You Love to See It: The Terror

In a few short minutes and with no more than a pinch of fog-assisted CGI, The Terror’s eighth episode stages an action sequence more exciting, immediate, and emotionally intense than anything Hollywood produced in the 2010s. So much goes into building toward the vengeful spirit Tuunbaq’s attack on the camp of the survivors of the icebreakers Terror and Erebus, but the parallel buildup of Mr. Hickey’s (Adam Nagaitis) mutiny against Captain Crozier (Jared Harris) is so tense and obvious that it obscures the supernatural threat until the last minute. We learn in the episode previous that the ship’s dog, Neptune, is the camp’s only alarm for the creature’s approach. Hickey kills and eats him as part of a bid to draw in new mutineers with fresh meat. Likewise his manipulation of the crew’s officers into murdering a group of Netsilik hunters precipitates his conflict with Crozier coming to a head, but it is also implied to enrage and draw down the beast. Likewise for the fog which rolls in to cover the camp, allowing Hickey’s mutineers to finagle their way into opening the armory against the pretend threat of Netsilik retribution but also concealing the creature’s approach. The two plots are unfolded such that one artfully obscures the other until, at the moment things snap into place, the entire picture seems suddenly foreknown and inevitable.

The attack itself is a nightmare, the camp breaking apart along rushed and addled lines of allegiance further muddied by ongoing lead poisoning as the disturbingly human-faced Tuunbaq rampages through tents, a trail of gore in his wake, and characters we’ve come to know cower in fear, run for their lives, or bravely throw themselves into harm’s way. The desperate rocket attack launched by Commander James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) after the episode opens with his confession that his heroic exploits have been motivated by shame and vanity is a believable, poignant coda for his character, giving him a chance to stare down one death while already held in the jaws of another as his body succumbs to lead poisoning and scurvy. There’s nothing dashing about his actions, no thirst to be known or seen. Each character moving through the camp has clear motives. Each death feels both gutting and personal. Chaos, yes, but ordered by narrative and by emotional weight.

Moving through the entire sequence from beginning to end is Mr. Collins (Trystan Gravelle), who in his despair at the sheer weight of his trauma over living through a fire which killed half the expedition mixed with dread at the advancing effects of scurvy in the camp has taken an enormous draught of cocaine-infused wine. At first he simply wanders through the camp in a giddy, drunken state of wonder, embracing his comrades and gaping at anything and everything, but his dissonant laughter echoing out of the fog during Hickey’s court martial heralds Tuunbaq’s approach, too. There’s a nasty sense, as Collins staggers giggling out of the mist, that it really is all one big, sick joke. In the end even his attempt to numb himself to the expedition’s horrors is rendered absurd when Tuunbaq, tearing into his body, rips out and devours his soul.