Those are very good points about narrative structure, that Mr. Blanky’s scene does act sort of like a panel, as for modesty’s sake, to spare the audience and the story the reality of what’s going on meanwhile, back at the ranch, where Goodsir’s having to cut up Hickey’s ex. The whole business is inglorious, nasty, disgusting, dehumanizing, when one is close enough to see, as it were, how the sausage is made. Pulling out of focus for a moment to allow Mr. Blanky to find the Northwest Passage creates the kind of seasick reversal that The Terror does so well: for a second, we’re back in the adventure story. And, then, we realize, we never left the horror story*.
I think, though, that the futility of Mr. Blanky finding the thing they’ve all been looking for, by himself, as he’s waiting to die, doesn’t take away its meaning. In that moment, it’s not about the empire, or the expedition; it’s discovery in its purest sense: new awareness; something appears to you where before, you were aware of nothing. Does it matter that he’s not going to live to tell anyone about it? If the discovery, itself, doesn’t matter, then neither does his inability to communicate it; either all of it- the expedition; Mr. Blanky’s entire life- matters, or none of it does. In his final moments, meaning becomes so concentrated in those moments, that he loses his connection to time in a larger sense; Mr. Blanky slips out of the narrative, and takes the Northwest Passage with him. That’s the narrative’s ‘fuck you’ to the British empire, to John Barrow: he doesn’t get to know what Mr. Blanky knows; he dies with his quest incomplete. He can’t have that knowledge, because he didn’t go there. You can’t cheat discovery.
That futility, that tragedy, remains in place, though. Whatever one thinks about the individual men on the expedition, the expedition as a whole, Victorian England, the men are still people who suffered and died. I think the various ideas can coexist: what they did was wrong, and they died horribly; it was all for nothing, but you live til you die; depending on their own lives back in England, they would have had more or less of a stake in the idea of the empire, and many of them would have just been doing a job- but, finally, fuck John Barrow.
* But, then, we’re back to adventure, with Mr. Blanky’s death, a foregone conclusion showdown, but one which occurs off-screen. It would have been redundant to show the actual death, Collins’ death having shown us everything we needed about how Tuunbaq kills, but it’s also a service to the character. As to the question, who are we supposed to root for, Mr. Blanky or Tuunbaq, I don’t think the show has an opinion. It’s tempting to imagine that the show goes too easy on the British sailors, and some more than others, but I think that The Terror avoids the expected, comfortable answers. You have to ask yourself what you’re really seeing, and why you’re being shown it; what your actual reaction is, as opposed to the one you think the narrative wants you to have. We’re never told “Colonialism is bad”, because we don’t have to be told that. The show doesn’t draw extra attention to the hundred, plus dead bodies that pile up over ten episodes, because it doesn’t have to. You can’t miss them.
