now that i’m through with the whole thing i’ve been thinking a lot about the dynamics that exist in this extreme vacuum of (male-centric) humanity. hickey, by sheer force of will, has perhaps the strongest pull of the lot. he’s proactive in an environment that often appears to leave you with very few choices. the loophole here is to do what’s necessary, to focus on “practicals.” if nature (and the world at large) is unforgiving, then you’d best follow suit, forget morality and opt for ruthlessness as strong as you can muster.
despite the importance given to the hickey/crozier relationship, and despite hickey’s sense of betrayal from one he saw as an equal, his true counterpoint is not, in fact, francis, but goodsir. after all, even francis is aware of the boatload of sins he committed on the expedition. but francis sees that goodsir is clean. goodsir, whose distress it was up to the very end that lady silence had formed a bad opinion of england from the white men who trespassed into her home, killed her friends, and did just as badly to each other. yes, it reads naive, but his is the code of the scholarly gentleman, of a man with a deep respect for life. “practicals” leave out beauty and wonder, decency and honor. hickey, meanwhile, knows there are no decent men. only dead men, or live men.
ultimately, it’s goodsir who makes the definitive play, goodsir who goes toe to toe with hickey, albeit posthumously. and in the middle of these two opposites is tuunbaq, a creature meant to balance the scales. francis crozier is not the hero of the story, though by awareness of his guilt, he certainly exhibits heroism in an attempt to atone for his mistakes. we can’t forget that this is a story about colonialism. hickey does not die because he is evil, he dies because he was presumptuous enough to try to claim something to which he had no right. francis is not the indomitable force of self-interest that hickey was, nor is he, like goodsir, an example of the equally powerful, equally human desire to wonder at the unknown. he is not like sir john or fitzjames either, who are men of the empire through and through, in it because they have something to prove to a “Society” that is often petty and cruel (fitzjames lives long enough to recognize it as vanity).
francis’s role is to witness. he is a deeply flawed man, but he knows it, and he takes responsibility for it. he kills tuunbaq, and he recognizes that he has killed something important and irreplaceable. i think he stays behind to remember, no matter how painful the remembrance is. and silna is out there too somewhere, remembering, the only other person who knows what happened, who could possibly understand. they are the series’ memory.
francis’s misdirection at the end of the episode will buy some time, but we know, and he knows, of the boundlessness of greed and the curiosity of men.
and tuunbaq, the equalizer, is dead—dead because francis killed it.
it’s only a matter of time before many other important and irreplaceable things are discovered, misunderstood, exploited, killed. there is a helplessness in francis and silna’s situations, a loneliness that comes at the end of a story full of isolation and impending doom. but there has also been friendship, and courage, and brotherhood… along with hubris and cold-blooded cruelty. francis and silna have the strength to acknowledge both sides equally, and in the end, i think we’re meant to as well.
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
snowghoul
kaledo-art
gummygunk
titsay
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
