This page is for tropes that have appeared in The Terror (the series, not the novel).
For the rest:
- Eat Me:
- Blanky covers himself in forks in an attempt to give the Tuunbaq major indigestion.
- Goodsir drinks and covers himself in poison before slitting his wrists, aiming to poison Hickey's mutineers when they eat him.
- Endless Winter: Obviously. They're far enough north that the best "summer" they can hope for is for temperatures to rise slightly above freezing, and even then that summer never really arrives.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: In the first episode, the men comment on Neptune whining at night, assuming it's because he's smelled a bear. He also doesn't seem to care for Hickey, defecating in front of him out of what seems to be pure spite.
- Evil Versus Evil: The Tuunbaq is a supernatural monster, and Hickey is the secondary antagonist. They come to blows in the final episode.
- Exposed to the Elements:
- Downplayed example; everyone is dressed for cold weather, but not nearly as heavily as in the novel. No use in paying for actors if you can't see their faces.
- Hickey undresses himself and keeps himself warm by dancing in order to kill Irving without getting blood on his clothes and frame the Inuit as the killers.
- When Hickey loses it in the final episode, he is dressed only in his underwear and boots.
- Face Death with Dignity: Many sailors do not do this—cannibalism, mutiny, madness, abandoning the sick and weak—but some do.
- Blanky, realizing that with his gangrenous leg he has no hope, leaves the main party in an effort to draw the Tuunbaq away from the others. He also ties as many forks to himself as the surviving sailors can spare, to make himself as unpleasant a meal as possible. When the Tuunbaq does show up, Blanky laughs in the face of death and says, "What in the name of God took you so fucking long?"
- A haggard Goodsir, clad only in his nightshirt, smears his body with poison and drinks some more poison, aiming to kill Hickey's men when they cannibalize him. Then he makes a point to dress up in his full uniform before lying down on his cot and slitting his wrists.
- Face–Heel Turn: Several crewmen join Hickey in his mutiny, most notably Tozer, Des Voeux, and reluctantly, Hodgson.
- Fan Disservice: Goodsir, Fitzjames, and Hickey are all good-looking men one might look forward to having a Shirtless Scene or two. Pity you only see them undressed when they're respectively carved up like a Christmas turkey, investigating rotting war wounds, and being flogged.
- A Father to His Men:
- Sir John, whose men love him and fear disappointing him.
Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John.
Sir John: For all our sakes, let's hope you're wrong.- Then Crozier, in a far more meaningful way, fighting desperately to save his men and bring them out of the Arctic alive. This is echoed in a Call-Back when Crozier tells Fitzjames that they will leave a store of supplies behind in case any of Hickey's mutineers change their minds and attempt to return. Fitzjames, moved by Crozier's generosity of spirit, mutters "More than God loves them."
- Fighting Irish: In a fit of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy, Crozier starts a fight with Fitzjames after the latter confronts him for requisitioning the whiskey on Erebus.
- Finale Credits: As the credits roll for the last time, we get a reprise of "The Silver Swan".
- Fire-Forged Friends: When the series starts Fitzjames and Crozier openly dislike one another. Fitzjames is an inexperienced yes-man to Franklin and ends up supporting him against Crozier, despite the fact that Crozier's right about the risks of the voyage, but Crozier is also an abrasive, joyless alcoholic who rebuffs Fitzjames’s initial attempts at friendship and publicly embarrasses him out of spite. Later, as each shows his bravery and compassion through a series of disasters, the two men become True Companions.Fitzjames: "Are we brothers, Francis? I would like that very much."
- Foregone Conclusion: If the words "Both ships then vanished" didn't spell it out, the rescue party arriving years too late and being told of the dying Crozier's warning — "Tell them we are gone. Dead and gone." — hammers home that this story is not going to have a happy ending.
- Foreshadowing:
- Pay close attention to the opening credits. The profiles of Franklin and Fitzjames are blown away to show the skull beneath the skin, and sure enough they both die during the course of the story. By contrast, Crozier's face distorts into the same mask worn by Lady Silence's father in "Go For Broke", showing his ultimate fate of surviving and being adopted by the Inuit.
- When Fitzjames is telling the story of the time he was shot in battle during the Opium Wars for what is implied to be the umpteenth time, Lieutenant Little notes that the nature of his wound (a bullet passing through Fitzjames's arm, entering his side and stopping just short of shattering his spine) is "like the shot that killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar," and Fitzjames confirms that he came very close to dying the same way. He does, two years later, thanks to scurvy reopening the wounds — and with a bleeding eye and rotting arm to mimic Nelson's famous disabilities to boot.
- In episode 3, Morfin starts to sing a sailor's lament in honor of Franklin, but is startled to realize that he's forgotten some of the lyrics. He's suffering from the early stages of chronic lead poisoning, which is going to become a big problem later on.
- A subtle one regarding Hickey's identity. In episode 2 Crozier comments that Hickey doesn't sound Irish, which Hickey says is because he's lived in England a long time. Hickey also responds that Crozier 'gives hope to the rest of us micks.' Mick is a derogatory term for an Irish person, unlikely to be used by one. Crozier gives a slight reaction to this. When we meet the real Hickey briefly at the beginning of episode 7, he speaks with a typical Irish accent.
- In episode 7, Crozier asks Jopson how he feels being deprived of his regular duties, and allows him to be the one who gathers the officers for a command meeting. At said command meeting, Crozier promotes Jopson to the rank of Lieutenant.
- From Bad to Worse: The entire show is basically a constantly descending Trauma Conga Line. As follows:
- First a minor outbreak of tuberculosis occurs during their first winter in the ice, killing three of the crew.
- Then Erebus damages its propeller, forcing them to rely on Terror—the less capable ship—to push through the ice, causing setbacks.
- Next, the ships get stuck in pack ice, and remain trapped there for a whole winter. When they try to get free in the spring/summer, there's no sign of a thaw or any way out of the ice.
- Then a scouting team accidentally shoots an Inuit shaman and appear to incur the wrath of a monster which kills several of the crew, including Franklin.
- Then they discover that a lot of the tinned supplies they brought with them were inexpertly processed and sealed and have spoiled, so they'll soon run out of food; and Goodsir and Macdonald are growing worried that the men are suffering from lead poisoning — either via the soldering in the food that hasn't spoiled, or via the water pipes on the ships.
- When Goodsir brings that last tidbit to the attention of Dr Stanley, Stanley appears to be driven to despair and madness by the almost certain death sentence that has been given to the expedition, and sets the Carnivale tent and himself on fire. Two of those to die in the disaster are Dr. Macdonald and Dr. Peddie, leaving Goodsir as the last medical man in both crews.
- When the crews abandon Erebus and Terror, Crozier and a few other men discover that the advance party that was sent out months before had been killed by the Tuunbaq only a few miles from the ships — so there's no hope of rescue coming.
- Just as Lieutenant Irving makes contact with a Netsilik family in the hopes of being able to trade with them and find a way of supporting the party, Hickey snaps and murders both him and Farr, trying to spark a mutiny that ends in the camp getting attacked by the Tuunbaq, and himself and his mutineers getting away with a captured Goodsir in tow.
- The crew finds out that the Tuunbaq does not only kill people, but devours their souls as well.
- Fitzjames is dying slowly and painfully from scurvy and has to be mercy killed by Crozier, Blanky is succumbing to gangrene and sacrifices himself to lead the Tuunbaq away from the remaining crew, Hickey kills a dying Gibson and forces Goodsir to butcher him for meat, and the mutineers capture Crozier.
- An off-screen example is what befalls Lieutenant Little and the remaining crewmen who elect to follow Crozier's order to leave him behind, even though he hoped they wouldn't actually do that. When Crozier finds their camp after several weeks under Lady Silence's care, all that remains are collapsed and tattered tents, half-eaten bodies and severed limbs in cooking pots, and the dying Edward Little, whose face is now covered in golden chains sewn into his cheeks and lip and is so far gone he can only blankly stare at Crozier and utter "close" before expiring.
- Gallows Humor: Blanky, facing the imminent amputation of his leg, asks Crozier to serve everyone a shot of whisky from his bottle, stating that he feels like he and the Tuunbag have just gotten engaged and he wants to celebrate. Much later on, as he's preparing to lure the Tuunbaq away from the rest of the crew, he starts cackling gleefully when Crozier realizes why he wants forks and rope.
- Going Cold Turkey: Crozier, who is the first to realize that he cannot go on being The Alcoholic as things are going bad, tells his officers that he's going to be locked up in his room for a while. He even says "I may beg," but that the other officers are to carry on without him until he gets dry. Attended only by his loyal steward Jopson, Crozier eventually kicks alcohol.
- Gory Discretion Shot: We don't actually see Irving's posthumous castration, just a huge, appropriately-placed bloodstain on the cloth that covers his corpse.
- Great White Hunter: In the third episode Franklin sets up a trap for the Tuunbaq similar to those used in India for hunting tigers, and brings a camera to photograph the expected result. It does not end well. At all.
- Half-Breed Discrimination: Showing the ridiculous lengths this went to in Victorian Britain, Fitzjames is troubled with the idea that his mother might have been Portuguese. Portuguese nobility.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: A watchstander aboard Terror is found cut in half. The doctors determine he was cut with a claw, and when Fitzjames suggests the assailant was a man using a bear’s claw as a weapon, they observe that the power demonstrated in each cut was beyond the strength of any man. The monster swiped its claw three times in the same place, deliberately bisecting the poor bastard — or rather, bastards, as the Tuunbaq, disturbingly, stacks the upper half of one dead man on the lower half of the other.
- This fate ultimately befalls Hickey in We Are Gone.
- Heroes Love Dogs: Franklin and Crozier to Neptune, in contrast to Hickey, whose first lines are complaining about the dog's apparent elevation over the crew and eventually kills and eats him.
- Heroes Prefer Swords: Fitzjames is the only one of the ship's officers who always carries his sword.
- Hero of Another Story: James Clark Ross had sailed with Crozier on a previous Antarctic expedition which netted him fame and success upon his return to England.
- Heroic Bastard: Fitzjames. It's practically his Freudian Excuse.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Unable to keep pace due to his amputated leg, Blanky leaves the retreating party to offer himself to the Tuunbaq and keep it away from the others.
- Goodsir doses himself in poison under expectation that Hickey's mutineers will eat him, and instructs Crozier on what to do so he doesn't find himself in the same place as them and can escape.
- Historical Domain Character: Essentially the entire cast, with the notable exceptions of Lady Silence, her father and the Tuunbaq. Also notable is the case of Cornelius Hickey, which unlike in the book, is revealed to be a stowaway who murdered the "real" Hickey and assumed his identity, presumably to get over the gratuitous villainization that the novel did to the real man.
- Historical Fantasy: A real 1840s Arctic expedition hunted by an Eldritch Abomination and meeting shamans mystically connected to it.
- Historical Villain Upgrade:
- Averted in the case of Cornelius Hickey, unlike the novel. The writers of the series were uncomfortable with how the novel portrayed Hickey as an Ax-Crazy madman with no consideration for the real person's memory, so in the series he was the victim of a Dead Person Impersonation by the antagonist.
- Curiously, the writers still play fast and loose with this vis a vis other crewmembers. It's probably a safe bet that Doctor Stanley didn't try to burn the rest of the crew alive. (None of the Inuit testimony about the real expedition suggests that something like this happened.)
- Holier Than Thou: The most outspokenly religious character, Sir John Franklin, is a classist xenophobe who has a dead Inuit's body disposed of like trash, at the same time he is preparing the eulogy of a British soldier and friend of his. He even remarks to the crew that they "have only lost one man" (and should only mourn him, as a result).
- How We Got Here: The first scene of the series features James Clark Ross, leading a rescue party in 1850 and making contact with the Netsilik, whereupon they learn that all the men of the Franklin expedition have died. Then we jump back to 1846 and the start of the story proper, as Franklin and his ships approach the Arctic ice.
- Hubris:
- Sir John's flaw, as called out implicitly by John Ross (which he questions Franklin about his rescue plan) and explicitly by Crozier (when Franklin decides to trust in divine providence rather than take sensible precautions).
- Invoked without being explicit where Fitzjames is concerned, as the dramatic war wound he's so fond of telling people about opens up again when he comes down with scurvy and ultimately kills him.
- All of Hickey's plans are as grandiose as doomed to failure. Starting with that time he murdered a crewman and stole his identity for an odd chance to desert in the Sandwich Islands.
