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.
In this week’s episode of AMC’s The Terror, we are building to the upcoming season finale. Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis) continues to show us just how demented he is, another major character is lost, and the mystery surrounding Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) and the Tuunbaq (snow monster) continues. This episode was more about showing the continued terrors of this journey, as opposed to overall story development. However, this should leave us set up for quite an action packed finale.
We pick up at Captain Francis Crozier’s (Jared Harris) camp not long after the most recent monster attack. They lost another 32 men, and 23 are unaccounted for. As they prepare to continue walking, Crozier leaves some supplies for Hickey’s men in the hope that they’ll appreciate his gesture and later re-join him. As they begin their trek, Captain James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) sickness has taken its toll on him and he collapses. That night Fitzjames tells Crozier that he’s had enough, and convinces Crozier to aid him in his suicide.
The very next morning Crozier learns that his other good friend, Thomas Blanky (Ian Hart), can no longer continue the journey. The wound where his leg was removed has been infected, so he offers to take a different route to lead the monster away from the crew. While taking this path he stumbles across the Northwest Passage, in essence completing the mission they’d set out on.
Meanwhile, at Hickey’s camp he is dealing with their lack of food issue. While Dr. Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready) is giving care to one of the sickly crew, Hickey stabs the man in the back to now use him as a source of food. Hickey then forces Goodsir to cut him up for cooking or else he’ll torture another member of the crew until he gets his way. Goodsir reluctantly obliges and the crew (minus Goodsir) dine on their former member.
We also get a brief update at the Eskimo camp where we find Lady Silence talking to a member of her tribe. He tells her that due to the British all their food source on land has been scared away and they are starving. He also informs her that they will need another Shaman for the Tuunbaq, although it is still hers and she cannot walk away from it.
At the end of the episode, Crozier and a few of their men are betrayed by a young boy in their camp. He led them to what was supposed to be a passage of water, but they are ambushed by part of Hickey’s crew. Crozier tells his men to hand over their weapons, continue their journey, and he agrees to head to Hickey’s camp. The episode ends with Blanky facing down the Tuunbaq with laughter.
It was a sad episode to see two great characters go. Blanky was a fan favorite from the beginning, always loyal to Crozier and the bravest of the men having single-handedly facing off with the Tuunbaq on multiple occasions. It was also sad to see the toll that it’s taken on Goodsir to be a part of Hickey’s camp. Once such a caring doctor, now he bluntly tells a man he’s checking up on that he’s going to die painfully. At the start of the episode we saw Lady Jane Franklin (Greta Scacchi) rallying support back in London to send out a rescue crew. Some of this rescue crew will presumably be the men we saw at the start of the first episode who were trying to find Sir John Franklin, Crozier and Fitzjames. Now we know the fates of two of those men, and things aren’t exactly looking promising for Crozier.
This episode once again shows us the lengths that people will go to for survival. It’s hard to watch them eating part of their crew, but it makes you question deep down how far you’d be willing to go were your life on the line. When I first saw a trailer for The Terror, I thought it was going to be a horror show about a monster hunting this crew in the middle of the Arctic. It wasn’t long before I realized that the show being called The Terror (asides from being the name of one of the vessels) is because it does an amazing job depicting the true terror of the journey these men went through.