With a world-class cast that will have you constantly saying ‘hey, it’s that guy!’, this horror drama about a doomed Royal Navy expedition is a grand treatise on colonial folly
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here’s an old adage that adventure is extreme discomfort remembered from an armchair. But what if there is no armchair waiting at the end of your journey? What if you never return at all? Well, then you have the first season of AMC anthology series The Terror. Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, who died last month, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846. After that, the entire expedition vanished – both ships and all hands lost – a sort of Victorian-era MH370 that has fascinated historians, geographers and artists ever since.
Simmons’s 2007 reimagining of this story, as well as the 2018 TV adaptation, speculates on the ultimate fate of the ships and their crews, using historically accurate names, dates and locations but embellishing the tale with Lovecraftian horror. Not only are the men contending with a subzero wasteland and suspected lead poisoning from their diminishing tinned food supplies, they are also being stalked by an enormous polar bear-like creature known to the local Netsilik people as Tuunbaq, “a spirit dressed as an animal” made of “muscles and spells”. For the Tuunbaq, the icebound ships are a year-round buffet and the Englishmen aboard are high-protein snacks.
