I will always mourn how little McDonald we got in the show, though I understand why for the sake of time and not crowding the narrative too much. But if his background as an Arctic veteran featured more prominently it could have added so much to his character as well as his relationships to the other characters. like the whole reason show!McDonald is promoted to head surgeon on Terror rather than being assistant surgeon like he was in the real expedition is because Dave K wanted to include his background of having previously gone to the Arctic, meeting the Inuk guide Inuluapik and writing his biography, being familiar with Inuktitut language. We get the duo of Crozier and Blanky as long time friends and veterans of the Arctic pretty prominently, but having McDonald be the third part of the triad they form was something I always wanted more of. And the fact that he is othered by his Scottishness, as well as his status as surgeon, there's lots of parallels to be drawn to both Crozier (his Irishness, having the leadership role of captain yet being continuously undermined in his authority by his background and lack of connections) and Blanky (he has some status due to his knowledge and rank of ice master, but he's not an officer and is wholly alienated from the world of leadership by his working class background and being enlisted rather than commissioned). I would have liked to see a scene of the three of them gathered in Crozier's wardroom exchanging anecdotes about their various expeditions and adventures. I would have liked to actually see McDonald telling Goodsir about his time with Inuluapik and his first time in the Arctic.
Hi! You seem like the right person to ask: what is the word Silna uses that gets heard as “huk-kah-hoi” and translated as “disappear”?
This is something I've wondered too, so I'll give you my best speculations! As a non-fluent L2 speaker of Iñupiatun I'm limited in my knowledge and by my dictionaries, so if anyone wiser ever corrects or clarifies anything I say here, I'd be most grateful! Iñupiatun is not Natchiliŋmiutut!
The Terror scripts really saved me here. Note that when referencing the scripts, the Natchiliŋmiutut orthography therein is nonstandard; e.g. the Natchiliŋmiutut letter ř is rendered indistinguishable from r, š from s, and y and j are both used, perhaps interchangeably, etc.
The line is scripted:
LADY SILENCE (20) (CONT'D)
If you do not leave now, you will disappear.
Tarvauruq aulanngikkuvhi, huqaruirniaqtuhi.
The word is repeated in what I guess to be a Qikiqtaaluk dialect in the scripted line:
CROZIER (21)
She says if we do not leave now, we are going to--
susqaruisinnarniaqtugut.
"We (plural) will disappear."
This was replaced onscreen with "huk-kah-hoi."
To correct Silna's scripted line as best I know (and to use the letter ŋ), it might be written:
Tařvauřuq aullaŋŋikkuvhi, huqaruirniaqtuhi.
With comparison, I believe that the single l in aullaq- "to depart/leave" and the second s in Crozier's line are typos (though may be mistaken); "suqaruisinnarniaqtugut" might be right, or the q may have been meant to be geminated: "suqqaruisinnarniaqtugut." Is there also a missing q in there? "Suqaruiqsinnarniaqtugut" maybe? I'm not sure, but there does seem to be a phonologically assimilated q in huqaruiq+niaq. Many postbases will drop a preceding consonant.
"Huk-kah-hoi" seems to correlate to huqaruiq- with a dropped final q (that is dropped due to Crozier not hearing it, rather than a postbase).
Hu(-) is a noun and verb stem and an interrogative pronoun meaning "what" or "to be what;" kina "who" is not in the 2023 Hadlari and Ikajuqtigiit Natchiliŋmiutut dictionary, which instead lists huna as "who;" it may not have the su/suna versus kiña "what vs. who" distinction that Iñupiatun does, but I can't find a handy source that explicitly states this.
The noun-to-verb postbase -qaq- means "to have/possess," and in Natchiliŋmiutut -qaq- can also mean "there is/there are." Therefore: huqaq- "to have what/something"/"to be there what/something/someone."
+ruiq- may be made from the +ruk- "to want/to crave/to feel the physical need for" postbase as seen in imirukpit "do you (sg.) want/need water," or it may be a form of the +huk- "to feel/experience" postbase that isn't cited on tuhaalaŋa.ca. If that r is actually an ř that's deleting the q, I don't know what it might be. And then the -iq- postbase means "to no longer," which sounds the same as in Iñupiatun piiq- "to vanish"/"to die" etc.
One thing you need to realize about George Hodgson is that he gives off the most Erebus “popular kid” energy among the Terror lieutenants.
Yes, he looks like a brittle, funny-looking blond twink and all, but he’s the only one of the Terror lieutenants who actually led a party to find leads (the other two being Gore and Le Vesconte). He’s also the one who fires up Tuunbaq while Blanky is out there doing backflips on the mast.
He’s easily the most aggressive compared to Little and Irving, who are never shown firing arms. Hodgson went to war like Fitzjames, Gore, Le Vesconte, and Des Voeux (which is not a good thing). He gives the order to kill a Native family (which is worse).
I think this is one of the reasons Hickey chose Hodgson as his Lieutenant Mascot — he knew Hodgson had a record of violence and the ability to act. That, and the fact he was on the Terror with him. Little did Hickey know about Le Vesconte.
When he says he isn’t fit for command, it’s not because he’s a brittle twink who only cares about playing the clavier and sipping tea from fine cups. He knows he isn’t cut out for it because he keeps making bad decisions, relying only on the skills and experience he already has. He is very aware of himself in many instances.
The contradiction between his appearance and how he presents as a character, versus his actual actions, is exactly what will make me a Hodge fan forever.
The thing is, it doesn't make sense. Thomas Jopson is a tailor's son from central London. Why would he have grown up hunting for his dinner? Where would he have done it, and what would he have caught?
I've got four possible answers, some of which contradict each other, and some of which don't.
Answer 1 - Some ways it could happen
The Terror leaves plenty of room for speculation and adding on one's own personal headcanons. Even the backstory I cited above isn't exactly canon, strictly speaking. Thomas mentions Marylebone (his historical counterpart's place of birth) while caring for Crozier, and he has a London accent that becomes more pronounced as the series goes on. Beyond that, we are not explicitly told anything further of his origins.
Perhaps he spent some part of his childhood in the countryside. Perhaps his family started off living somewhere rural and moved into the city later on, or vice versa. Perhaps he was sent to live with relatives for a while. One scenario I quite like to imagine is that Jopson learned from his father. The dates just about line up to allow for Jopson's father to be a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars - a man who might have brought his rifle home with him and found some value in using it to supplement his family's dinners with meat that only costs him in time and ammunition.
Hampstead Heath is an hour's walk from Marylebone, and was more rural in those days; perhaps Jopson and his father could have gone there to catch rabbits and ducks. (Hampstead Heath would later become infamous as a gay cruising spot, which adds another layer onto the thought of Jopson heading up to the heath with a rifle… for sport, or as a handy excuse and/or last resort if caught?)
Answer 2 - He's lying
Never discount the possibility that a character might not be telling the truth!
Jopson clearly does know how to use a rifle, as we see him loading one with evident confidence during the Tuunbaq attack in episode 8, but did everything he ate growing up really come from hunting? Probably not.
Even with the possible explanations above, it makes a lot more sense to me if you assume Jopson is exaggerating for effect. What he wants in this moment is to convince Hickey that he knows exactly what to do with the weapon in his hands. Does it matter all that much if hunting was actually something he only did occasionally? Jopson may see himself as a far better man than Hickey, but I don't think he's above bending the truth when it suits his needs.
Answer 3 - The writers needed to find an explanation for why Jopson knows how to use a rifle
I feel like fandoms in general often find Doylist explanations less satisfying than Watsonian ones; or rather, if you're not familiar with the jargon, we prefer to find ways to make things work within the fictional universe, rather than accepting that something is that way because it suited the writers' needs.
The simplest explanation is the dullest one. It serves the story to have Jopson know how to use a rifle, but it's not a skill he would have learned as an AB or steward, so a couple of lines of backstory are inserted to explain it. The backstory slightly contradicts other things we know about him, but fuck it, who will notice? Only those obsessive weirdos on Tumblr!
But wait… why does it serve the story that a steward knows how to shoot?
Answer 4 - It adds another dimension to the character
Bluntly speaking, it gives him some of his masculinity back.
The stewards are placed in an unusual position within the ship's hierarchy. They perform feminine-coded, domestic labour in a men-only environment. I don't think it's a coincidence that two out of four characters explicitly depicted as queer in canon are stewards; even today, the role of stewards (eg. as flight attendants and on cruise ships) is a profession with a disproportionate number of gay men. Each steward character of significance deals with this tension between their role and their masculinity slightly differently.
As for Jopson, he's somewhere between Armitage and Bridgens. Like Bridgens, he is a caregiver, and has explicitly done it before. Caregiving is heavily gendered even in the present day; the average woman is much more likely to end up with caring obligations than the average man, be it for children or parents. It's really unusual to see male carers depicted in fiction.
Armitage rejects the suggestion of femininity. He wanted to be a marine, and by the end of the series, is wielding a rifle and acting as the most dedicated foot soldier of the mutineers.
Bridgens is unconcerned by it. He embraces a role of care and nurture, moving from being a steward to something like a nurse.
Gibson is ambivalent. At times he is feminised, characterised by Hickey as a 'wife'; at times he rejects this, reasserting himself as a man. He leaves behind his steward's role when he mutinies, but does not take up the role of guard.
At the same time, however, Jopson is not feminine. While Terror's leadership singularly fail to live up to the Victorian ideal of stoic masculinity, Jopson remains unerringly calm in a crisis. His ability to be gentle and compassionate does not make him cowardly or weak. In the tent scene, Hickey tries to gain the upper hand by speculating that Jopson doesn't know how to shoot; in turn, Jopson reaffirms his masculinity by confirming that he is, in fact, quite capable of violence when required.
There's layers upon layers in that. The tension between two working class men with very different views regarding authority and hierarchy in general and their current leaders in particular. Hickey, a canonically queer man, regarding Jopson (sexuality unspecified but arguably ambiguous) as less of a man than him because of his subservient role. Jopson, an unquestioning servant of empire, feeling superior to Hickey because his capacity for violence is precise, controlled and (in his head) justified, unlike Hickey's impulsive, 'savage' anger.
This is one of the things I really love about The Terror, the way you can dig so much meaning out of the smallest moments. It's a single line of dialogue and it doesn't quite make sense - but it doesn't quite make sense in a really interesting way.
Forgiveness--and lack thereof--as a core theme of the Terror.
Goodsir's last words to Silna are 'I'm sorry'. He kills himself with clinical precision in order to poison the entire mutineers' camp, save for Francis. Francis on the other hand would save Diggle and Hodgson from that fate (though not the others).
Francis says I forgive them all and I don't think it's because he is blind to his men's faults, but rather because he fell and it was Blanky's forgiveness, his refusal to condemn Francis for the loss of his leg, which gave him the strength to go sober. So he forgives his men--crucially with the exception of Hickey--because he is in no place to judge and because if he can do that, with their mutiny and cannibalism and desire to leave the sick behind, and if he can get them home, maybe, just maybe, he can extend the same forgiveness to himself. 'Do you include yourself in that forgiveness?' Hickey asks with startling clarity and Francis replies 'I won't know until the end.'
The Inuit forgive Francis for killing the Tuunbaq but not Silna. Or perhaps they don't forgive him but let him stay and forgive her but have her banished--does the distinction matter? Francis and James forgive one another but if they have a conversation about it, we are not privy to it--and of course, like everything else, it happens too late.
Through it all, the show asks one key question on this I think: do we forgive them for being the overreaching arm of the Empire in the flesh? They are each one of them products of their time, and yet each one of them his own person. We are shown their compassion and kindness, even at the end of all things, and their cruelty; their grisly ends and the destruction they wreak upon the land. Are we even in a position to forgive them? Was Francis? There are no easy answers.
a lot of monster media has a hard time with balancing making their monster incredibly dangerous but also keeping the most important characters alive without it seeming like obvious plot armour
but i think the terror does a really great job--not just because they do allow it to kill a number of important characters, but because of the composition of the two scenes where tuunbaq is beaten
the first, in ep 5, is when tuunbaq chases blanky up the foremast, which, on the surface, seems like a very obvious case of plot armour. tuunbaq kills several other crewmen with incredible ease in that very same scene, but then blanky is spared long enough to escape from it, simply because he's an important character.
but that's not what's going on there. all of the easy deaths, so far, prior to this, have occurred on tuunbaq's territory. on flat ground, on the ice, and now tuunbaq is staking its claim on terror. but terror is still occupied, and blanky, especially, is a man who is more at home on a ship than land. tuunbaq is beaten, here, because blanky is playing with a home turf advantage. blanky does have armour, but it's not because he's an important character--it's because tuunbaq has invaded the space where he's most comfortable, and so he goes up, to where he knows a bear can still follow him, but it'll be exposed, and too heavy to follow him all the way.
and this show has done a great job of setting the stakes, already, by this point--the first time i watched this scene, even though blanky was so far surviving the confrontation, i was incredibly sure that he wasn't going to make it out. i thought for certain that he was going to have to sacrifice himself in order for them to hit tuunbaq with the cannon, and so it was deeply satisfying when he actually survived. i was so fucking happy, because i was already starting to get sad about him being dead, even though he wasn't dead yet, lol. it feels earned, when he makes it out, and fair enough that he loses a leg in the process, too.
the second, in the final episode, is i think a bit more obvious, and considering how many other major characters get torn apart, it doesn't feel quite so much like crozier has plot armour. but tuunbaq is once again beaten by using the things that are not native to its land, that tuunbaq isn't designed to deal with. the sick and poisoned flesh of the seamen it's already consumed, for one, and then the boat chain.
and, for the second time, in order to beat tuunbaq, a limb must be sacrificed--crozier's hand, i think, counts, even though he loses it after the confrontation is long over, because blanky only loses his leg properly after the fact as well. and i think this can be brought around to how tuunbaq's shaman must remove their own tongue to communicate with it--if one wishes to have any sort of dominance over tuunbaq, a part of their body must be given in exchange. silna and her father give their tongues, blanky gives his leg, and crozier gives his hand.
and it is emphasized through hickey's failure that tuunbaq cannot be controlled by the expeditioners. the colonizers. it can be beaten back, and suppressed, and killed, through sacrifice, but it cannot be harnessed. it belongs to silna's people, to the inuit, and cannot truly be taken away. the only way to beat it is by invading its home with foreign powers and losing something of yourself in the process.
tl;dr thomas blanky doesn't need plot armour because he's just that good /silly and also this show is just. awesome.
self-indulgent james fitzjames genderqueer meta below the cut
as much as I love and respect the trans woman james fitzjames headcanon, I've recently been thinking about femininity as a fantasy jfj indulges in during times of duress rather than a path in life he would be happy pursuing. while he's flamboyant to be sure, and definitely enjoyed the sight of himself in that dress and the experience of being lady britannia, imo fitzjames would quickly become disillusioned with victorian british femininity if he ever lived within its strictures. this is a man who traveled the world, fought in imperial wars on the side of empire, served as a gunnery lieutenant in the royal navy, fired a congreve rocket at a leviathan polar bear — that's not to say women aren't capable of the same adventurous and daring spirit, they obviously are, but the equivalent lifestyle and expected behavior for a woman of fitzjames' social standing in victorian britain was highly restricted and proscribed in a way I think he would immediately chafe against, as a person who lived the life he did.
(for a point of contrast, it's interesting to read about how jane franklin was perceived in her lifetime, and how her travels even as the respectable wife of a colonial governor were looked down upon by british society. this isn't an apologia for jane franklin, she was a colonizer and a racist, but rather an interesting look into how two people with adventurous spirits — i.e. james fitzjames and jane franklin — were perceived very differently due to the gendered expectations of victorian britain/northwest europe.)
anyway it's interesting to think of femininity as a fantasy for fitzjames, who as a man raised in the context of patriarchal british imperial culture likely thinks of femininity through a patriarchal lens: a state of being led rather than leading, passive rather than active. in a situation where he is pressured to lead, a task that he doubts his ability to complete, retreating into a fantasy of passive femininity might be tempting, a sort of escapism that serves him in specific contexts but would ultimately be contradictory to his nature if he attempted to live it 24/7 in mid-nineteenth century britain.
of course that says nothing about what he would or wouldn't do if he lived in 2025 and had the opportunity to experience a more liberated femininity, but in my own canon-era writing I think of james fitting into a more fluid genderqueer space where fluidity is something to be explored in specific circumscribed settings rather than as a lifestyle or something he would like to pursue full-time. obviously all headcanons are valid and fans have done truly lovely work with mtf jfj fanworks, but I still think it's interesting to consider other ways of interpreting the fitzgender of it all, especially within the context of historical gender roles and gender within empire
One fascinating thing about "You Must Unload" is how thematically relevant it is for all the characters on the show, especially Irving himself. The Terror is a story about progressively giving things up and leaving things behind, what you choose to unload and when. (Boats? Curtain rods? Books? Your only clothing, useless in this cold weather? Your only food, poisoned? Your only companions, sick and dying and unable to walk?) Trying in vain to haul things with you that you cannot carry, both metaphorically and literally.
And Irving is at the center of all of it. As discussed in this post, after Crozier declares at Carnivale that they will abandon the ships, Irving stops referencing religion, a turning point for his character. And he is the one call "Forward, men!", the final decision to leave everything they've known behind. You must unload!
He is also the one whose reaction we focus on when Crozier tells them that even the food they're carrying with them is killing them. Which makes sense, of course: Irving is the one we have seen keeping careful inventory of these supplies, trying to make them last as long as possible. Revealed to have been a futile effort the entire time. You must unload!
And then finally, he goes on the hunting trip, making the call first to split off into a smaller party, then to go all alone to meet the Netsilik. At last, he gives up his spyglass, the only prized possession he has left, something stated textually in the book and implied in the show to be important to him personally. And at the same time, he gives up the symbols of his imperialist existence: rank, class, national identity, all of it, because these things have, quite literally, no meaning in this situation. He's left with nothing but his Christian name.
And when he goes back to try to bring the rest of the expedition with him to salvation, that's what kills him. You must unload!
