AMC’s The Terror lands its final, satisfying blow in “We are Gone”

With “We Are Gone,” AMC’s gothic horror series The Terror delivers an engaging, ultimately satisfying finale. Staying true to the style the series has established, the last episode avoids indulging in the grotesque, instead delivering up a grimly thoughtful piece of work.

The fates of the Franklin expedition sailors has never been in question: they were all going to die. The real point of The Terror (based on author Dan Simmon’s novel of the same name) is to examine how people pushed beyond their limits in an unknown environment face death.

BEWARE, MATEYS! SPOILERS FOR “WE ARE GONE” LIE BELOW!

“We are Gone” opens with the captured and battered Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) being hauled into the mutineers’ encampment on the rocky barrens. The triumphant caulker’s mate turned rebel leader Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis) awaits, telling his men to take Crozier to see the captive Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready), so he can have his minor injuries attended to. Crozier notices, with some consternation, that Hickey is wearing another man’s boots.

Lt. Edward Little (Matthew McNulty) is now in command of the main camp. He tries to organize a mission to rescue Crozier, who had ordered him to march south. The suffering men inform the exasperated Little that they “prefer” the captain’s orders, and that they’ll be departing in the morning, leaving the sick and dying behind.

In the mutineers’ camp, Goodsir works to clean up Crozier’s injuries. Crozier expects that Lt. Little will defy his order and attack the mutineers with superior force and arms before the end of the day. Goodsir informs him that Hickey and his company are now surviving through cannibalism.

Even so, the honorable and gracious Goodsir can still find goodness in the world that has trapped him. “This place is beautiful to me even now,” he says. “To see it with eyes as a child’s. There is wonder here, Captain.” Still, Goodsir is certain that he will not survive, and tells Crozier that if he dies and Crozier is forced to consume him, he must only eat the rough soles of his feet. “Everything depends upon it.”

The next morning, the able-bodied men of the main camp depart south, leaving the seriously ill behind with the last few remaining tinned rations. The ailing Lt. Thomas Jopson (Liam Garrigan) sees them leave and, thinking Crozier has inexplicably abandoned the sick, drags himself out of his tent to plead for help. The delirious Jopson experiences a vision of a well-attired Captain Crozier seated at a feast before he collapses.

In the mutineers’ camp, Hickey calls Crozier into his tent to have a discussion where he reveals that Cozier is the only man on the expedition he considers anything close to an equal. Hickey, if you want to find an equal, check under your shoe. Crozier is placed in a tent with cook John Diggle (Chris Corrigan), who offers to help him defeat Hickey.

Crozier still expects Lt. Little to arrive with armed men, and he plans to spring more of Hickey’s mutineers whom he suspects were coerced into Hickey’s plan. That night, Goodsir washes himself in poison, drinks poison and opens his wrists. He dies in the midst of bizarre, beautifully clear visions of an orchid, a shell and a crystal.

The next morning, Crozier is rudely awakened to find Goodsir dead and butchered, and Hickey seated at a table with his men, their plates loaded with bits of Goodsir. Crozier is forced to partake of Goodsir’s flesh, but he only hacks a slice from the bottom of the corpse’s heel, as Goodsir told him. Hickey then makes some vague comment about a ceremony on a hill, takes a shotgun and bashes Sgt. Solomon Tozer (David Walmsley) across the head with it.

Back in London, Sir James Ross (Richard Sutton) prepares to embark for the Arctic, part of a large rescue mission in search of the Franklin Expedition. On the barrens, Hickey stands atop a boat sledge in his longjohns as his men, including Crozier and Tozer (who are both chained to the boat) drag it to the top of a ridge.

Hickey plans to bait the Inuit spirit-monster tuunbaq and kill it. The men believe the tuunbaq is both wounded from earlier cannon-shot and sick from eating the lead-poisoned flesh of its victims. Hickey, who strangely seems to think he is some kind of godly equal to the tuunbaq, believes it will provide them with ample meat and fur for warm coats.

But his plan as a twist. Hickey announces that he cannot go back to England. He is a criminal who murdered a Terror crewman named Cornelius Hickey (an event suggested in the previous episode, “Horrible From Supper“), stole his identity and expected a one year voyage to the Pacific where he could start a new life in the Sandwich Islands.

The Hickey-imposter tries to lead the group in a rousing song, but Crozier and a number of the men realize that he is completely insane. The lookouts sight the approaching tuunbaq, just as Goodsir’s poisons start taking their effect on the men.

As the tuunbaq charges Hickey and the mutineers, several of the men panic. Hickey is mesmerized by the creature as it rips most of the men to pieces, including Diggle and Lt. Hodgson (Christos Lawton). Tozer manages to escape his chain and grab a shotgun. He shoots the beast, but it kills him offscreen.

Hickey cuts out his tongue and offers it to the monster in a deranged version of the Inuit shaman bonding ceremony, but the beast devours him. Using the chain, Crozier finishes off the mortally wounded tuunbaq by choking it to death with the remains of Hickey’s body.

Out on the barrens, the Inuit Shaman with Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) suddenly turns around and heads back. She hesitates, then continues forward alone. She passes a dying crewman before she arrives at the scene of the battle where the body of the dead tuunbaq lies, surrounded by the corpses of the dead English sailors.

Lady Silence blows air into the tuunbaq’s face and pours water on its tongue. She then discovers that Crozier is still alive, but she can’t release him from his manacle. She amputates his hand to free him. She sledges the unconscious Crozier back to the mutineers’ camp where she sees the horror of Goodsir’s butchered body. She bundles Crozier up in a tent and applies medicine to his wounds.

Once Crozier is sufficiently recovered, she agrees to head south to help him try to find his men (Lt. Little’s detachment). They return to the main encampment where they find the collapsed tents (tins unopened) and dead bodies of the crewmen who were left behind, including Lt. Jopson.

Slogging on, Crozier and Lady Silence come upon the remains of Lt. Little’s last camp, full of wrecked tents and frozen bodies, some cannibalized. Lt. Little sits alone, barely breathing, his lips and face ceremonially pierced with gold chains that speak of some madness and a bizarre primitive ritual. Crozier hears Lt. Little’s last word, which is “Close?”

With the winter weather setting in, Crozier and Lady Silence arrive in a Netsilik camp. An Inuit shaman speaks with Crozier, who learns that Lady Silence’s real name is Silna. As the last survivor of the Franklin expedition, Crozier isn’t sure what he wants to do next. The Inuit offer to let him stay with them for the winter; he can make his decision in the spring.

Crozier awakens in the morning to find Silna (Lady Silence) gone, and is told that she slipped away in the night. Since she lost the tuunbaq, she is fated to remain alone. Devastated, Crozier is frantic to follow her, but the Inuit have no idea where she went.

In September 1850 (two years later), the Inuit see two white men approaching their camp. Crozier is still with them, and the shaman asks Crozier what he wants to do. The first episode’s opening framing scene is replayed, where Sir James Ross asks the Inuit man about the fate of the Franklin expedition and shows him photographs of Captain John Franklin (Ciaran Hinds), Captain James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) and Crozier.

Ross’ scene is intercut with shots of Crozier crossing the ice pack with a small Inuit family, forever vanishing from the view of European eyes. Crozier’s words are relayed to Ross by the Inuit shaman: “Tell those who come after us not to stay. The ships are gone. There is no way through, no passage. Tell them we are gone. Dead…and gone.”

And thus the tale of The Terror ends, with the lone survivor avoiding rescue to disappear with the rest of the expedition. One might think that Crozier and Hickey’s final confrontation with the tuunbaq would be the end of the story, but it isn’t. The horrific beast has never been the main driver of the story, and while the tuunbaq’s death made for an action-packed climax, the tale goes on for quite a while after it bites the dust.

The tuunbaq, the furious spirit of the violated Inuit people, must be destroyed, just as the world in which the Inuits live will be devastated by contact with the colonial empire of the British and other Europeans. It is fitting that the most powerful and somewhat empathetic Englishman, Crozier, delivers the death blow to the creature. Even when the British arrived with good intentions, the tide of colonialism overwhelmed every indigenous culture it sweat over.

What the tuunbaq’s demise signals is a major shift in the story’s perspective—we are now in the world of Silna. “We are Gone” reveals to us her true Inuit name, not the one given to her by the British. The remainder of the episode is delivered largely in Arctic silence and the native Netsilik language. By the time Sir James Ross appears with his English words and haunting daguerreotype photographs, we are looking at him from the Inuit point of view.

Crozier, who has always seemed a native spirit at heart, chooses to vanish into the land of ice and snow. He is dead to his former life, but not his new one. In the end, The Terror is a tale told in the crucible of a great Victorian tragedy caused by human hubris—the loss of the Franklin expedition—but the show allows us to see the good things in ourselves despite our profound flaws. As the consequences of our destructive actions are embodied in the tuunbaq, we also get to see our better halves reflected in Captain Crozier and, even more clearly, in the character of Harry Goodsir, perhaps the only unblemished Englishmen in The Terror.

Goodsir is a good man, a human being motivated by empathy and understanding rather than blind duty and ego. Yes, he is as guilty of colonial intrusion as any other empire-driven Englishman, but one cannot be condemned beyond redemption for being a product of the culture in which they grew up.

As the most perceptive officer on the expedition, Crozier recognizes Goodsir’s purity of soul. “Even if God sees every last thing we do here, you have nothing to fear,” Cozier tells him. “Not you. You’re clean, Goodsir. Clean.” Goodsir has proven to be the best a man can be under such terrible conditions, but in the end he too becomes an instrument of destruction by turning his own body into a poison bomb. Yet as his life bleeds away, he is rewarded with visions of cold but astounding beauty, the beauty only he could see.

The Terror is a bleak story of horror and disaster, but what makes it stand out is its willingness to focus less on the blood spatters and scares and more on its human characters and themes. As man’s civilized veneer is ripped away to reveal the primitive, and his sanity is assailed by madness, what is left of his ethics and morality? These are questions that can never be fully answered, but just as the ships Erebus and Terror journey deep into the ice pack to explore the unknown, so the story of The Terror plumbs the darkest recesses of man’s nature.

That is why the story in “We are Gone” doesn’t end with the defeat of the beast. That is why the last shot isn’t of the dead tuunbaq, but rather the long, hauntingly beautiful  visual of a flawed Crozier who, having lost everything that anchored him to his former steam-powered, modern existence, has been absorbed into a world of nature, of aboriginal spirits, a world ruled by an immense cruelty and astounding beauty we don’t fully understand.

EPISODE GRADE — A

SERIES GRADE — A

Next: AMC’s “The Terror” starts out cold, dark and spooky as hell

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