AMC’s “The Terror” starts out cold, dark and spooky as hell
Packed with dark foreboding, mysterious occurrences and psychological chills, the beginning of AMC’s new series The Terror delivers. The first two episodes, “Go for Broke” and “Gore,” which aired this week, are sumptuously filmed, atmospheric and waste no time drawing the viewer into the story of the doomed Franklin Expedition.
The Terror is based on the superb novel of the same name by writer Dan Simmons, and lists Ridley Scott (Bladerunner, Alien) as one of its executive producers, along with show creator David Kajganich and showrunner Soo Hugh. Game of Thrones veterans Ciaran Hinds (Mance Rayder), Tobias Menzies (Edmure Tully) and Clive Russell (Brynden Blackfish Tully) — plus actors Jared Harris (The Expanse), Paul Ready (Motherland) and Nive Nielsen (The New World) — are parts of the large, excellent cast.
The actual Franklin Expedition began in 1845. Captain Sir John Franklin, a famous explorer, took two of the world’s most technologically advanced ships — The Terror and The Erebus — on a three-year mission to navigate the Northwest Passage, a much sought-after but elusive path through the Arctic Ocean and a potentially convenient trade route between Europe and Asia. The expedition vanished.
Missions designed to find out what happened to the Franklin Expedition have been undertaken from Victorian times right up until today. The artifacts recovered suggest that some of the shipwrecked crew survived for a long period of time, some resorting to cannibalism before they succumbed to scurvy, malnutrition, lead poisoning and the cold. Simmons goes further, introducing a monster that relentlessly stalks the stranded crews, turning the unforgiving Arctic landscape into a freezing, terrifying hell.
WARNING, MATEY: SPOILERS AHEAD FOR EPISODES 1 AND 2
Episode one, “Go for Broke,” is aptly named. It begins with a superbly unnerving scene set in 1850 where two European Navy men interview an Inuit man about what he might have seen regarding the remnants of the Franklin Expedition. The Inuit man claims to have seen a dying Captain Francis Crozier (Harris) and a few emaciated sailors attempting to walk south; they were terrified, hunted by something he calls the Tuunbaq, a word for a monster of “muscles and spells.” The European interpreter doesn’t understand.
Crozier’s last message, relayed by the Inuit man, is “Tell those who come after us not to stay. The ships are gone. There’s no way through. No passage. Tell them we are gone. Dead, and gone.”
The episode then hops backwards to September 1846, four years earlier, where we see the ill-fated British Royal Naval Expedition (part of the Discovery Service) under way. The crew members are isolated as few human beings have ever been, as their ships plow through the icy Arctic waters at the edge of the world. Captain Sir John Franklin (Hinds) stands proudly on the bow of The Erebus, his ship, ready to adventure into the unknown.
We quickly get to know the three expedition leaders. Franklin is an affable, elegant man skilled at managing his crew, but he suffers from poor judgement, tending to put too much faith in technology and providence. Captain James Fitzjames (Menzies), loyal to Franklin, is a glory-seeking braggart driven by his desire for fame. With his braggadocio, he’s not unlike pre-Red Wedding Edmure Tully. Fitzjames is dismissive of Captain Crozier, whom he criticizes for his lack of dash and sense of adventure. Both Franklin and Fitzjames love journeys into the unknown, but their enthusiasm isn’t always borne out by the cold, hard facts.
Captain Crozier’s dour personality stands in stark contrast to that of his fellows. Despite his heavy drinking, he’s pragmatic and capable, and the only one of the three to have gone on an Arctic expedition before. He understands the perilous nature of the environment. “In this place, technology still bends the knee to luck,” he tells Fitzjames. Crozier and Fitzjames despise one another, no matter how many times Franklin tries to mediate their disputes.
From the opening minutes of the episode, death is omnipresent. It starts with a scurvy-riddled crewman spewing blood, and then a sailor who drowns after falling from a high mast. This is a dangerous voyage into the unknown, and accidents will happen, but soon, things get strange. When the ailing crewman, at death’s door and in the care of assistant surgeon Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready), recoils at a vision of an Inuit Man wearing strange masks at the foot of his sickbed, he screams that “It wants us to run!” Then, in a particularly haunting sequence, crewman Henry Collins (Trystane Gravelle) dons a diving suit and descends into the glowing blue-white depths below The Erebus to dislodge a piece of ice jamming the rudder. The man is sent into a panic when he sees the body of the drowned crewman drifting towards him.
With an early winter approaching and The Erebus crippled by a damaged propeller, Franklin holds a officer’s meeting aboard The Erebus and makes his critical mistake: he overrules Crozier, who advises either heading east and away from the ice pack for the winter or abandoning the half-speed Erebus and going “for broke” in a speedy dash west in an attempt to beat the southern-pushing ice. While the unflappable Franklin admits the ice is “increasing dramatically in thickness and amount,” he refuses to abandon the Erebus or stop pushing west. “We are two weeks away from the Grail,” he says, “and it is my belief that god and the winter will find us in safe water by the end of the year.”
Crozier is crestfallen, reminding Franklin that if they get caught by the ice pack they will become part of it, and helpless. “This place wants us dead,” he says. “If you are wrong, we are about to commit an act of hubris we may not survive.”
The Erebus and The Terror advance into the ice pack and are soon reduced to a crawl, moving forward only as the ice is broken by hand or with explosives. But the heavy ice closes in, and “Go For Broke” ends with Franklin realizing that his two vessels are trapped in place for the winter.
The second episode, “Gore,” opens in the spring of 1847, where we find that the crews of the two ships have survived the winter in good condition. Franklin sends lead parties to the west and east: these search parties, dragging supply-laden lifeboats on sledges, are on the lookout for open water. The eastern-oriented lead team returns half-frozen, reporting seeing nothing but ice. Even more ominously, a portion of their tinned provisions have already spoiled.
The west-oriented party, headed by Lt. Gore (Tom Weston-Jones) and accompanied by Goodsir, reaches a crest of ice and an island cairn where they are threatened by a roaring beast they cannot see beyond the ice ridges. The beast upends their supply boat and the panicked sailors accidentally shoot an Inuit man approaching them with his daughter, the Silent Woman (Nielsen). Gore is snatched away, but none of the party actually sees what takes him.
The survivors of the western lead party scramble back to the ship, frightened that whatever killed Gore is following them. The ship’s surgeon refuses to treat the wounded Inuit man and Goodsir is unable to save him from his injuries. (Apparent to the audience but unknown to the characters is the fact that the Silent Woman’s father appears to be the Inuit man the young crewman dying of scurvy saw in “Go For Broke”). As the Inuit Man—a mute who had his tongue cut out long ago—dies, the Silent Woman sobs, begging him to remain and saying cryptic things as if they are having a two-sided conversation: “Please stay. I can’t do this on my own. Do not ask that of me. I am not ready. Tuunbaq will not obey me. It’s not going to be able to find you.”
Crozier has the Inuit woman transferred to theTerror, and that night, as he walks back to his vessel across the space of dark ice between the icebound ships, he pauses and turns as if he senses something out in the darkness. In the final scene of “Gore,” Crozier speaks with the Silent Woman aboard the Erebus. He tells her that the British only want to help. Her response is “You want to help. Take your boats away. You cannot be here.” She says the British are going to disappear. But the British are stuck.
In the final haunting shot of “Gore,” the bereaved Silent Woman motions as if she is throwing her voice away, and Crozier, a man who has some understanding of the Inuit, watches with a sense of confusion and dread.
The first two episodes of The Terror excel in the art of cinematographic storytelling. The two-hour block is drenched in atmospherics and serves up judicious shockers, allowing the characters to take center stage while the horror burns slow in the background. We all know pretty much what’s coming—a slowly revealed monster, terrible setbacks, supernatural weirdness, desperate acts of desperate men—so the success of the remaining eight episodes of the series will lie in keeping us engaged with how it comes about.
Everything is firing on all cylinders for The Terror. The bad luck, spinning compasses, barking dogs, tricks of the Arctic light and Inuit enigmas hook the viewer with bait aplenty. Even the opening credit sequence is chilling, with its ghastly visions of death beneath ice. The seamless CGI used to create the environment is astounding, especially considering that almost all of the series—with its sweeping vistas of water and titanic ice fields constantly around the characters—was shot on a sound stage in Budapest.
With the premiere episode’s graphic cards and opening scene, The Terror immediately dispenses with historical facts: the Franklin Expedition disappeared, long without much of a trace (a lot of evidence and artifacts have been discovered recently, including the wrecks of both ships, but that really has no bearing on this Victorian-era re-imagining). The story here is about what happened when overconfident men sought to conquer Mother Nature and, perhaps, forces in this world the Europeans didn’t understand.
This tale of historical fiction is mixed with hope, horror, human frailty and elements of the supernatural. Based on the bone-chilling excellence of the first two episodes, I’d say The Terror will be one hell of a horror-fiction ride.
GRADE: A
To hold us over for the week, here is AMC’s sneak peek of episode 3, “The Ladder:”
Are you as all-in on The Terror like us? Feel free to discuss in the comments section below!
(The AMC limited 10-part series The Terror airs every Monday night at 8:00 p.m. CST and is available in its entirety to Comcast users with AMC Premiere.)
Next: 'The Terror' brings more storytelling firepower in Episode 3
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