AMC's The Terror (2018)

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.