The Terror: Go for Broke

March 30, 2018 6:58 PM - Season 1, Episode 1

The crew of a Royal Naval expedition searching for the Arctic's treacherous Northwest Passage discovers instead a monstrous predator.
posted by Countess Elena (7 comments total)

It took me a while to get over the HEY YOU WERE IN GAME OF THRONES feeling; less so with Ciarán Hinds, much more so with Tobias Menzies who felt like he was delivering a similar performance.

Totally in it for the sense of impending and building dread, which lay over this episode like a heavy blanket; and for the instant payoff of "did Captain Franklin just make a terrible decision?" "YES HE DID."

Todd VanDerWerff, Vox: AMC’s The Terror is a near masterpiece of survival horror [note this is a review of the entire series; it treads lightly but contains some maybe-spoilery mentions of incidents in future episodes]

Readers of Simmons’s book — or even just the back cover of Simmons’s book — will know that Simmons has chosen to explain many of the hardest-to-understand decisions the men of the Franklin expedition made by suggesting that they were being stalked across the ice by some strange, intelligent creature, similar to a polar bear, but much larger and much smarter. (Then again, considering lead poisoning likely contributed to their deaths, and lead poisoning can cause horrible hallucinations, maybe Simmons is onto something.)

On TV, The Terror has preserved this element, but has also preserved the sense that maybe none of it is happening, that maybe it’s all a shared delusion among these men. It’s also preserved the sense that the darkest things that can happen out on the ice will happen between the men — and that the most horrible thing of all is either the unrelenting ice and cold or the insistence that it must be tamed to find a newer, quicker, more profitable shipping route.

This sense of squander and loss makes the last four or five episodes of The Terror some of the bleakest television I’ve seen, but not in a way that feels exploitative or needlessly miserable. Even though the series has nature itself and a monster roaming the ice, the most terrible choices are always made by people, and you always understand just why they make those choices. The series follows follies as they beget other follies, but always traces them back to the one central folly of believing technology could best the ice at all.

posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 3:50 PM on March 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

Thanks for posting this!

I'm not sold on the story yet, but darn it's gorgeous. I really like Ciarán Hinds and Jared Harris can always be counted on to put up a good show.

Absolutely haunting visuals and the actors really sell the sense of terror, despair, and desolation.
posted by porpoise at 9:12 AM on April 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

This show depicts such deep cold that I am thinking about saving it to binge watch in July.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 5:43 PM on April 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Very excited to get started on this once we finish Wild Wild Country (and assuming I can distract my partner long enough for her to forget that UnReal has a third season).
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:16 PM on April 2, 2018

In terms of actors, I am really amused by them having both Caesar and Brutus from HBO’s Rome. Especially during the “like Caesar crossing the Rubicon” line.
posted by corb at 9:19 AM on April 4, 2018 [11 favorites]

(also Mance Rayder and Edmure Tully)
posted by porpoise at 10:44 AM on April 4, 2018 [5 favorites]

1. features an excellent use of the expression "in a brown study," which always gets points from me.

2. nothing good is going to happen to that monkey.
posted by Rust Moranis at 9:48 PM on April 4, 2018 [6 favorites]