You’ve probably seen the meme. Two guys standing on a frozen wasteland, looking absolutely miserable, with text overlaying it about how "this could have been an email." That’s The Terror. But if you actually sit down to watch the 2018 AMC series—specifically the first season—it’s so much more than a meme about a bad workday. It is, quite honestly, one of the most suffocatingly accurate depictions of human ego meeting a brick wall of natural reality ever put to film.
Based on Dan Simmons' mammoth novel, the show dramatizes the real-life disappearance of the 1845 Franklin Expedition. Captain Sir John Franklin set off with two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, to find the Northwest Passage. They had the best tech of the Victorian era. They had canned food for years. They had a library of 1,200 books. They had everything except a plan for what happens when the ice doesn’t melt.
What The Terror Gets Right About the Franklin Mystery
Most people come for the monster. There’s a giant, spirit-bear thing called the Tuunbaaq that stalks the crew, but that's almost the least scary part of the show. The real horror is the lead poisoning. See, back in the 1840s, canning food was a relatively new science. The expedition’s supplier, Stephen Goldner, won the contract with a low-ball bid and a rushed timeline. This led to poorly soldered tins.
As the men ate, they were slowly, incrementally losing their minds.
We know this because of real-world forensic work. In the 1980s, anthropologist Owen Beattie exhumed several crew members buried on Beechey Island, including John Torrington. The photos of Torrington—perfectly preserved in the permafrost—are haunting. His tissues showed lead levels high enough to cause the kind of cognitive decline and paranoia we see Jared Harris (playing Francis Crozier) and Tobias Menzies (playing James Fitzjames) struggle against in the show.
It wasn't just one thing that killed them. It was a "cascading failure." That’s a term you hear in engineering a lot. It’s when one small mistake triggers another, and then another, until the whole system collapses. For Franklin’s crew, it was the combination of an unusually cold "Little Ice Age" cycle, bad food, and the sheer arrogance of British naval officers who refused to learn survival techniques from the local Netsilik Inuit people.
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The show captures this friction perfectly. It’s agonizing to watch them march across the ice in heavy wool uniforms, dragging massive wooden sledges filled with silver plate and "necessities" while the locals—who are right there, watching them—know exactly how to survive in the Arctic. It’s a masterclass in how pride kills.
The Cast That Made Us Care About Dead Sailors
Jared Harris is a god-tier actor. Seriously. As Francis Crozier, he brings this weary, alcoholic brilliance to the screen that makes you root for a man who is essentially doomed from episode one. Crozier is the "second-in-command" who is actually the smartest guy in the room, but because he’s Irish and lacks the "proper" social standing, nobody listens to him until it’s way too late.
Then you have Ciarán Hinds as Sir John Franklin. He’s not a villain. He’s just a man who believes in the "system." He believes that God and the British Navy are more powerful than the pack ice of King William Island. Watching his optimism slowly curdle into terror is one of the most effective arcs in modern prestige TV.
And we have to talk about Adam Nagaitis as Cornelius Hickey. He is the ultimate "workplace nightmare" taken to a lethal extreme. He’s the guy who sows discord just because he can. He represents the breakdown of social order. When the rule of law fails, people like Hickey thrive. He’s scarier than the bear. Much scarier.
Why the Ships Were Finally Found in 2014 and 2016
For over 160 years, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus were ghost stories. Divers and searchers looked for them everywhere. The breakthrough finally happened because researchers actually started listening to Inuit oral histories. For generations, the Inuit had told stories of a "large boat" sinking in a specific area near King William Island.
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In 2014, the Victoria Strait Expedition found the wreck of the Erebus. Two years later, the Arctic Research Foundation found the Terror in Terror Bay. Interestingly, the Terror was found much further south than anyone expected, and it was in remarkably good shape. It’s sitting upright in about 80 feet of water.
This discovery actually changed how we view the timeline of The Terror. It suggests that some of the crew might have gone back to the ships after attempting to trek south, or that the ships were manned long after the official "record" says they were abandoned. The mystery isn't totally solved, but the show does an incredible job of filling in those blanks with plausible, albeit gruesome, theories.
The Survival Elements You Shouldn't Ignore
If you're a survivalist or just a gear nerd, this show is a treasure trove of "what not to do."
- Layering: They didn't have moisture-wicking fabrics. They wore wool and leather. Once you sweat in those, you stay wet. In the Arctic, wet means dead.
- Scurvy: Vitamin C deficiency turns your old scars back into open wounds. Literally. Your body stops producing the collagen that holds your skin together. The show depicts this with stomach-churning detail.
- Psychology: Total darkness for months at a time (the "polar night") does things to your brain. Add in some heavy metal poisoning and a supernatural predator, and you've got a recipe for the total dissolution of the human soul.
Practical Lessons From the Franklin Expedition
You aren't likely to get stuck on a 19th-century bomb vessel in the middle of the Northwest Passage. Probably. But the themes of The Terror are weirdly applicable to modern life and project management.
Don't ignore the "Crozier" in your life. There is always someone who sees the ice closing in before everyone else does. Usually, they're ignored because they aren't "team players" or they're delivering bad news that nobody wants to hear. If you're leading a project, find the person who is most skeptical and actually listen to their concerns. They might just save you from a metaphorical Tuunbaaq.
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Also, vet your suppliers. If the "canned goods" of your business or life are being handled by someone who cut corners to save a buck, the toxicity will eventually catch up to you. Whether it's bad data, cheap materials, or a toxic hire, those small "leaks" eventually lead to a total system failure.
What to Do Next
If you’ve finished the series and want more, don’t just watch season two. Season two (The Terror: Infamy) is an anthology and deals with a totally different story involving Japanese internment camps. It's okay, but it doesn't capture the same frostbitten dread.
Instead, go read the original 1859 "Victory Point Note." It’s the only written record of what happened, found in a cairn on King William Island. It starts off optimistic and then has a frantic, handwritten update in the margins saying Franklin is dead and they are abandoning the ships. It is a chilling piece of history.
After that, check out the Parks Canada YouTube channel. They have actual footage from inside the wreck of the HMS Terror. Seeing the plates still stacked on the shelves in the steward’s pantry—170 years later—is the closest you’ll get to time travel. It grounds the fiction of the show in a reality that is far more haunting than any CGI monster.
Dig into the work of Dr. Anne Keenleyside, who performed extensive bioarchaeological analysis on the remains found in the 90s. Her findings on the "cut marks" on the bones confirmed the rumors that the crew eventually turned to cannibalism. It’s a grim rabbit hole, but it gives you a profound respect for the sheer will to survive that those men had, even when everything—the weather, the food, and their own leaders—had betrayed them.