@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!”

This whole section of Memory Alpha’s article on Distant Voices lives in my head rent free. 

the more you watch the terror the more it's like wow. there was literally no way out. like we know they're ghosts from the beginning but it's fascinating how much nothing any of them did or could have done mattered. everyone is dead from the start — the events of the story are the last of their lives. as crozier says at the very start, no one knows where they are. the narrative itself refrains from making moral judgements on the characters. characters who do good things are not necessarily rewarded nor do characters who do bad things necessarily receive punishment. yet it everything they do does matter!! A lot in fact!!!

when these men reach the end of their lives, as they all die slowly and in varyingly painful ways, they reach out to each other. there's obviously the pairs — the tenderness of the last days bridgens and peglar have together, the care and respect with which crozier and francis interact with each other. but there's also crozier comforting tom hartnell as he dies, telling goodsir he's clean, saying that he knows magnus is a good boy. there's silna's incredible kindness in going to comfort goodsir after morfin's death despite all that she's suffered. there's the joy on fitzjames and the lieutenants' faces when jopson receives his promotion, even as their bodies are visibly decaying. there's goodsir listening to collins even though he cant solve the problem of the tins, and even his final caress of gibson's face as he dies.

looking at these actions through a utilitarian lens, they do not matter. they are nothing in the path of the spectre of death, and theyre certainly nothing in the face of the gaping maw of empire consuming them. but these acts of kindness are not trying to make a big point or a lasting impression on the world. they only exist as exactly what they are — small moments of goodness in the face of the void. they dont change anything, but each individual (both the giver and the receiver) is undeniably the better for having experienced them, reaffirming their humanity even while literally experiencing oblivion.

The entire form of The Terror revolves around transformative works.  I’ve said before that Lady Jane and Sophia read to me as fans.  Barred from the act of creating the officially recognized product- they can’t join the Royal Navy, cos they’re girls- they still interact with it, know the canon backward and forward, and their reading of the text is more astute than that of those writing it, the Admiralty.  When told that their participation isn’t wanted, they form their own, parallel narrative, which is, in fact, a literal narrative, pitched by Lady Jane like a serialized story to which patrons can subscribe as they help to determine its progression, endorsed by no less than Charles Dickens.  Lady Jane and Sophia aren’t even an anomaly, the distinction between creator and audience, canon and fan works, barely a distinction at all.  Sir John Franklin, James Fitzjames, James Clark Ross to an extent, are living men who exist both as themselves and the narratives built around them.  We see one such meeting of subject-author and reader-author in “Go For Broke”, when Francis and James Clark Ross view the tableau vivant of their Antarctic expedition, the transformative work having condensed and sanitized real life, rendered it in broad symbols, tailored to the constraints of the format and the taste of the audience.  Bridgens and Peglar understand the porousness of narrative, that the story can be entered, and potentially, changed.  It’s strongly implied that Goodsir, having read Dr. MacDonald’s journals, patterns himself after the man he’s read about, a real person whom Harry knows, but also a creation of the written word, a fictionalized version of himself.  It’s also strongly implied that Goodsir keeps a journal, himself, concerning his meetings with Silna, both scientific document and, in form and reception, an epistemological pastiche, a piece of self-insert fan fiction.
What separates Hickey from the others is awareness.  Lady Jane understands the power of narrative, the marketing and selling of dreams, but these are separate from her, a means to an end in achieving a private, personal goal.  Francis Crozier, the man couldn’t be further from Francis Crozier, the story-symbol available to the public.  Nor could Sir John.  Nor could, as we learn, James Fitzjames, though James, presented to us early on as an over-hyped figure, author of what we might call James Fitzjames fan fiction, compulsively tooting his own horn, comes the closest to seamlessly merging self-constructed narrative and living, pulsing human experience.  It’s not the story, but the way you tell it.  Eventually, James tires of the burden of narrative, and asks Francis for permission to lay it down.  Hickey, however, can’t lay it down. 
Hickey isn’t in a story about Hickey.  Hickey is a story about Hickey.  At a certain point, he became aware of himself as a player, within a play, that someone was writing the thing, so it might as well be him.  His moments of greatest joy, when he comes totally, defiantly and incandescently alive, are in performance.  He’s a provocateur, placing himself at the center of a class drama.  He’s a ‘devious seducer’, a term that seems to tickle as much as annoy him.  He’s a character in a farce, as Irving enumerates with increasing desperation an increasingly unlikely catalogue of distractions against lust.  He’s a magician, and a gambler, making it up as he goes along, failing to convince Francis of his merit, but succeeding in what was probably his secondary goal, misdirection; keeping Francis from discovering Armitage’s part in kidnapping Silna.  Initially, Hickey has as many failures as successes, his performances broad and shabby.  No one’s particularly bothered by Neptune being pampered.  Gibson doesn’t believe a word he says.  Irving lashes out at him.  Francis has him lashed.
Yet, a curious thing happens round about “A Mercy”.  Hickey suddenly gains credibility, as a performer and as an author.  The rational narrative, that set out by Victorian society, dissolving around them, ceding to an Arctic narrative that none of them can read or predict, the men cast about, even unconsciously, for rescue.  Hickey only truly becomes dangerous once his narrative becomes attractive, with its tacit possibility of the other men writing their own stories, separate from the dominant one, shaped by but not reliant upon it.  Yet, Hickey’s stepped completely out of the pre-existing narrative, and has been writing, for some time, a story that has nothing to do with it.  It’s a story not about Victorian England, or the Royal Navy, or even those around him.  It’s a story called Cornelius Hickey, the title lifted from another work, half pastiche and half deconstruction, built from within.  A story that knows itself.  Hickey left the confines of linear narrative, dipping into past, present and future*, into other stories, which don’t belong to him; less a piece of writing than a collage, a cut-up.  Shaping the narrative in an increasingly claustrophobic sphere around the other men, he’s removed himself totally from it and taken up residence full time outside, wholly an author, a collage artist, no longer stage directing his fellow actors, but cutting and pasting men’s lives, the forces of nature.  Until, finally, the original narrative, now a merger of England and the Arctic, the collective pressures of both, exhausted and bloated and poisoned and wounded, turns on its would-be author, reclaiming reason, causality, time, space, death, termination.  The end.

* This happens, I think, at the crucial moment of the carnival, when Hickey reshapes the narrative by cutting through the tent, freeing the men trapped inside.  Hickey cheats death, but it’s only putting off the inevitable, the I.O.U. punctuated by Dr. MacDonald’s ruptured body.  Sometimes, when you cut the present, the future leaks out.

In Silna, we find the other half of the purpose of transformative works, not spatial, parallel, the ‘what’s happening over there/under there’, but temporal.  “What happens next?”  She’s sent into exile, which we understand is a death- the death of community, the death of identity as a member of the community, the death of narrative continuity*- but it’s not the death.  Francis continuing to live shows us as much, through reflection, through negative space.  We know what happens to Francis.  What happens to Silna?
We don’t know, and while that not-knowing is sad, disturbing, it’s a space.  Not a negative space, because it’s not formed in reaction.  It’s waiting to be filled in, as every story is, potentially, after the last page, after the credits roll.  Transformative works allow for the continuation of the story, when you don’t want to leave it, when you’re not done with it, or it’s not done with you.  The narrative of The Terror and Silna have finished with each other, but Silna has her own story.  The fear is in the unknown: what will become of her.  Separated from her original context, who is she, who will she be?  Again, canon provides if not hope, the stuff to build hope on.  She loses her ability to speak, but not her ability to communicate.  She’s an artist, we see her drawings and carvings.  She has an interest in communicating, not only to relay relevant information, but for its own sake; to express her emotions, her sense of aesthetics.  Her story has ceased to be informational, so now, it can become something else, informed by Silna’s still-changing inner world.  Silna, in this sense, comes to resemble another kind of fan.  With Sophia and Lady Jane, we find the creation of the parallel narrative, the ‘missing scene’ or the character study.  With Silna, we find the post-canon story.  We can go with her, if we choose; if we want to know more, if we want to imagine more, if we just like her, and don’t want our time with her to be over.

* “I don’t exist when you don’t see me.”

genuinely one of the best parts of the terror is that the characters all have bad qualities. and i dont mean make mistakes i mean there are genuinely parts of their personalities that one would find annoying or upsetting or off putting. characters are often allowed to make mistakes, mistakes that hurt other people badly even, but so often those mistakes are driven by a good aspect of their character or at the very least a neutral one. but in the terror it isnt just their mistakes that mar characters but their personalities. francis’ anger and isolation leads him to make mistakes, but it is also undeniably something inherent within him, as it does not fall away even after he starts actively captaining and caring. fitzjames is often vain and too focused on others opinions — traits that both help and harm in equal measures, making him appear to both francis and the audience as fake, but allowing him to ask blanky the right questions about morale. silna* (though this is all through the lens of her being rightfully scared) is bad at her job and desperate for a guiding hand to the point of inaction. blanky’s relentless joie de vivre is a joy to watch but would absolutely be wearing to live with. jopson is so loyal that he endangers the crew by his enablement of crozier, and can even be outright hostile when they dont respect him. goodsir, the most obvious character to place our affections on, is shown to both have the ability to be mean (one could argue even cruel with his ‘i suspect when that happens sleep will be near impossible’ line) and to be stuck in his rigid, victorian worldview. it adds realism obviously but it also makes the audience contend with the nasty bits of the story in delightful and interesting ways.

*i want to note that silna cant be judged through the same lens of imperialist victorian britain as the others but i wanted to include her since it’s a reduction of her character to say she doesnt have off putting traits or make mistakes. unlike the others she is in no way guilty against the expedition (thats all from inside the house), but she is judged by her people and exiled for her own failures to them.

I want to say that I agree, in particular, re. Silna, because a lot of what happens is down to her inaction, her indecision, her inability to act.  She has a right to be afraid of Tuunbaq, to acknowledge that she’s unprepared, possibly even altogether unwilling, to deal with him- and this, while she’s coping with the sudden, violent death of her father, whom she isn’t even allowed to give a proper funeral.  It’s tempting to want her to be brave and competent all the time, to fail purely because others hinder her, not because she, herself, is lacking- but that’s not realistic.  Silna’s a fully-rounded, compelling character, just as challenging as Francis and Hickey- Nive Nielsen’s performance all the more noteworthy because she has so much to do and fewer lines and less screentime in which to do it- just as nuanced, just as much a focus of the audience’s sympathy and empathy, and sometimes, frustration.  She is flawed, and realistically so, because the writers respected her enough to make her not a scaffolding upon which to pile up expectations about what a female character should have to and be allowed to do, but a real human being.

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.