The Terror is a 2018 television series about the crew of a Royal Naval expedition searching for the Arctic’s treacherous Northwest Passage who discovers instead a monstrous predator.
Episode 7 (Episode 6 here) of AMC’s The Terror, while not giving us any further glimpses of the monster, may have given us an even more fearsome villain that has been hiding in plain sight. There wasn’t a ton of overall development of the series in this episode, but it had some pertinent parts that will undoubtedly factor into the upcoming series finale in the next few weeks.
At the beginning of the episode the men are packing and preparing to begin their journey on foot. A few men opt to stay behind with the ships in case the ice melts and they’re able to sail out. As other men are packing, Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis) is already starting to coerce some men into splitting off on their own. 18 miles in their journey Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) and a few others come across the original rescue party they’d send out months ago. The men have all been decapitated.
During the first night after taking off, Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready) talks to one of the men about the night the carnival was burnt to the ground. He tells Goodsir that when he smelled the flesh burning that night, his mouth started watering. Goodsir then urges then urges Crozier to send out the hunting parties ASAP so the men can stop eating from the tins that are leading to their insanity. On the second night, John Morfin (Anthony Flanagan) collapses in pain and begs men to kill him. When they refuse, he grabs a rifle and purposefully misfires at James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies), which causes a man to shoot him dead.
Hickey sees Goodsir instruct Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) not to eat food from the tins, giving away that the food is infected and driving the men mad. He shares this information with some of the men, one of whom is an officer he wants to get on his side. That way he’ll be able to rally the men easier when the time is right. Hickey knows that even if they find some game to hunt, it won’t matter because there won’t be enough to go around.
Hickey, Lt John Irving (Ronan Raftery) and another crewman later come across some Eskimos. Irving approaches them and attempts to communicate. They seem friendly and offer him food, so he returns to share the news with his men. When he gets back to them, he finds Hickey killing their companion, who then turns his attention to Irving and kills him by stabbing him repeatedly in the chest. The episode ends with a flashback in which we learn that Hickey is not who he says he is, and that he actually replaced the real Hickey and took his spot on the voyage.
The main realization that I came across tonight is that this is not a horror show, it’s a survival show. It gives a fictional depiction (with some fantastical embellishment) of what happened to these two ships. We get a real look into the conditions that these men were faced with, and the actual horror that we get is what these situations can do to men. We see even more men going mad here due to the tin food that they are eating, yet their only option is to turn to hunting game which they aren’t finding any of. It comes down to starvation versus insanity. Meanwhile, Hickey is off the reservation. We learn that he replaced (and most likely killed) the actual Cornelius Hickey, which begs the question of why he wanted to join this voyage in the first place. He’s quickly turned into a murdering psychopath with a hidden agenda that only he seems to know. The monster has become the least of the men’s worries.