AMC's The Terror (2018)

heh, "fursonification."

The problem I had with the book is the same problem I have with the Stephen King I've read: it doesn't matter how solid the premise, he can't resist throwing in a monster. "The Terror" (the book) is really long, and impressively researched, so it felt like a well-written account of this doomed expedition that just every once in a while was repetitively interrupted by this vague monster that went a few too many steps past metaphor.

You'd probably enjoy Abominaable. The final third gets a bit silly but the first half gives a great account of what is was like for those early climbers of Everest. I have nothing but mad respect for what they achieved in those conditions with the basic equipment available at the time.

season 2 info:

https://www.thewrap.com/the-terror-season-2-premiere-date-the-terror-infamy-photos-amc-derek-mio-george-takei/

AMC has set an August premiere date for the second season of its horror anthology series, “The Terror,” and released a batch of first-look photos for the Derek Mio and George Takei-led installment.

Set during World War II, Season 2 a.k.a “The Terror: Infamy,” centers on a series of bizarre deaths that haunt a Japanese-American community, and a young man’s journey to understand and combat the malevolent entity responsible. “Infamy” will debut Aug. 12 at 9/8c on AMC.

The second season stars Mio as Chester Nakayama; Kiki Sukezane (“Lost in Space”) as Yuko, a mysterious woman from Chester’s past; Cristina Rodlo (“Miss Bala”) as Luz, Chester’s secret girlfriend; Shingo Usami (“Unbroken”) as Henry Nakayama, Chester’s father; Naoko Mori (“Everest”) as Asako Nakayama, Chester’s mother; Miki Ishikawa (“9-1-1”) as Amy, a Nakayama family friend; and Takei as Yamato-san, a community elder and former fishing captain.

just finished season 1. so many breathtaking shots throughout the series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIbjUAeTYY

Weird, was not expecting a sequel.

I finished the book years ago, but I never got around to finishing the show. Everything about it was spot-on and well acted and well made, but I just couldn't get into it. I wonder if I would have liked it more (or less?) if I never read the book.

I'm two episodes from the end of Season 1 (it's on Hulu) and man, the monster just suuuuucks. All the other stuff is so interesting that when this camel-bear comes galumphing in every two or three episodes it just derails all the good shit that's been going on.

yeah it's an anthology show now Josh, and I guess the general theme is historical drama with a supernatural twist? It's an all new creative team though I think

I felt much the same as you about S1. I loved the book's evocation of the numbing routine of life on board the frozen ship, which didn't quite come through in the show. And yeah, neither really needed the monster...because the real monster was us, etc.

I thought I'd be done with this after S1 (as with True Detective), but they couldn't pick a more timely historical background.

Anyone watching Infamy?

Wondering the same. I’ve got it recorded for a rainy weekend.

yeah, is it being released as weekly episodes everywhere?
I'm relying on downloads and not sure when new episodes are coming out. Is it released/shown on a Monday night?

The first coupl ehave been interesting anyway.

Is it based on a real story like s1 ?
I liked s1 but the monster and mostly Mr Icky’s ott guru/super-villain character were too much for me... basically, it was mostly over once they quit the boat, imo.

Well the japanese incarceration during World War II was definitely a thing.
I'm not sure about specifics beyond that.

& also not sure to what extent based o a true story holds for Series 1. It was true taht there was an expedition on which 2 ships became icebound and were therefore lost. I'm not sure what else is known beyond taht. though have seen taht Michael palin has a book out called Erebus which I think is named after teh 2nd ship, the 2 were HMS Terror (so there's word play not available for the sequyel) and HMS Erebus. & I'm assuming the palin book examines what is known of the story.
BUt it looks like there was a whole supernatural element bolted on to an existing situation.
it looks like the shjips were totally lost in the Arctic when looking for the Northwest passage a dream that I think they weren't the first people to die looking for. Looks like the ships were only found recently, possibly just before the series was made. Wrecks were discovered in 2016, series released in 2018
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/franklin-erebus-terror-shipwreck-archeology-arctic-mystery-1.5250185

Yeah, the real story of s1 is kinda fantastic and fascinating by itself.
That's why I found it kinda unecessary to add the monster and the supervillain guru.

whoah!
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-doomed-1845-expedition-to-the-Arctic-killed-129-14396996.php

xpost -- your argument isn't with the show so much as Dan Simmons, then!

Just listened to this interview with Michael Palin on the history of the Erebus done by Dan Snow for his podcast
https://tv.historyhit.com/watch/34127379

interesting stuff. Hadn't realised he was a History major at Oxford, I know Terry Jones was.
may get around to reading the book at some point.

Isn’t it that the local Inuit knew the ships were there for decades but no one listened to them?

that is covered in the story I linked

yeah i don't think it was the case that no one listened to them

most of the prior findings of cairns, artefacts, etc. were based on Inuit testimony (going right back to the contemporaneous searches)

I think it's just that it's really really hard to locate things in the arctic

yeah the one guy's story is he stumbled upon a mast sticking out of the ice, took a picture, and then lost his phone on the way back lol

Xxposts
Yes, it’s part the book but the book is not responsible for the clown-faced white bear and the casting /direction of the unsufferable super-villain !

I saw a copy of the Simmons on the shelf in a small local area newsagents earlier when i had to be on the other side of town> Don't think I've seen it before. So was that just totally random or tied in with the 2nd season of the tv show? Which it doesn't really anyway. Happened to be in buying a newspaper and then saw it as i put newspaper in my bag. Not sure if either season has been on tv eover here since I have been watching them all as d/lds. Thick book.

THink it came out in 2007 so several years prior to the wrecks actually being discovered. I see the series was commissioned in march 2016 and i think the Terror itself wasn't found until later that year. I think Erebus was foun din 2014.

So wondering if there was anything of a tv tie in audience since I wasn't sure if it had been on tv. Or if it was just a random surplus book remaindered from another region's audience.

the show is based on the book, which was written and released prior to the ships actually being located

I haven't read it, but the show is apparently a fairly faithful adaptation. It's historical fiction, but the supernatural extrapolation incorporated all of the known facts, which were... few

afaik, despite the ships being found, no artifacts or writing have been found that contradict the historical extrapolation. the supernatural, of course, can't be necessarily contradicted :)

sheesh did anybody read the link I posted

they can see that there are desks, drawers, and entire rooms that are locked and sealed. Odds that there are preserved written documents in those are good, they just haven't been able to reach them yet.

it's kind of funny that after so many years, the greatest obstacle right now is that the captain left his door shut

well that and all the freezing cold water

I was a bit surprised that it would be amongst a bunch of cheap low com denom books for sale in a newsagents like that. Thought they tended to be popular tv tie ins or mills & boon or whatever. So surprised this would be there if there wasn't a showing on tv over here. It said on cover it tied in with the tv show, I think AMC which doesn't really mean anything over here. Might tie in with an RTE or netflix showing possibly.
otherwise possibly a bit obscure. But tv version may have tied in with preceding popularity?

Anyway, should have grabbed a copy but a bit broke this week.

I did read that link I think. Not sure what was readable yet though

Think I'll skip the book

Wow. Nice one, Dan Simmons. What a jerk. pic.twitter.com/6VKCFPvU6a

— Jeff VanderMeer (@jeffvandermeer) September 25, 2019

Yeah, Simmons did some decent writing (and some not so great) but from what I've heard, he's turned into a complete reactionary conservative dipshit in recent years

https://www.npr.org/2011/07/28/137621172/one-rant-too-many-politics-mar-simmons-dystopia

The book takes place in what's left of the American West, about 20 years in the future. Because of "staggering entitlement programs," the economy has tanked — and America is down to "forty-four and a half" states. Sports stadiums have been converted into prisons, conservative talk radio has been banned, and Los Angeles teachers are required to carry guns.

...the rest of the summary in the review is even worse

Whoa! That's a bummer. I really enjoyed The Terror The Book and have been thinking about going back to re-read Hyperion, which I tried to enjoy for someone 20-odd years ago.

by "tried to enjoy for someone" I mean that at the time it was a little over my teenage brain, but I wanted to impress a girl.

Two characters — Leonard Fox, a former professor who spends most of the book ruing his past liberalism, and Danny Oz, a poet who fled Israel after 6 million Jews were murdered by the Muslim "Global Caliphate" — seem to have been created for the sole purpose of explaining why the left wing has destroyed America

"seem to"

Just remembered that he made one of the bad guys in The Terror a buggerer.

His early book The Song of Kalki is staggeringly racist about Indians.

Man Infamy is just getting dumber and dumber. And the main character is kind of a void.

was this no good then?

I really enjoyed the first season. Didn't watch the second.

sorry, i was referring to S2.

All I've gathered is that it is set in ww2 US Japanese internment camps which is a sort of intriguing premise, but it seems to have passed with barely any commentary.

I stopped after a few episodes. Some potential, but it kind of putters along and never rose up to be compelling

The last episode was surprisingly good but that came after four incredibly slow, very dumb episodes where the ghost might as well be Freddy Krueger.

Wonder if the producers ever approached Vollmann for a treatment for Season 1.

We have watched 9/10 episodes of the first series and really liking it. I’m surprised people upthread didn’t like Hickey though, or call him a “supervillain” - he just seemed very adaptable and willing to do what it would take to survive. Compare it with Franklin who fucked them right at the start.

The harsh landscape is incredible to look at, and I loved when Mr Blanky, awaiting his lonely death, accidentally found the Northwest Passage. Jared Harris is wonderful and I found him incredibly watchable but surely Paul Ready’s Goodsir is the heart of this whole thing... so to speak?

Also, Tobias Menzies great value in this as per.

The scene where Menzies character confesses to Crozier that he completely fabricated his naval prowess and experience is brilliant counterpoint to the high drama elsewhere in the story.

Yeah that was specifically the scene I was thinking of when I wrote that. Also enjoyed the Rome references when he was onscreen with Hinds.

Did you say you still had the last episode to watch?

Yes. Tomorrow!

Great.

I don't know why I disliked this when it first came out, but I binged it over a couple of days recently and it is a deranged masterpiece!

is season 2 any good? I'd imagine it couldn't possibly be as good.

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

Yeah kinda.

I enjoyed it, think it took me longer to get through than it might do since i had the video files and wound up taking a break so had to get back into it. Pretty different, different era different feel, not as claustrophobic I think. Still pretty good though.
Is it still 2 series so far?

this (s1) has an extremely satisying ending, which is not something you can say very often. Just so good.

the best description i can think of to sum up this series was a possibly misheard quote from a Shackleton expedition doc I watched ages ago : "the madness of optimism"

Second season is completely new cast and setting (and not based on the book at all).

I've not seen it but heard it's not as good xps

I thought it was interesting.
About japanese Americans and mistreatment during WWII and some of their folk demons and things.
Very different, so possibly weird that it was seen as an other series of the same show. so was it repackaged from something else?
Have wondered if there would be more or possibly didn't get more made because of the timing which would presumably have clashed with the start of the pandemic.

I think the intention is/was to have every season be a self-contained, separate story.

I didn't think much of s2, the story seemed kind of muddled and rambling and by the end I was just watching it so I could say I'd finished it. Will probably revisit it someday, though.

my wifi streaming finally got sorted and i am catching up with this [jjst finished e6]

1: mods plz change thread title to When Big Boats Get Stuck in Narrow Channels: how they got The Terror moving again
2: when sir john got his im sorry i laughed out loud -- actual factual meagre history of the expedition has indeed forever treated his death as its own mystery (coming only a very short time after the dispatch in the cairn announed "all well", in no wise explained in the second and last dispatch) and this solution-explanation
3: ive been thinking -- and planning to write -- abt this expedition for years (courtesy david woodman's two books on inuit testimony and folklore as onlookers as puzzled and ultaimtely appalled onlookers) so maybe this will spur me
4: setting aside the invention (which is fine and fun and dark and funny)the series does a bunch of v useful stuff where a visual representation is hugely superior to writing, giving a much more visceral sense of what it's like cooped up on a boat, what it's like being on the ice in an arctic winter, the possible 'cross-currents" (to use roland huntford's favourite word for expeditionary infighting) within a mid-19th century crew and which flawed character types are best able to prosper when such a thing comes to calamity
5: no bad performances!
6: the shamanic stuff is maybe (as of e6) a wee bit thin and indian burial ground-y (tho it's also a good way into 3 for me: annoyingly my friend has my good books on shamanism and it will be hard to get them back during pandemic)
7: bcz my bad critic brane never sleeps the one thing that was bothering me was their mildly cavalier -- if dramatically very practical -- attitude to geography (the ships weren't frozen in sight of the coast, it was very unclear where they are burying the lad in the first ep) (which is not really important at all to the story but worried at my pednatic brain) (occam's razor says somerset island, where i believe evidence of a franklin landing was sighted during on of the early searches, BUT the ships may also have travelled a long way south the wrong way east round the island before it got too shallow and shoal-y for them, and bear grylls found different evidence of a campsite on an island in that region) (anyway…)

and this solution-explanation

^^^what happened to the end of this sentence, another arctic mystery

man-bear grylls

anyway more later and don't sorry abt spoilers, the inuit folkore says that two of the crew got back to their homeland

also enjoying lady jane's battles with a very stupid early victorian naval establishment and somewhat 🙄 at the weight being put on lead poisoning -- this theory gained much explanatory traction after the owen beattie expedition came back with the three famous pix of the unearthed bodies from beechey island and some evdience of high lead content in bodily relics but has i believe somewhat been rolled back since (as speculation without a strong control group as to likely levels?)

I know MIchael Palin has a book on the subject of the expedition. Thought it was a weird coincidence when i saw it at the time I was watching the series. But does mean there is a more fact based exploration of some of the main material around in popular circles.

if it's all "coinciding: with something it's the finds of the two sunken ships, erebus off the adelaide peninsular in 2014 and terror in terror bay in 2017

= a couple of hundred miles south as a ship drifts (or as re-manned and sailed) from where they were mapped as frozen in and presumed sunk

so there's lots of scope for speculation (there were several inuit sightings south of the frozen-in point, which until recently were largely ignored as fantasy or confusion -- for example that the inuit words for ship and boat were the same so who knew what they could possibly be talking abt… )

also there was the famous (and hilarious) 19th century sailor's tale of a sighting of both ships frozen into a single iceberg travelling south past the hudson bay into the atlantic, complete in some versions with men frozen into the rigging

sailors be fibbin is how to break this down to an extent

(more franklin chat here, inc.how the inuit invented sunglasses and how walruses are scarier than shamanic man-bears: ancient disaster)

so is king william island really as bleak as the surface of the moon? in summer i think no, there is vegetation esp. towards the south of the island

and done

good sad strong ending, plenty of fan service to the anecdote-burdened real hedz who know (me) plus as much chaotic fuck you to same, which is fair (fuck me)

i did hope they'd dig up the very tall man with teeth as long as an inuit's fingers but he's wound right into the remanning and moving of the ships and that would require splitting the party into three not two, which would have been dramatically confounding i guess

also one (of the two?) bodies that made it all the way home is these day's thought to be goodsir's (they still thought it was someone else's when the book was written)

2: when sir john got his im sorry i laughed out loud

Yes, me also - I think mainly because certain facial expressions that Ciarán Hinds adopted reminded me very strongly of Frankie Howerd.

A breathing Earth: the annual pulse of vegetation, land and ice in a populat gif by illustrator and data visualizer John Nelson [source: https://t.co/pDO6aIGgJ7] pic.twitter.com/WT2wQFzJGN

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 30, 2021

telling that king william island never goes dark in that pulse: tho i think in some years its southern edge will be caught and will bloom

one theory of the catastrophe is that the expedition, having in fact survived largely at least a year or two of camping and hunting, then encountered (or in fact possibly caused) a local famine -- causing it (if they did) by overhunting just on the island (the intuit in the show hint at this, though they relate it as much to magtical-moralistic reasons as practical matters of e.g. musk ox or seal population)

5: no bad performances!

This is very true and noteworthy and something you can rarely say. I've recommended this to several people and everyone liked it but no one has been as wild about it as I am, other than here, obv. Because I'm tangentially related to stuff relating to the look of this, in theatre rather than film, I kept wondering how they achieved the overall look of it, it looks extraordinarily expensive. That's just logistical stuff I can't quite get my head around but the production design in every aspect of this is seriously impressive.

d'you mean the creation of the island landscape itself? or the man-bear or ???

i think i just decided it was filmed on real actual king william island even tho i don't actually think it looks very like that -- or else in that essex gravel pit that 70s doctor who was always filmed in lol

I read somewhere that it was pretty much all CGI.

I was thinking of the general land or icescape, the ships themselves and the size of the cast as well as the sheer amount of CGI required. Also individual set pieces like the tent for the carnival and the subsequent fire. Maybe my problem is that I just don't really watch shows of this kind so I don't see much of this kind of set or landscape building in my other telly viewing, it could be fairly routine now for all I know.

well, here are some answers

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/the-terror-location-cgi-not-shot-outside-1201945793/

the croatian island of PAG seems more of a mediterranean paradise than you'd expect from its role in this series, i guess that's our CGI dollars at work right there

Having the rare not-fake-looking-snow helped a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8VZKyHIg70

I saw there was a documentary on one of the iTVs or 4s a few days ago about the discovery of the Erebus but I 'd missed most of it by the time I found out so will have to look for a torrent of it

I didn't know about it, thanks. Its called Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship and it's on All4 or 4od or whatever it's called this week.