#the thing about goodsir/silna is that it's good because it didn't happen

[karmaphone]

I can see some of y'all are deep in the colonial romance fantasies re silna 😒😒😒

[rosemarytales]

okay so I rewatched the terror and this time around I understood more because I could somehow tell them apart. here are some random thoughts

jopson's fate was among the cruellest things that happened

hodgson's speech to goodsir made me understand just how deep the writers went when analyzing the psychology of the characters. what is truly interesting is how they also had to forget parts of it because humans barely ever know why they do what they do and yet it still defines who they are (that kieran culkin golf analogy)

I missed so much stuff on my first watch, but Idk how I missed hickey wearing fitzjames' boots, how people were turning against the lieutenants, sophia going barefoot in the snow, etc. those were all fundamental things, no wonder I didn't understand anything

hickey was much much smarter than anyone gave him credit for. the fact he figured out the ritual to become shaman is mind-boggling

goodsir is painfully good and painfully english. both are the reason why he could not have lived on the way crozier did, because he would have never accepted silna leaving and that would have been his demise (because he loves her and because he refuses to see things according to the culture they are happening in). I also know he started realizing he coould never go back to england the moment he said goodbye to silna, when he hesitates saying people there are good. he knew then that it wasn't necessarily true and that was not a fact he could live with, but he still went out trying to save the man he deemed worthy of it

tozer definitely started hating people when they didn't help him save heather

doctor mcdonald's death?? what??? insane

goodsir's visions :((((( I think a lot about goodsir

NO ONE talk to me about bridgens and peglar. no. one.

on that topic, I was surprised this show was actually this queer. I thought people were mostly going off on subtext and the only explicitly queer characters being. well. insane. but no we are talking hms faggot here, this is crazy. I was pleasantly surprised because I know tumblrinas were not the target audience for this show

collins breaks my heart. he just wanted peace :((

for some reason I grew so attached to hodgson and mcdonald. they are like potatoes to me and I grow them on my windowsill

fitzjames. just. 23 layers of façade to hide his insecurities. relatable queen

crozier, hickey, hodgson and goodsir monopolized my attention tho. don't ask why

[darkfire359]

Thoughts on e8-e10 of The Terror

(The final entry in my posting saga)

I went in expecting expecting literally everyone to die on this "doomed" expedition. So in that sense, Crozier and Silna surviving meant that things weren't as bad as they could have been. But also... holy shit, Jopson's death was heartbreaking. The fact that he didn't know what happened to Crozier and so he thought he'd been abandoned by his captain was so incredibly tragic. And undeserved! Like I'd argue that Jopson probably dies in a worse way than basically anyone else in the series (maaaaybe not Sir John, but Sir John also got some karmic retribution for disrespecting Silna's dad and for putting everyone's lives at risk). So WHY did Johnson have to die alone, in pain, and thinking he'd been left behind by the man he cared about most? I am so upset by this.

Thoughts on some other deaths:

Goodsir's was not as sad for me when it happened—he at least got to kind of choose how it happened, and it seemed like he'd at least accomplish saving Crozier. Ultimately it seemed like it didn't do that much though, and Silna's reaction to seeing his body was also heartbreaking.

Fitzjames's was sad, but in a more heartwarming way? At least he got to die with someone he cared about next to him. I definitely understand people shipping Crozier/Fitzjames now.

Gibson's death I think I had spoiled a while ago, so my main takeaway was that it was less gay than I expected. Like, it was still reasonably gay, but I expected it to be very gay. The thing that gets me is that I'm not sure whether or not Hickey did it out of love (Goodsir had just explained to Gibson that he was going to die from illness eventually but that he would suffer PAINFULLY first) or pragmatism, because Hickey wasn't in the tent when Goodsir gave the diagnosis. Did he overhear it and want to keep Gibson from suffering? Or was it actually just that Goodsir said that Gibson couldn't haul? Characters having already canonically fucked does NOT stop me from wanting to analyze the homoeroticism of their subsequent scenes.

I feel like the Crozier/Fitzjames death scene and the Hickey/Gibson one were explicit parallels of each other, given that Crozier also mercy killed Fitzjames (massaging the poison down his throat) and Fitzjames tried to get Crozier to eat him. TBH I kind of feel like Crozier should have indeed done so—given that Team Hickey ended up finding Fitzjames's body anyway, it's likely that he got eaten regardless. Surely one wouldn't want other men to be the ones to eat their boyfriend, right? (Relatedly, Fitzjames saying "Use my body!" also sent my mind in directions away from the seriousness of the scene.)

Speaking of scenes where someone sadly and homoerotically holds their BF, the Bridgens/Peglar stuff was also sad and sweet. Probably if I rewatch the series and actually pay attention to them more earlier, it would be even more so.

Now I'm sad about Jopson's death again because he was all alone and abandoned. :'(

Also it's sad that Little died without ever being able to tell Crozier that he TRIED to rescue him. I initially thought that Crozier legitly wanted the men to go south, so the fact that he'd been misleading Team Hickey and had actually been counting on Little to rescue him was tragic.

Blanky’s death seemed like the happiest—he got to finally discover the Northwest Passage, while wearing his WTF fork outfit. Good for him, that badass deserved something cool.

My friend that I was watching with hates Hickey now and so was happy when he died. I was fully expecting Hickey's crazy murder schemes to come up at some point and so my opinion on Hickey didn't change that much. I do think it would have felt weird for the plot to *not* have Hickey die though.

Speaking of Hickey, some obligatory Hickeyposting:

I love how he somehow manages to be comic relief in addition to being the primary villain. I laughed my ass off at the reveal that he murdered a guy and stole his identity completely unnecessarily, out of a mistaken impression he'd get to summer in the Caribbean. Also the scene where he started singing while all of his men were panicking about the Tuunbaq was black comedy hilarious.

Way before this episode, I saw some shots of him with a noose around his neck. I assumed I'd been spoiled for his death scene. Then I saw those shots tagged as being from e8, and I figured that I probably hadn't been. I was correct! (Later I got spoiled on the real death.)

Crazy as he is, I feel like he had to have been like, "Wow, um, okay," when Crozier's approach to cannibalism was to cut off and eat Goodsir's raw, calloused, foot skin.

I didn't initially appreciate how TINY he is. There was a scene where he was standing in between Gibson and someone else and he was just soooo much shorter than both of them. So brave of the creators to canonically make him a top.

I expected him to kill more people. I think Gibson might have even been the only person he *directly* murdered in these three episodes? He definitely caused quite a lot of trouble though.

I think I got trolled into thinking that the Tunbaaq would die from choking on Hickey's evil evil soul, rather than choking on a literal chain. Whoops.

I was surprised that Hickey didn't bring up more audience-compelling points during his hanging speech. Or maybe I was surprised that Crozier was as straightforwardly good as he turned out to be? I think it might've been cool if Hickey had been able to call out Crozier on real flaws, rather than mistakenly interpreting his plan to resign and lead a team south as something selfish.