Thinking about when Dave K said that he has “come to love the characters who aren’t victorious, that don’t necessarily rise to the challenge — the Hodgsons and the Littles — and I just find them really interesting and moving to kind of watch them as they sort of fail”, and The Hodgson Failson Problem.

Hodgson’s speech to Goodsir in 1x09 confirms to me that he has almost returned to a second childhood. I think of all the characters that episode he is most shown as being stuck in the past, a past order, a past life. Eating apart from Hickey’s mutineers on his fancy china with fork and knife like he’s still a Lieutenant, recalling the Virginian ham, recalling that childhood summer with his Catholic aunts. When he’s telling Goodsir about the wafer and wine and he says, “I felt forgiven of every poor, weak, or selfish thing within my soul” (Christos Lawson hits the tear drop at exactly this note; handshake with Tobias Menzies for great timing) – he’s talking about how he knows himself to be now, his conduct through this entire crisis; poor, weak, and selfish. He wants to go back to childhood. To feel faultless again. It’s this very Hodgson characteristic you see in 1x08 as well, when he’s whining at Little, wanting reassurance that he did the right thing by ordering the slaughter of a Netsilik group based on Hickey’s flimsy say-so. Little does not offer him absolution – he tells Hodgson, “If [your instinct and your training] told you to proceed with what you ordered...then be easy with yourself.” Hodgson can’t have that, and has to follow up with the hysterical story about Native Americans. Come on, I told you about the scary Native Americans, won’t you reassure me now?

(My hunch is that even if he got the absolution he so wanted, he’d cringe away from it, he wouldn’t believe it – the giveaway is in the story [he never went back to Mass]. Just enough self-delusion to spin justifications around his missteps, just enough self-awareness that they don’t do the trick.)

I couldn’t tell if Goodsir was moved by “I’m hungry, and I want to live.” (I always am.) The problem with that line, which on first viewing made me ask myself, “Did Hodgson just make cannibalism … ennobling?”, is how hollow it is. Gibson’s flesh and blood, ill-gotten through murder, does not compare to the strange and illicit but ultimately beautiful Catholic communion that Hodgson so badly wants it to be. (That would be Fitzjames’s flesh and blood; he calls himself Christ on his deathbed, and offers his body to his men freely, even if they don't take him up on it.) The way those men try to survive is not ennobling. Hickey was right. It is a nasty piece of business. I’m thinking of the other small and big cruelties that go on in Hickey’s camp (the way Des Voeux shot Hartnell though Hartnell was lowering his gun, the way at the start of 1x10 Crozier is bleeding from his forehead and nose without explanation). I wouldn’t be surprised if Goodsir was moved by that telling. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if he was bored out of his mind.