Every week, Stephen Smith and Russell Potter will review the latest episode of the AMC show The Terror for Canadian Geographic. Their take on episode 3 — “The Ladder” — appears below.

Stephen Smith 

It’s a gorgeous song that John Morfin gives us in episode three of The Terror, if not exactly uplifting. “Farewell, all joys,” the seaman sings to his mourning mates in Erebus’s twilit confines. “Oh death, come close mine eyes.”

Welcome aboard, and, yes, I’m afraid it has come to this.

I guess maybe I was thinking there might be some respite for the ships’ company — for us, too, along for the voyage to the Great White Nothing — after the death of Lieutenant Graham Gore in episode two. Nope: no time here for cheer or comfort, let alone self-care. We are well and truly in the nightmarish thick of things now, entirely beset — in the endless ice of Victoria Strait, by the cold, the unknown, the fear of this vicious beast that may or may not be a bear with a ferocious grudge.

Not that trying to classify the enemy, biologically or otherwise, would be anyone’s chief concern while whatever-it-may-be is very actually tearing the expedition to bloody bits and — in Sir John Franklin’s pointed case — committing those to the icy deeps below.

It’s all emergency, now. You can understand why the threat of sudden slaughter gets all the attention, but it’s just part of a grim ensemble act. Summer is split-the-skin freezing. Provisions continue to rot and fester in their cans. Aboard Terror, the caulker’s mate Cornelius Hickey seems to be in charge of making sure that discipline gets a solid start at foundering and breaking down. Even the flashbacks to pre-expedition England are fraught. “You’ll eat your shoes again,” Sir John Ross warns Franklin. “You’ll eat worse.”

The history framing the fiction tells us that Sir John won’t last long enough for that. It’s June of 1847 already, and so we know that Sir John’s time is almost up. His death is quick and gruesome. No need for me to pen him a eulogy here — he does a fine job on his own, even if his words were intended for Gore.  

In Sir John’s other farewell speech, in the blind, he exhorts his Royal Marines to shoot with maximum malice at the monster that’s bedeviling them. “Educate this creature,” he commands, “as to the dominion of the Empire and the will of the Lord.”

I can’t have been the only one to have felt that it would be Sir John who’d be getting the schooling here, as he duly did. I had a wince of worry that Harry Goodsir was done for, too, and I was relieved to see him survive. At this point, I’ll take whatever mercies this Arctic is willing to grant. 

A question for you, Russell: as someone who’s worked so carefully in piecing together what is so very complex an historical puzzle, does the blurring of history with fantastical fiction unsettle you at all? Is there a cost to the history when the fiction is so compelling?