In summers of deadly heat and wildfires, The Terror and The North Water conjure an Arctic in which cold, bearded, scurvy-addled men commit grisly acts far beyond the reach of the Bechdel test or upward-creeping levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But modern nostalgia is its own act of imagination. Shelley’s Walton dreamed of making the North accessible this version of the 19th-century Arctic, populated with foundering ships and human wreckage, is nearly unreachable, a place that matters only to the explorers on its ice.
Two miniseries in particular- The Terror (Season 1 aired in 2018) and this year’s The North Water-are fully Arctic historical dramas.
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In the past few years, the films Arctic and The Midnight Sky and the series Fortitude have been set in the region’s semi-present, while the sled dogs of the movies Togo and The Call of the Wild have evoked its past. Two hundred years later, that dream is no longer a chimera-routes north of Canada are navigable without an ice-breaking ship-and fiction is again turning to the Arctic for inspiration. It was certainly a pointed location for a novel critiquing Promethean dreams: For much of the 19th century, English ships hazarded ice floes in search of glory, profit, and an open polar sea that did not exist. Perhaps Mary Shelley had such grotesque agonies in mind when she set the opening of Frankensteinon the Arctic Ocean, where a sailor named Robert Walton rescues the novel’s titular doctor and learns of his black-lipped, mottle-skinned creation. And because many sufferers hallucinate that they are among the foods and comforts of home, some doctors called the affliction “ nostalgia.” Odors and sounds become agonizingly, even dangerously, intense hearing a gunshot can kill.
This tissue is actively rotting, so living men smell dead. Gums bleed and blacken, then engorge and protrude over the teeth or their absent weeping sockets like a dark second set of lips. The disease often starts with stiff limbs and ulcerating skin. Of all the horrors of a 19th-century European voyage to the Arctic-noses and cheeks turned necrotic by frostbite, snow blindness, sea madness, broken bones badly knit-perhaps most ghastly was scurvy. This article contains spoilers for The Terror and The North Water.