@amisssunbeam

When he tells Silna “for trade”, that’s where it all begins to come donw. 

By that point in the series, I already liked Goodsir, but his first scene with Silna was when I began to really care for him.  He, alone, made the effort, however clumsy, to approach her as a human being; was just aware enough to feel that something was wrong, that what the expedition was doing was wrong, that they’d fucked up collectively, not just Hickey, individually, by kidnapping Silna, but he didn’t have the perspective necessary to go further than that.  Goodsir is a product of his environment, he’s not blameless, but he is, in a fundamental sense, innocent- not because he’s inexperienced or incorruptible, but because he’s missing the pieces that bridge the gap from ignorance to understanding.  The difference between someone like him and someone like Hickey is that old original sin, awareness of doing wrong; the ability to question and decide for oneself, based on one’s own experiences and ideas.  Hickey knows that some of the things he does are wrong, but his experiences have made necessary to reconcile himself to surviving at the expense of morality; Hickey’s essentially amoral.  Goodsir can’t separate himself from morality, from the worldview, the society that made them; he is morality, Victorian society.  Victorian society isn’t Sir John, or James, authority figures, or even Hickey, all of them damaged and hardened by it, but this gentle, interested, curious man whom we know to be utterly doomed*, the least likely victim of a system that’s only cared for him, the victim we don’t want.  But that’s the nature of tragedy, and the British Empire, its scope, its aims, its actions, is a tragedy, and tragedy doesn’t care what you want.

So, anyway, I drove Goodsir to the hospital, and he was fine.

* They’re all doomed; we know that much from the beginning.  Goodsir’s death is painful, though, in a way that no other death, save Jopson’s, approaches.  Goodsir goes to his death furious, disgraced, betrayed, used and ridiculed, stripped of everything he thought he knew about the world and himself, left only with the bitterness and cruelty he’d up to that point rejected.  The narrative doesn’t judge him, tries to comfort him, tries to comfort us, but that doesn’t change the fact that Goodsir’s death is just wrong.  It shouldn’t have been that way.

Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry

What I think connects the deaths of Jopson and Goodsir in a particular kind of horror is betrayal.  Of all the pain on The Terror, that of betrayal is shown to have the greatest destructive potential; the greatest force for movement, in either direction.  Sir John’s betrayal of Francis, his constant whittling down of Francis to Francis’ defects, real and perceived, makes Francis sink even deeper into self-loathing until he no longer cares whether any of them live or die.  Hickey’s betrayed several times over, and while the men are already wretched by the time he gets around to taking his revenge, the violence and degradation he subjects them to/induces them to participate in is beyond what they’ve already suffered and could have imagined.  Conversely, James’ forgiving of Francis’ betrayal of him, Francis striking him and taking away both their dignity, allows them both to gain self-acceptance, to love each other, trust each other and work together.  These are easily named and understood, belonging to the logic of life. 
There’s no logic in death, least of all, in Jopson’s.  Sick and in pain, Jopson hallucinates Francis abandoning him, when Francis would never leave Jopson, not in life or in death, if he weren’t being held against his will.  We understand that, and so would Jopson, if he were in his right mind and in possession of the facts.  That it’s an illusory betrayal doesn’t make it less real.  Jopson feels it as though it were real, and spends his last moments convinced he’s been forsaken, reaching for Francis not in hope of help or comfort, but beyond these, reaching for Francis for Francis’ sake.  Whatever Francis is to Jopson*, it’s something vital, the loss is visceral, horrifying, without reason, and Jopson can’t survive it.
The betrayal Goodsir experiences is equally lacking in reason; another abandonment.  Goodsir’s belief in the British empire is not in an economic and cultural force, the acquisition of territory and knowledge, but in a kind of protective goodness, like a parent’s love.  It’s unconditional, until Goodsir begins to feel it slip away**.  Hence his inability to cope with his own moral failures, and his total break-down after Hodgson’s apologia, the muddling of the profane and sacred by an unbalanced mind, or self-serving varnish after the fact to cover Hodgson’s embrace of the bestial.  Either way, if Hodgson, an officer, has sunk this low, it’s further evidence that none of them are any longer what they were supposed to be.  Yet, Goodsir has learned too much to save himself with the logical assumption that it’s separation from Great Britain, geographical separation from the source of grace, that’s making them this way.  For a time, he tries, protesting to Silna, “people there [in England] are good”, but that soon fails him; whatever they had of home has left them.  One sees Goodsir approaching the inevitable conclusion that perhaps it was never there at all. 
Then comes Goodsir’s own treachery, a man allowing himself to become an animal to be butchered for sustenance, and that sustenance concealing death.  It’s the empire’s betrayal turned back on itself, the knowing and willful contradiction of its supposed civilization, Goodsir metaphorically biting the hand that fed him.  Yet, he can’t betray without betraying himself, giving up what was good about him, rooted in his connection to his home, the hope that there was still a home for him to return to.  “I will not leave this camp,” he tells Francis, both a statement of intent and a capitulation to fate.  The punishment for both his betrayal of his ideals and his awareness that his ideals have betrayed him, is that Goodsir can never return to ignorance, can never go home again.

* A popular reading of their relationship is strictly quasi-familial, but I find more interesting the lack of boundaries between them, the erasure of both the limits imposed by society and by time, Francis simultaneously Jopson’s mother, his father, his son, his husband, his master, his employer, his penitent; Jopson, Francis’ son, mother, enabler, wife, servant, priest, nursemaid.  The more entangled they are, the less intelligible their relationship is, the more Jopson’s anguish makes sense.  Francis is part of him.  What part or parts, I’m not sure we’re meant to know.

** I think of the exchange in “Deadwood” between the Reverend Smith and Jane.  The reverend, suffering the physiological and psychological effects of a brain tumor, says that when he prays, he no longer feels God’s presence.  Jane retorts, “Well, join the fucking club of most of us!”