I was initially inclined to avoid The Terror because the premise didn’t seem to be the kind of story I would be interested. However, once I saw the entire season was up on Hulu, I decided to give it a try and I’m glad I did. The Terror, befitting its name, is terrifying.
The Terror is based on a 2007 novel by Dan Simmons and sets out to explain what really happened to Sir John Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition, which set off in HMS Terror and HMS Erebus to find the legendary Northwest Passage and was never seen or heard from again. The story is largely based on what is believed to have happened to the expedition (the ships got caught in the ice, eventually they started to walk south, and ultimately they all died, and in all likelihood they suffered from lead poisoning).
However, woven in-between the facts is a supernatural narrative that I found surprisingly believable. Deep down, I know monsters like the Tuunbaq aren’t real, and yet…the Arctic, especially as it appeared in the late 1840s, was so remote and so icy that it feels like the sort of place the last of the supernatural monsters would have survived. After all, man had swarmed everywhere else, it makes sense that monsters native to these cold, foreign areas, would still survive long past time time other monsters disappeared.
I really liked the inclusion of the Inuit in the story’s narrative. The Inuit’s accounts of Franklin’s expedition were derided for many years, especially their accounts of cannibalism, because of course there’s no way proper British sailors would revert to savage actions like that (read heavy sarcasm here). In The Terror however, the writers really sought to portray the Inuit properly, contrasting their ability to survive in the snowy wilderness with the complete inability of the British to survive this hostile environment (contrast Silna/Lady Silence with any of the British characters).
One thing that surprised me is how the character of Sir John Franklin (Ciarán Hinds) departs/dies relatively early in the season. For some reason, as the leader of the expedition, I thought he would be around much longer, but the show does not suffer in his absence.
Honestly, I enjoyed first season of The Terror a lot more than I thought I would when I started the first episode. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, because it will leave you spellbound until the bitter end.
What did you think of the first season of The Terror? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and have a great day!
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