gift to receive, certainly not for them and not for the show’s viewers either. But in reflecting on The Terror, the best television show of the year, I am glad to have opened it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Where to stream The Terror