History YMMV / TheTerror

* UnexpectedCharacter: Lady Jane enlists Creator/CharlesDickens (that one) to rise support for a search expedition to find her husband.

** In the same vein, Ross's Inuktitut interpreter in the show is never named, but is universally taken as a reference to Rae due to being a white, bearded man with a Scottish accent, even though Rae didn't search for the expedition with Ross. Rae spoke some Inuktitut, but it was limited and he needed his own native translators.

** In the same vein, Ross's Inuktitut interpreter in the show is never named, but is universally taken as a reference to John Rae due to being a white, bearded man with a Scottish accent, even though Rae didn't search for the expedition with Ross.

* TooBleakStoppedCaring: If knowing that it's based on a real-life Arctic expedition [[spoiler:that ended in total failure]] doesn't cause this to set in, the sheer number of unlikable characters (and the few decent characters dying or hitting the DespairEventHorizon early on) and the constant [[YankTheDogsChain jerking on their chains]] will.

* CrossesTheLineTwice: [[spoiler:Franklin getting his leg ripped off by the creature and set plummeting down an ice hole to his death? Horrifying. His severed leg then tidied up and buried in a full-size coffin, in lieu of anything else to bury? Bizarrely and darkly funny, especially since Goodsir struggles to decide how to place the leg in the coffin.]]

** Jopson seems to have been embraced by the fandom as well for his kindness and care for Crozier. The [[spoiler:extremely tragic death]] helps.

* ImprovedSecondAttempt: The series solves the book's problem of Hickey being a psychopathic villain while ''also'' being based on a real life and blameless man, [[spoiler:by adding the twist that show "Hickey" is in fact an impostor who murdered the real man and stole his identity.]]
* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Borders on WildMassGuess. [[spoiler:After Franklin dies Jane Franklin says she can 'feel' her husband's spirit calling out to her. Considering that souls are said to exist and the Tuunbaq did not eat Franklin's soul, perhaps Franklin's soul did go back to his wife to beg her to [[AFatherToHisMen help his men get home.]]]]
* MoralEventHorizon: You can take your pick with Cornelius Hickey. [[spoiler:Is it when he murders Farr, Irving and an entire Inuit family, including a child, just to undermine Crozier, and then subsequently mutilates Irving's body? Is it when he kidnaps Goodsir? The hint that he found, dug up, looted and devoured Fitzjames' body? Is it when he ruthlessly kills his former lover Billy for being ill and then eats his body? Maybe it's when he butchers Goodsir's body, leaving him out on a slab like an undignified hunk of meat, or when he forces Crozier to partake. Or when he knocks out his henchman Tozer and forces him, alongside the others, into a suicidal mission. However, it might have come before all that... when he killed the real Cornelius Hickey and stole his identity just for quick passage.]]

* SpecialEffectsFailure: The show avoids this for almost its entire runtime, but the scene of [[spoiler:Hickey being ripped in half at the waist by the Tuunbaq]] in the final episode just looks bad, leaving a bit of a sour taste after ten episodes of nearly flawless special effects.

* TearJerker: The entire show. The ''very first scene'' tells us that the expedition is missing and probably dead, so we know it is not going to end happily. Most of the men have problems, but most of them are not bad people. It is made even worse by the fact that it becomes increasingly clear that as a group, most care deeply for one another. As their situation becomes more desperate and their true selves are revealed, most try to fight against their own fears and weaknesses. Most of the men try to hang together and keep military discipline in increasingly hopeless circumstances. [[spoiler:Yet despite all their suffering, all their attempts to make it through, it turns out to be AllForNothing.]]

* CrossesTheLineTwice: [[spoiler:Franklin getting his leg ripped off by the creature and set plummeting down an ice hole to his death? Horrifying. His severed leg then tidied up and buried in a full size coffin, in lieu of anything else to bury? Bizarrely and darkly funny, especially since Goodsir struggles to decide how to place the leg in the coffin.]]

* TooBleakStoppedCaring: If knowing that it's based on a real-life Arctic expedition [[spoiler: that ended in total failure]] doesn't cause this to set in, the sheer number of unlikable characters (and the few decent characters dying or hitting the DespairEventHorizon early on) and the constant [[YankTheDogsChain jerking on their chains]] will.

** [[AnimalMetaphor The Tuunbaq is a physical representation of the difficulties and horrors that confronted the Franklin Expedition]]. [[ImplacableMan It is exactly as relentless and unforgiving]] as the Arctic itself. It seems as though its actions are done with a view to compound the Expedition's misery solely ForTheEvulz. For example, had the tinned food not been lead poisoned and properly sealed Franklin's men might have had just enough strength to make it to mainland Canada. Finally, Franklin's men were - from the locations of their last campsites - able to find the Northwest Passage, completing their objective and in some senses beating the environment and their difficulties but, as with what it costs them in the series to finally kill the Tuunbaq, only in a manner that makes their eventual triumph a PyrrhicVictory.

* CompleteMonster: "[[EvilIsPetty Cornelius Hickey]]" is in truth a stowaway who murdered the real Cornelius Hickey and stole his identity. On the ''HMS Terror'', Hickey blackmails a fellow sailor into having sex with him and attempts to murder the Inuit shaman "Lady Silence". Abandoning the ''HMS Terror'' when it gets stuck on Arctic ice, Hickey murders his own hunting party and frames an innocent Inuit family for the deed, resulting in their deaths, [[WouldHurtAChild children included]]. After successfully stealing a boat and supplies from the crew and kidnapping Dr. Henry "Harry" Goodsir, Hickey kills his own sexual partner and forces Goodsir to butcher the body for Hickey and his fellow mutineers to [[ImAHumanitarian eat]], threatening to kill other members of his party if Goodsir doesn't comply with Hickey's demands. Finding Goodsir to have committed suicide, Hickey mutilates Goodsir's corpse and forces Crozier to partake in the cannibalism before having him and his own men in chains to use as bait for [[AnimalisticAbomination the Tuunbaq]] while Hickey attempts to control the beast. The Tuunbaq ultimately dies trying to devour him because of how [[TooSpicyForYogSothoth utterly vile Hickey's soul truly was]].

** Crozier and Fitzjames are a very popular pairing among the fandom due to the eventual tenderness their friendship takes on. This may have been intentional- according to Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies, a lot of their later scenes together were filmed “like love scenes”, with minimal crew to interfere with their performances.
** After Fitzjames’s confession of his origins in Episode 8, the crew left the camera running, prompting Menzies (according to Harris) to worry that he’d forgotten a line and whisper “What are we supposed to be doing?” Harris replied, “I think we’re supposed to make out?”
* ImprovedSecondAttempt: The series solves the book's problem of Hickey being a psychopathic villain while ''also'' being based on a real life and blameless man, [[spoiler:by adding the twist that show 'Hickey' is in fact an impostor who murdered the real man and stole his identity.]]
* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Borders on WildMassGuess. [[spoiler: After Franklin dies Jane Franklin says she can 'feel' her husband's spirit calling out to her. Considering that souls are said to exist and the Tuunbaq did not eat Franklin's soul, perhaps Franklin's soul did go back to his wife to beg her to [[AFatherToHisMen help his men get home.]]]]

* TearJerker: The entire show. The ''very first scene'' tells us that the expedition is missing and probably dead, so we know it is not going to end happily. Most of the men have problems, but most of them are not bad people. It is made even worse by the fact that it becomes increasingly clear that as a group, most care deeply for one another. As their situation becomes more desperate and their true selves are revealed, most try to fight against their own fears and weaknesses. Most of the men try to hang together and keep military discipline in increasingly hopeless circumstances. [[spoiler: Yet despite all their suffering, all their attempts to make it through, it turns out to be AllForNothing.]]

* AuthorsSavingThrow: The series solves the book's problem of Hickey being a psychopathic villain while ''also'' being based on a real life and blameless man, [[spoiler:by adding the twist that show 'Hickey' is in fact an impostor who murdered the real man and stole his identity.]]

* UncannyValley: The Tuunbaq was deliberately given human qualities, particularly around the face. With how well it blends into the environment and the [[NothingIsScarier slow-build up to truly seeing it]], it can easily be mistaken for just another polar bear at first, but with something distinctly ''off''. Its eyes are also completely human.

** [[AnimalMetaphor The Tuunbaq is a physical representation of the difficulties and horrors that confronted the Franklin Expedition itself]]. [[ImplacableMan It is relentless]] like the troubles that assailed Franklin and his men. It seems as though its actions are done with a view to compound the Expedition's misery ForTheEvulz. For example, had the tinned food not been lead poisoned and properly sealed Franklin's men might have had just enough strength to make it to mainland Canada. Finally, Franklin's men were - from the sites of their last camp sites - able to find the Northwest passage, completing their objective and in some senses beating the environment and their difficulties but, as with what it costs them in the Series to finally kill the Tuunbaq, only at the greatest cost in a manner that makes their eventual triumph a PyrrhicVictory.

* CompleteMonster: "[[EvilIsPetty Cornelius Hickey]]" of the ''HMS Terror'' is in truth a stowaway who murdered the real Cornelius Hickey and stole his identity. On the ''HMS Terror'', Hickey would blackmail a sailor into having sex with him and would attempt to murder the Inuit shaman "Lady Silence". Abandoning the ''HMS Terror'' when it gets stuck on Arctic ice, Hickey would murder his own hunting party and frame an innocent Inuit family for the deed resulting in their murders, [[WouldHurtAChild children included]]. Separating from Captain Francis Croizer and kidnapping Dr. Henry "Harry" Goodsir, Hickey would kill his own sexual partner and force Goodsir to butcher the body for Hickey and his men to [[ImAHumanitarian eat]], threatening to do such to Goodsir if he doesn't comply to Hickey's demands. Finding Goodsir to have committed suicide, Hickey mutilates Goodsir's corpse and forces Crozier to partake in the cannibalism before having him and his own men in chains to use as bait for [[AnimalisticAbomination the Tuunbaq]] while Hickey attempts to control the Beast. The Tuunbaq would die trying to devour Cornelius Hickey because of how [[TooSpicyForYogSothoth utterly vile Hickey's soul truly was]].
* CrossesTheLineTwice: [[spoiler:Franklin getting his leg ripped off by the creature and set plummeting down an ice hole to his death? Horrifying. His severed leg then tidied up and buried in a full size coffin, in lieu of anything else to bury? Bizarrely and darkly funny.]]

** Thomas Blanky, the only thing on the Arctic Ice that's [[MadeOfIron tougher than the Tuunbaq.]]

* TearJerker: The entire show. The ending is told at the beginning, we know it is not going to end happily. Most of the men have problems, but most of them are not bad people. It is made even worse by the fact that it becomes increasingly clear that as a group, most care deeply for one another. As their situation becomes more desperate and their true selves are revealed, most try to fight against their own fears and weaknesses. Most of the men try to hang together and keep military discipline in increasingly hopeless circumstances. [[spoiler: Yet despite all their suffering, all their attempts to make it through, it turns out to be AllForNothing.]]

* TheWoobie: Anyone who isn't Hickey.

* TookTheBadFilmSeriously: Creator/BorisKarloff and Creator/JackNicholson. As James Rolfe noted in his Monster Madness review of the movie, you wouldn't expect the latter to be the famous actor he eventually became if one only knew him from ''The Terror''.

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: If knowing that it's based on a real-life Arctic expedition [[spoiler: that ended in total failure]] doesn't cause this to set in, the sheer number of unlikable characters (and the few decent characters dying or hitting the DespairEventHorizon early on) and the constant [[YankTheDogsChain jerking on their chains]] will.

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: The villains are ravening psychopaths or unknowable eldritch horrors, while most of the rest of the cast tends to be [[BlackAndGreyMorality very flawed]]. Adding to the fact that the whole expedition is DoomedByCanon, it can make some viewers reluctant to get involved in the story.

* OohMeAccentsSlipping: While Jared Harris does a decent Northern Irish accent most of the time, occasionally it sounds much more southern. Crozier was from Banbridge, 25 miles away from Belfast.
* SpiritualAdaptation: Despite already being an adaptation, it also works well as a TV series of ''Film/TheThing1982'', as both are about a doomed group of polar researchers being stalked by an EldritchAbomination

* SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome: The show has been widely praised by critics for the quality of its sets and VFX. The Arctic ice scapes are considered particularly impressive, since they were almost entirely created with CGI; [[http://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/the-terror-location-cgi-not-shot-outside-1201945793/ the series was actually shot on a sound stage in Budapest!]]

* TheWoobie: Anyone who isn't Hickey.

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Borders on WildMassGuess [[spoiler: After Franklin dies Jane Franklin says she can 'feel' her husband's spirit calling out to her. Considering that souls are said to exist and the Tuunbaq did not eat Franklin's soul, perhaps Franklin's soul did go back to his wife to beg her to [[AFatherToHisMen help his men get home.]]]]
* MoralEventHorizon: You can take your pick with Cornelius Hickey. [[spoiler:Is it when he murders Farr, Irving and an entire Inuit family, including a child, just to undermine Crozier, and then subsequently mutilates Irving's body? Is it when he kidnaps Goodsir? The hint that he found, dug up, looted and devoured Fitzjames' body? Is it when he ruthlessly kills his former lover Billy for being ill and then eats his body? Maybe it's when he butchers Goodsir's body, leaving him out on a slab like an undignified hunk of meat, or when he forces Crozier to partake. Or when he knocks out his henchman Tozer and forces him, alongside the others, into a suicidal mission. However, it might have come before all that...when he killed the real Cornelius Hickey and stole his identity just for quick passage.]]

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Borders on WildMassGuess [[spoiler: After Franklin dies Sophia Franklin says she can 'feel' her husband's spirit calling out to her. Considering that souls are said to exist and the Tuunbaq did not eat Franklin's soul, perhaps Franklin's soul did go back to his wife to beg her to [[AFatherToHisMen help his men get home.]]]]

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: For the first three episodes the main characters are analogous to the cast of ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries''. Producer Ridley Scott emphasised the similarity between Victorian explorers and modern astronauts to the degree that Franklin provides a ShoutOut to the Starfleet mission statement in the first episode. Franklin is the arrogant but loveable Captain Kirk, Crozier the OnlySaneMan is Spock because he puts logic before personal glory, TheMedic BadassBookworm Goodsir is Bones, LonghairedPrettyBoy Fitzjames fills a similar role to the original MrFanservice Chekhov, and the elderly but resourceful Blanky is Scotty. The peaceful Inuit are mistaken for TheSavageIndian in a similar way the Klingons from the new film series were misunderstood as warlike aggressors.

* DarknessInducedAudienceApathy: The villains are ravening psychopaths or unknowable eldritch horrors, while the heroes are... [[BlackAndGreyMorality flawed.]] Even the nicer characters like Goodsir and Jopson slowly have their idealism eroded by the barren, godless landscape of the Arctic expanse. The expedition is [[spoiler: [[DoomedByCanon historically doomed to fail with no known survivors,]]]] and each episode just sees things grow even more hopeless, bleak, horrific. By the end of it all, [[spoiler:Crozier is the only survivor (with all the other sympathetic characters having died in variously lurid ways), and he consciously decides ''not'' to return to Britain, as there is nothing left for him there and the loss of his entire command has rendered it pointless anyway.]] It gives [[DownerEnding the ending]] an AllForNothing feel to it, really. About the only good thing that comes of it all is that one of the various parties involved in the rescue expeditions coincidentally manages to find the Northwest Passage while they're at it... but like Dr. Goodsir said, that will be good for their ''economy.'' (Which seems in retrospect a rather frivolous thing for [[spoiler: hundreds of men]] to have '''died''' over)
** On the other hand, numerous critical assessments of the series cited that the main themes of most of the series are that human bonds and taking care of each other are the most important things in the world, even in the face of certain doom. Many of the men are able to be TogetherInDeath, [[spoiler:Fitzjames dies having become the hero he always wanted to be]], and [[spoiler:Blanky]] is able to greet death as a friend and on his own terms, while [[spoiler:Hickey]] dies a self-mutilated madman mauled to pieces for his hubris. It’s a dark show, with a KillEmAll ending [[spoiler:or almost all]], but the overarching theme is that WhatYouAreInTheDark matters.
* EnsembleDarkHorse: Thomas Blanky, the only thing on the Arctic Ice that's [[MadeOfIron tougher than the Tuunbaq.]]

* HoYay: Crozier and Fitzjames are a very popular pairing among the fandom due to the eventual tenderness their friendship takes on. This may have been intentional- according to Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies, a lot of their later scenes together were filmed “like love scenes”, with minimal crew to interfere with their performances.

* IdiotBall: Hickey ruins [[spoiler: both the Expedition’s defenses by killing Neptune, and then sacrifices any real hope of the Expedition’s survival by slaughtering the Inuit. He does this only because it would make Crozier right, and he wanted to undermine him and take over. Had he just let Crozier and Irving work with the natives, they all could’ve walked out of the Arctic with untainted food and survived.]] It’s justified however, as he had already lost it at that point and was suffering the accumulative effects of years of lead poisoning. He never considers the possibility the Tuunbaq [[spoiler: wasn’t interested in another shaman or at least a white one, nor does he ever consider it wouldn’t accept one that murdered a large number of the people that worship it.]]

* OohMeAccentsSlipping: While Jared Harris does a decent Northern Irish accent most of the time, occasionally it sounds much more southern. (Crozier was from Banbridge: for reference, that's 25 miles away from Belfast.)

* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments: In "Go for Broke", Tozer tells Hickey to fill up Young's grave. Hickey flips him off as soon as he turns his back, and then, when Tozer turns around, quickly turns it into a thumbs-up.