Carrying on a bit from my previous post:
The Terror is not a story of if people die, it is a story of how people die. That is clear from how the story is structured from the very beginning. Therefore it is not a story of how the choices made damn the people involved to a gruesome death. They were already damned. It is instead a story of how choices are made within the context of the damned.
So I would like to propose a different context for the argument between Franklin and Crozier in “Go for Broke”, one that takes into account the historical context. (Leave aside that the rest of the show, by adhering to the “standard narrative” of the Victory Point note being indicative of a great walk south towards rescue, disregards said historical context. The writers were stuck with that.)
We usually characterize this argument – to go east (Crozier) or west (Franklin) – as the choice that doomed the expedition. It was Franklin’s hubris that damned them all, etc. But I don’t think this is the right context. The argument they are having is how to go around King William Island: east through James Ross Straight, or west through Victoria Straight. That means they have already sailed through Peel Straight by the time we meet them and watch them have this argument. And that means they are already doomed.
The reality is this: Peel Straight was unusually free of ice, and they sailed through it, south to King William Land (which they actually had good reason, although no direct evidence, to believe was an island!). This is the choice that damned them. They then had a choice to sail east or west, and neither was passable. East, through James Ross Straight, was too shallow and full of shoals for ships the size of Erebus and Terror. West, through Victoria Straight, was well known to be filled with ice during almost all of the year (from the memoirs of one James Clark Ross and his overland trek during the expedition under John Ross with one F.R.M. Crozier) and had a high likelihood of freezing them in. There is, in fact, evidence that they tried to go through James Ross Straight, foundered, and had to turn around. So, at this point, they were fucked. They were stuck in a land that could not support them, and they had no way to escape. They could not sail north – Peel Straight had frozen behind them, and would not be free of ice again for ten years. When JCR showed up to rescue them, he saw the very frozen Peel Straight at pretty much the exact time of year that the Franklin Expedition had happened upon it, said “no way!”, which was a very reasonable thing to think, and went off looking in the wrong direction. They could not sail east, or west. They were already damned.
The Terror removes men’s choices from the damning of them. No choice made after Franklin and Crozier’s argument has any effect on their ultimate end: they are all going to die. But the writers knew how the real story likely played out, and I think making the argument about exactly what it was about – James Ross Straight or Victoria Straight – was intentional. That fictional argument could have been placed earlier, perhaps about sailing down Peel Straight itself. That argument would have been one that could have ultimately made a difference. But instead they chose to make it about James Ross Straight or Victoria Straight, an argument that ultimately had no meaning. No choice, made during the duration of the show, changes their ultimate end. They are all going to die.
And that is what allows the story to be about how they die.
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