Gods of the Terror

"That's not a polar bear, the slope of the skull is all wrong."

 

My correction there drew an eye roll from the seat next to me... then an exasperated sigh and reach for the heavens when it was repeated almost verbatim by one of the TV show's characters a couple minutes later.

Comparative anatomy powers: activate!

I was equally jazzed at the subsequent blink-and-you-missed-it glimpse of the monster's humanoid phalanges. Rare is the art / effects department capable or willing to invest such work in details which, let's be brutally honest, almost none of a TV series' audience will appreciate.

 

But I do find it regrettable in retrospect for The Terror to have opened with hints of a "creature feature" to hook its audience, as that severely undersells the show's complexity. Where should I start? The, if not world-class, at least professional acting of every last bit player? The grandiloquent but believable period cast? The Inuit presented as positive characters but never diving headlong into some politically correct superiority complex? The rare splashes of low-key dark humor growing naturally from the plot and personalities? The decor, which initially put me off as low-quality but soon grew to impress me through its consciously theatrical set design? The refusal to pull punches while also never sinking to a slasher flick's cheap reliance on gore? The sun dogs? One observation surprised me more than most, and it may be better illustrated by a slightly simpler example. An illustrated example.

See, I also recently read through a comic called Gods of the Game. Six teenagers in 1987 get transported to a magical medieval world as an RPG party. At only 120 pages long it suffers from some pacing issues (after a disproportionately lengthy introduction in our own dimension, the last chapters feel a bit rushed, similar if inverted to some other examples I've given) and the solidly clichéd set-up immediately had me polishing my scoffin' fangs. Then, weirdly... it pulled me in. Clean style, not skimping on the backgrounds, decisive plotting. Something about the very readiness with which the author adopts all the standard gimmicks manages to come across as neither mercenary pandering nor naïve / blasé complacence but an endearing love of the genre shining through on every page. And, as another reader commented at some point, she managed to cram a startling amount of characterization into so few pages. As the example which most stuck with me, here's how the story handles the inevitable moment when the popular athletic girl joins the geeks' game: a weird, morose younger girl just bluntly invites her, to the slack-jawed consternation of every male in the room. And that tells you more about their personalities than pages of exposition.

Even the "don't go meta" criticism fails to stick, for much the same reason that it's not belabored into some startling plot twist. So what're you left with? Adventure. Characters adapting to new situations according to individual personalities. Gimmicks and phlebotina permutating into trials and solutions.

I hadn't realized how much I missed adventure stories.

I don't mean the "kitchen sink" approach to adventure you see in most cRPGs where you absolutely have to fight every monster in the monster manual in sequence, or the alternative of straining to turn every goblin stabbing into some supposedly grandiose social commentary like "racism against goblins is bad, mm'kaaayy?" but a story merely taking a limited premise unto the great unknown and allowing it to run its course while fleshing out naturally afferent details. You don't have to save the world. You may not even save yourself. The story gets away from you. You just do the best in the situation at hand. And, in its multifaceted problems, in its self-conscious refusal to bow to clichéd expectations of redemption or salvation, that's what The Terror in turn boils down to: an old-school adventure story, but one expertly developed beyond its stock elements.

That adventures now come as surprises probably says a lot about the state of pop culture.

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P.S.: Having never read the novel on which it's based I can't speak to how much of the adaptation's quality was inherent in the original and yes, I did see that AMC's trying to cash in The Terror's well-deserved warm reception with more (unrelated) seasons under the same title, but sequelitis warns me off any such cash-grab.