Program AMC The Terror z 2018 roku zrodził jedno z najlepszych wydarzeń 2024 roku

All is well at panic Camp.

The author Julian Sancton has just finished speaking about his book Madhouse at the End of the Earth, which papers the ill-equipped and ill-fated Belgian Antarctic expedition of 1897. The conference attendees are watching via Zoom, and flooding the accompanying Discord chat with hearts and hand-clap emojis erstwhile Allegra Rosenberg, the event’s organizer, reminds everyone to stay on for a peculiar announcement — and, apparently, a peculiar guest.

Another individual joins the Zoom call. It’s David Kajganich, a author and maker of the 2018 tv series The panic about the even worse-fated 1845 Franklin expedition in the Arctic — the show that is the reason over 1,800 people have signed up for the digital conference in early December.

Kajganich has a simple but breathtaking announcement: He’s yet releasing a set of Spotify playlists for the lost men of the Franklin expedition. Initially, Kajganich had planned to release the playlists in the fall, but he was waylaid by something peculiar: the identification of the remains of James Fitzjames, 1 of the expedition’s 3 captains.

The skeleton was first found in the 1990s, but a massive effort was late made to collect DNA evidence of direct descendants of the Franklin expedition’s crew, which enabled the remains to be identified. But knife marks on the skeleton’s mandible besides confirmed that Fitzjames’ body had been cannibalized.

Not the temper in which a thoughtful show creator wants to jump in with a fun, frothy Spotify project.

So Kajganich waited. Now, each week, he’s releasing a playlist for each character, curated to include songs that Kajganich believes they would perceive to if they lived in the present day.

(“Edward small Radiohead,” a viewer immediately quips in the chat — referring to the lieutenant portrayed by Matthew McNulty with the countenance of a wet and chronically depressed sheepdog.)

Kajganich cautions the excited crowd that he didn’t think about lyrics at all erstwhile he was making the playlists. “Please — as many of you are kind of wont to do — do not exhaust yourself looking for coded messages in the lyrics, or connective tissue with events of the show. I’ve gone out of my way to not think besides much about that.”

The advice is reasonable. But reveling in the pleasance of thinking is precisely why everyone is here, at a conference built around 1 period of a tv show that aired in 2018.

The Terror is an adaptation of the Dan Simmons fresh of the same name. It spins a fictionalized tale of the Franklin expedition, a real-life endeavor to find the Northwest Passage that set sail in 1845.

In our world, the Franklin expedition disappeared. The first rescue mission was sent in 1848. Subsequent attempts to find the missing men would map more of the Arctic than the Franklin expedition itself always saw. But the men were long dead — explorers found only bodies.

In the show, the men are beset by supernatural terrors as well as the grim realities of scurvy, starvation, and cold. It could have been miserable. It could have been misanthropic. Instead, The panic is a thoughtful, nuanced look at what happens erstwhile men are lost where they don’t belong, and set adrift from the restrictive norms that defined Victorian England. Who thrives? Who breaks down? Who survives?

Kajganich and fellow creator Soo Hugh took a cast of predominantly white (and bearded, and mutton-chopped) men, and utilized them as a canvas to tell a communicative that captures viewers’ imaginations even six years later.

According to Fandom’s 2024 Year in Review, the show has shot onto the top 100 list of most-talked-about tv shows on Tumblr. It’s No. 63. This is surely due in part to the show yet coming to Netflix in August. But excited fresh viewers are being welcomed open-armed by a community that’s been going strong since 2018 — and panic Camp is its biggest party.

Terror Camp, which has been run annually since 2021, bills itself as a fan convention and academic conference. It is absolutely, rigorously both.

“It’s like this thing that originally came out of Terror fandom,” says Sarah Pickman, 1 of this year’s organizers. “But has grown to encompass any people who are in academia, any people who aren’t, all people who are just united by this amazing love for this past and truly reasoning profoundly about how the Arctic and Antarctica are represented in media, including in The Terror, which just gives you so much to analyze.”

“I’m utilized to online fandoms but not academic conferences, so I was initially intimidated by the thought of panic Camp,” says Goz, a Terror fan who has been attending the conference since its second iteration in 2022. Over Discord, she wrote to me that she overcame the nerves due to the fact that that year’s programming featured interviews with 2 of the actors and a writer, as well as the show’s costume designer — and like many fans, she was curious about what it was like behind the scenes.

The surprise, then, was being thrust into the wide, cold planet of polar exploration, and the warm embrace of the fandom. “I got to respond to and discuss the presentations with another attendees in real time,” Goz wrote. “I didn’t feel like I was out of my depth, but alternatively an enthusiast among another enthusiasts, even for the presentation topics I was just learning about for the first time.”

Pickman is 1 of the fans who came to the show from academia. She was pursuing her doctorate in Yale University’s past of discipline and medicine Program erstwhile she first watched it in 2018.

But The panic has also pushed everyday tv fans to cast themselves as researchers. Pickman tells me this is not atypical for polar history. The field, more so than many others, attracts people from non-academic backgrounds.

She points to David C. Woodman’s book Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. The book compiles Inuit histories of the Franklin expedition – testimonies that were ignored by the British admiralty at the time and then neglected in the century since.

“And he wasn’t a professor. I mean, he was just a guy,” Pickman says. “I think he worked for the Canadian military, but oh my God, he just spent so much time in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., reading handwritten 19th-century journals and correspondence and transcribing all of this evidence that everybody else had overlooked. And the book that he wrote has become a truly serious book that everybody references.”

Many of panic Camp’s presenters do end up coming from the academic planet — but all approach their topics with the enthusiasm and warmth of fans. It makes for a weekend of programming that’s really fun to watch.

We’re treated to a thorough and profoundly sourced presentation from Ted Logun about The Frozen Deep, “a very bad play that everyone loved,” by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. The 1856 play was 1 of Dickens’ many efforts to canonize the Franklin expedition as a heroic tragedy. erstwhile contemporary reports came in that the lost men had resorted to cannibalism, Dickens was 1 of the loudest voices refuting them. Dickens greatly exerted himself to guarantee that Franklin, and by extention the colonial motivations of the expedition, were never called into question.

Logun caps the presentation off with a slide that reads “Fuck you, Mr. Dickens.”

During another panel, the chat absolutely pops off at the mention of John Sacheuse, an early 19th-century Inuk interpreter. He’s received with all the enthusiasm of an actor from the tv show.

“I think that’s 1 of the cool things about panic Camp, is that there are various structures in academia and conventional academic conferences that can be gatekeeping mechanisms,” Pickman tells me. “This 1 is just like, if you’re interested, just show up. […] You don’t gotta wait to effort to break down the doors, to be part of a more conventional academic conversation.”

That sentiment is echoed by Goz. “This year, there were a number of sessions that highlighted marginalized voices in particular, like presentations on Inuit and female perspectives in polar exploration, on queerness in the context of the historical era or transness in the context of present-day fandom,” she says. “It shows that you don’t should be an armchair dad obsessed with naval warfare to enjoy The Terror and its related subjects. You can be into fashion or food or gender, or just truly curious about a single working-class historical figure who might otherwise have been remembered mostly as just another name on a muster roll.”

Terror Camp has expanded its focus in the 4 years it’s been running, but the tv show remains at the heart of many of the panels — and demonstrates why it’s specified a powerful entry point into polar obsession.

One of the weekend’s presentations was by Leah Palmer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Galway whose focus is Arctic archival material. Palmer uses 1 of the show’s most beloved characters, the surgeon Harry Goodsir, as a springboard to discuss 19th-century Inuit-language dictionaries.

In The Terror, Goodsir is 1 of the fewer men who attempts to realize a captured Inuk woman, dubbed woman Silence by the English crew. Working with woman Silence, Goodsir begins compiling a simple one-to-one English-to-Inuktut dictionary.

Palmer tells an enthralled audience that there were many specified dictionaries in circulation in the 19th century — and that many were created because of the search for the missing Franklin expedition. Dictionaries taught English sailors useful phrases specified as “Have you seen any large ships lately?” and “Have you seen any white men on this coast?”

In a Q&A afterward, Palmer points out that these dictionaries weren’t always accurate. For example, James Clark Ross listed the word for nose as “Inuk.” In fact, in Inuktut, it’s simply the singular of Inuit. 1 imagines that whoever Ross was talking to pointed at their own face and Ross took it besides virtually — but it’s a breathtakingly immense mistake to confuse a individual for a body part.

But specified is the communicative of polar exploration. The field is full of stories where endurance rested on the blade of a knife. A single bad decision or misunderstanding could spell doom. Pickman says this is part of why endurance stories like The Terror resonate with modern viewers.

“Why do we have people in 2024 who are inactive obsessed with the Donner Party or the Raft of the Medusa?” Pickman asks rhetorically. “All these historical episodes, these utmost endurance stories — what do people do in these kinds of circumstances? Who rises to the occasion? And how did the veneers of civilization and order break down? I think that’s truly compelling, and it was done so well in the show.”

The Terror has been a niche adequate show that panic Camp has always been able to get talent to appear in the programming. Dave Kajganich actually did a keynote in the conference’s first year and showed eager fans any deleted scenes. This led to a comic minute in this year’s Saturday keynote, which for the first time featured the legendary actor Jared Harris (who has made tv audiences weep on Chernobyl and Mad Men, and will shortly take a turn playing Claudius in Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company), alongside his able scene partner Liam Garrigan.

The 2 play Captain Francis Crozier and his steward, Thomas Jopson, respectively. As Jopson, Garrigan balances both steely darkness and loyalty. In a show full of tragedy, Jopson’s peculiar destiny is 1 of the most striking, and coupled with Garrigan’s portrayal, it’s made him a fan favorite. (Although it could be argued that, given how dedicated people are to this show, all character with at least 2 seconds of screentime is someone’s favorite.)

Garrigan describes 1 of the deleted scenes that he filmed, shot for shot, from memory. He’s clearly excited about it, he remembers it being superb on the page, but isn’t certain how it turned out. Apparently, he’s never actually seen it — but many of the fans have, thanks to panic Camp. The panel’s moderator promises to send it to him.

“I’m certain Dave wouldn’t mind.”

To me, panic Camp is the utopian imagination of what fandom should be. quite a few people hear “fandom” and cringe, imagining an uncritical, single-minded devotion to a celebrity, or show, or what have you. But we’re not talking stan wars on X, here.

What panic Camp shows is that fandom can be about learning quite a few cool crap and sharing it with people. It’s a conference that someway balances highly valid criticism of the polar projects and their colonial goals with empathy for the people active and an appreciation of all the themes that grow out of polar narratives.

But mostly, I just like it erstwhile smart, comic people tell me things that I didn’t know before. And that’s what panic Camp does so, so well.