THE TERROR

In 1845, the crew of the Royal Navy vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, venture on an expedition to chart the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Thinking they can beat the winter, both vessels find themselves frozen amidst the remote tundra. The crew and their officers must band together to survive the horrendous cold and wait out the winter, until the thaw arrives. Unfortunately for them, they are being stalked by a powerful, unfeeling predator. An animal of such size and strength, it violently dispatches crew members apace. It'll take all the ingenuity they can muster to survive, if they just don't end up killing each other first.

Based on the novel by celebrated fantasy and genre author Dan Simmons, The Terror is a top notch, tense and tightly scripted drama owing much to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventure The Hound of the Baskerville's as well as to John Carpenter's The Thing. The cast are uniformly terrific, particularly Jared Harris as Crozier, Captain of the HMS Erebus and the ever-reliable Ciaran Hinds as Sir John Franklin, Captain of the HMS Terror. Tobias Menzies (soon to be seen in The Crown as Prince Philip) is terrific as First Officer Fitzjames. The drama on board the vessels is just as riveting as the tense moments of horror off it. The crew below decks are a mix of dutiful sailors and self serving scam artists. The violence, when it occurs, is deeply graphic and not for the faint of heart. This story embraces its gothic horror - and dread - with abandon. No doubt AMC are looking to repeat the success of The Walking Dead (which is definitely waning, in terms of the fan support and ratings) and re-capture that same audience. That said, this is a well scripted show, there's a good deal of beautifully written drama to rivet the viewer, in between the scenes of baroque horror and chair-squirming naval surgery.