Watched THE TERROR (10 episodes) on NETFLIX.https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_terror/s01https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/26/17163368/the-terror-review-amc-dan-simmons-jared-harrisAMC’s The Terror is a near masterpiece of survival horrorThe miniseries reimagines Dan Simmons’s Arctic-bound novel — based on a true story — as a long, slow descent into hell.It’s Simmons’s biggest swing, decoupling from the book entirely to suggest that the apocalypse is no one moment but rather unfurling all around us all the time. Your best day is the end of the world for somebody else. And on it goes.
The irony of bringing the specter of climate change into his book so late is that Simmons has set the bulk of his novel amid the story of the doomed Franklin expedition, which set sail for the Arctic in 1845 in hopes of finding the Northwest Passage, only to find itself iced in for years on end.
The expedition vanished, the men never to be heard of again. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the two warships they retrofitted to be icebreakers, were finally found on the ocean floor in 2014 and 2016, respectively. (You may have read about it.) What remains we have found of the expedition suggest a long, slow descent into utter hell, with the survivors perhaps even resorting to cannibalism.
The melting of the polar ice cap may yet bring about an extinction-level event for humanity, but the members of the Franklin expedition encountered their own apocalypse out there, on all that ice, amid the bleary white. If that sounds like a depressing thing to make a 10-episode TV series about, well, it is. It’s also tremendous.
