The Terror

The Terror is the bleakest thing on this list that is also, in large part, documented history, and the creature is the least frightening element in it.

The series' method is attrition. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are beset in the ice north of King William Island in September 1846 and never float again. What follows over ten hours is lead poisoning from badly soldered food tins, scurvy, frostbite, tuberculosis, botulism, snow blindness, hunger, and the slow discovery that nobody is coming. The series is extraordinarily patient about the specifics — the rationing arithmetic, the man-hauling sledges, the cairn messages left under stones, the difference between what the officers tell the men and what they write in the log — and the effect is that every death feels procedural rather than dramatic.

Jared Harris's Crozier is the best thing in it: an Irish captain passed over for command because he is Irish, a functioning alcoholic who dries out on the ice because the situation requires it, and the only man aboard who listens to the Inuit. Tobias Menzies's Fitzjames, who begins as a preening careerist and ends as something considerably better, has the series' best arc. Ciarán Hinds plays Franklin as a man whose certainty is itself the fatal condition.

The Tuunbaq is the series' most divisive element

A bear-shaped spirit creature, immense, intelligent and not an animal, which takes men off the ice and arranges their bodies. It is the one element that is not history, it is held back for a long time, and it is at its best when it is a noise and a shape in a whiteout. When it is fully rendered in daylight it is less interesting than the ice.

What the series does well with it is make it a relationship rather than a monster: it is bound to Lady Silence, it was kept in check by an arrangement the expedition has broken, and the question of what the English did to deserve it is answered in a way that implicates them specifically.

Hickey is the real antagonist and the series knows it

Adam Nagaitis plays a caulker's mate who is not who his papers say he is, and the back half of the series is a mutiny led by a man with no loyalty to anything, improvising a cult around himself on a gravel beach. It is a performance of total conviction and the series is clear-eyed that the Navy's own hierarchy — its contempt for its own men, its deference to class — is what gives him his opening.

Where it is weak

Episodes two and three are slow without being ominous. The Lady Silence material is underwritten and her agency arrives late. And the carnivale set piece, which is magnificent, is also the one place the series reaches for spectacle over accumulation.

For the same closed group destroyed from inside in extreme cold, The Thing; for the same faith and hierarchy turning lethal in an isolated community, Midnight Mass; for the same medieval-register attrition on a journey, Between Two Fires.

The short answer: Hickey's mutiny takes most of the surviving men to a beach, where he has Dr Goodsir killed and butchered so the party can eat — not knowing that Goodsir has deliberately poisoned himself first, so that his flesh will kill whoever consumes it. Crozier is held captive by the mutineers. When the Tuunbaq finally comes, Hickey, by now entirely convinced of his own significance, cuts his own throat and offers himself to it: the creature takes him, and the poisoned, corrupted thing it has swallowed kills it. The Tuunbaq dies on the gravel with Crozier beside it. Crozier, the only man left, is found by Lady Silence's people and nursed back; he loses a foot and learns their language. In the final scene a Royal Navy search party reaches an Inuit camp years later and asks after the lost expedition, and Crozier — living there now, with a family, under a name they have given him — has the interpreter tell them that the men are all dead and that they should stop looking. He does not go home.

What is the Tuunbaq in The Terror?

A spirit creature in the shape of an enormous bear, drawn from Inuit cosmology as Simmons reworks it: made of muscle and the shaman's magic, bound to a human keeper who feeds it and holds it in check. Lady Silence's father is that keeper when the series begins, and the arrangement collapses when the expedition kills him. The series is specific that the Tuunbaq is not a punishment sent for the English; it is a thing that was already being managed, and they broke the management.

Who is Cornelius Hickey really?

Not Cornelius Hickey. Late in the series he explains that he murdered the real Hickey, a man with papers and a berth, and took his identity to get aboard — and that he has done this before, that he has no name of his own worth using, and that he is not from anywhere. It recasts everything he has done: he is not a sailor who mutinied, he is someone who boarded a ship to see what would happen.

How does the Tuunbaq die?

By eating Hickey. Goodsir, knowing he is going to be butchered, takes poison so that his body will kill the men who eat him; the mutineers consume him and begin dying. Hickey, dying himself and convinced he has become something, cuts his own throat and holds his arms out to the Tuunbaq, which takes him into its mouth — and chokes and dies on what he has become. The series stages it as the creature being destroyed by human corruption rather than by force.

Does Crozier survive The Terror?

Yes, and he is the only one. He loses a foot, is taken in by the Netsilik, learns the language, takes a place among them and is living there when a Royal Navy party finally arrives. He tells them, through an interpreter, that everyone is dead and that they should go home, and he stays. The series' last image is a man who has chosen the Arctic over England.

Is The Terror based on a true story?

The frame is history and the monster is not. Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition with Erebus and Terror, 129 men, both ships beset in the ice, the Victory Point note, the abandonment, the retreat south, the cairns, the evidence of cannibalism in the remains, the lead and the scurvy, Crozier and Fitzjames and Goodsir and Hickey as names on the muster: all real. Both wrecks have since been found, Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016. The Tuunbaq, the mutiny as dramatised, and Crozier's survival are Simmons's invention.

What actually killed the Franklin expedition?

The series shows the historical consensus rather than a single cause: lead leaching from the solder of cheaply contracted tinned provisions, scurvy from exhausted supplies, botulism, tuberculosis, starvation, exposure, and the catastrophic decision to abandon the ships and man-haul sledges south across the ice. The Tuunbaq is additional. The series' argument is that the expedition was lost by procurement, pride and a chain of command that could not revise a plan.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 010 is bleak — 17 works score lower. One hundred and twenty-nine men sail and one survives, by leaving his own country behind.

Era bias 086 reads modern — 87 works score lower, which is about the production rather than the setting: a 2018 digital shoot with digital ice, digital creature work and a contemporary sound mix, over an immaculately researched 1845.

Viscera 054 is just above the median — 65 works score lower. Amputations without anaesthetic, scurvy and frostbite in detail, bodies arranged by the creature, a butchering, a throat cut, and a man shot.

The threat at 045 is just under the midpoint, which is the right reading: the Tuunbaq is not human and almost everything that destroys the expedition is a human decision.

Reality anchor 032 is grounded — 19 works score lower. Real geography, real ships, real disease, and one creature that obeys consistent rules.

Pace 022 is very slow — 25 works are slower. Three winters pass and the series takes its time over all of them.

On jump scares: perhaps three in ten hours. The series would rather show you a man's gums.