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What remains? Every corner a new name
Today was unusually awful and exhausting and did not start to improve until the evening, but I want to note that I lost my wallet and keys in a downpour outside of Mass General Hospital and didn't find out until after my appointment was over and I was trying to put a piece of paper away in my suddenly nonexistent wallet and while they were soaked to the point that a check I am still hoping to deposit had almost dissolved, they had not only not been scooped off the street and stolen, they were sitting rather damply but plainly at the information desk of the Wang Building and I appreciate this enormously. Thank you, unknown person who did not make my day much, much worse! Also I have watched all ten hours of AMC's The Terror (2018) and loved everything about the show from acting to cinematography to Jared Harris' weird round wry haggard cat-face. Also Dakzen is an honest-to-God cheap eats in an escalatingly un-cheap town and I can add the ba mee moo dang to the list of dishes I recommend. Also the Tipping Cow now makes coconut-milk ice cream. Also our cats are nice.
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So I am a difficult person to ask about gore tolerances because I don't necessarily find disturbing the same things that other people do, but I would say that while there is gore in this miniseries, there is never gore that feels gratuitous, by which I mean gore that feels like it's being shown to get at the audience. The Terror does not subscribe to the fallacy that the past was inexorably grimdark and a story must be the cruelest version of itself in order to be any good. There is a thing that looks a lot like a polar bear and it dismembers some people and devours others and there's plenty of blood on the snow, but the primary horror of the series is not the mutilation of bodies (although in a story whose historical record ended in cannibalism, that is always so to speak on the table) but the cold and the isolation and the paradoxical sense of claustrophobia and entrapment in the middle of seemingly endless wastes of ice and sky, six-month stretches of darkness and light that scramble everyone's clocks and the mounting fear of having forged bravely for Queen and Country into a place that just flat fucking doesn't care about empire or discipline or pluck. For what it's worth, I did not leave the series with a dominant impression of ultraviolence. It has just as many striking moments of grace and beauty and they are done without irony. Also, if you are interested in Tobias Menzies, I had never actually seen him in a major role before and he is ridiculously good as Captain Fitzjames of HMS Erebus. Some of his scenes with Harris' Captain Crozier are the best in the series.
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That is a nice thing to watch someone do. I first started hearing about him with Outlander; I'd missed that he was on Rome! That makes me wonder if a costume choice on The Terror was a tip of the hat to the actor's history—when the icebound crew hold a carnival for the first return of the sun, Fitzjames is dressed as a Roman centurion.
I just love his crooked teeth and his odd-shaped face.
I registered him as classically good-looking. Go know.
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a place that just flat fucking doesn't care about empire or discipline or pluck
...St. Clair's brain??
Edit: apparently in Outlander his regiment was the 8th Dragoons (same as Banastre Tarleton) but on television they got the regimentals arsy-versy. It's okay, they all went to India and got cholera anyway. This is why I can't watch teavee.
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Icier, I think. Blessedly not devoid of queerness, however. Or seals.