Series 1 The Terror
Voyage Of The Damned Foolhardy
UK Broadcast AMC Global, Tuesdays US Broadcast AMC, finished Episodes Reviewed 1.01-1.10
sailors are a suspicious lot. Everything from women, to whistling, to sailing on Fridays brings bad luck, so you’d think they’d balk at setting foot on a ship called Terror. Except changing the name of a ship is bad luck too.
But HMS Terror was indeed the name of one of two real ships – along with HMS Erebus – that went missing during an Arctic exhibition to find the northwest passage in 1845. The story inspired Dan Simmons’s 2007 horror novel, on which this Ridley Scottproduced mini-series is based.
When the two ships become trapped in the Arctic ice floe, the crews are forced to survive in the bitterly cold conditions for three years. This is made worse by a demon called the Tuunbaq – think giant offspring of a polar bear and a wolverine – that’s hunting them. The indigenous Inuit might have helped, except that some of the crew have a habit of killing them.
It’s all intensely harrowing, with the series giving you a painfully claustrophobic feeling for what it must have been like to have been stuck on those ships. The attention to historical detail, passionate performances, colourful characters and impressive production values make this a series that reeks of quality. It also has a plot that – within what seem like severely limiting confines – develops in pleasingly unexpected ways. The fact that the main bad guy – an utterly odious git called Hickey – is homosexual avoids becoming an ill-advised cliché because he’s the most interesting and fully-developed character in the show.
However, the supernatural element sometimes feel like a bolt-on, with the mythology of the Tuunbaq left underexplored while the sailors suffer more from lead-poisoned rations, frostbite and officer stupidity. At 10 episodes long it feels padded – albeit with impeccably wellresearched padding. There’s also a flashback subplot involving a rescue mission that feels more like just an excuse to get a few more female roles in the show – that or a way to set up a possible season two. Either way, it doesn’t add much. On the whole though, this is a voyage worth taking. Dave Golder