Beasts Of The Northern Wild:The Terror.

"Nature does not give a damn about our plans" - Commander James Fitzjames.

"This place wants us dead" - Commander James Fitzjames.

The icy sea, the clear northern skies, endless vistas, and the flickering lights of the aurora borealis are all so visually spectacular that they're a joy simply to look at. But this sublime beauty is not what dominates The Terror (BBC2/iPlayer, recommended to me by my friend Darren). This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an advert for a holiday in Nunavut.

Alongside the incredible period detail (leatherbound books, fine crockery, wooden chests, oil lamps, and frock coats with polished brass buttons) and the ships themselves (with their wheels, their ropes, and their brass telescopes and compasses - that you'd be hard pressed to find outside the Science Museum these days) there is a darker, gorier, more dangerous, netherworld.

One that, at times, borders on Victorian torture porn. Alongside the glistening icicles, the sundogs, the stone cairns, the fountain pens, and the amulets there are toes cut off, dismembered legs, decapitated heads, severed tongues, and ripped open skulls. There are wince inducing post-mortems, claustrophobic underwater scenes, and there are months on end with no sunshine accompanied by a threat of scurvy, hunger, and even lead poisoning.

There is also the threat of something else. Something that lurks on the horizon until it is either hungry or is called into being to inflict further death and danger on these already imperilled sailors. As Commander James Fitzjames (Tobias Menzies) asks if it's "not a man, not a bear, then what is it?"

Sailing Master Thomas Blanky (the reliably brilliant Ian Hart) has seen, and survived, trouble before and he has no doubt of what the gravest danger of all is to these men. Themselves. This darkness, this isolation, this constant fear of a lonely painful death. What havoc it plays on a man's mind and what toll it takes on a man's soul is beyond measure.

Blanky knows from experience what many others on the voyage do not. In the Victorian era, explorers were heroes, feted celebrities, and those in the upper echelons of the nautical hierarchy often belonged to the aristocracy or nobility. Captain Sir John Franklin (Ciaran Hinds) was one of these men and, in 1845, he led an expedition of two Royal Navy Ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror - the most technologically advanced boats of their day, on a quest to find a navigable passage, known as the North West Passage, through the Arctic.

To give Britain a trading advantage in China and India. He is accompanied on his journey by over one hundred men. His second in command Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris), Commanding Officer of HMS Terror, is a melancholic man, prone to brooding and so partial to whisky that it is to the detriment of both his decision making and his health.

The Executive Officer of the Erebus, Fitzjames, is a keen raconteur fond of boastful post-prandial anecdotes and neither a fan of Crozier nor trustful of his competence. There is no love loss between Crozier and Fitzjames and, we learn via a series of flashbacks, there have been problems between Crozier and Franklin in the past when Crozier was refused the hand in marriage of Franklin's niece Sophia Cracroft (Sian Brooke).

These back stories act as a rich and complex foundation of rivalries, class grudges, and thwarted ambitions that provide a framework to explain at least some of the behaviour of the lead protagonists in northern Canada but when one of the ship's boys starts coughing up blood (presumed, initially, consumptive), hallucinates, and dies and another crew member drowns when the propeller of the Erebus hits an iceberg the problems facing the men become all too present.

As both ships become stuck in the ice, Assistant Surgeon Harry Goodsir (Paul Ready), a kindly man who sports a fine set of mutton chops, comes to the fore. When he is not tasked by the less kindly Ship's Surgeon Stephen Stanley (Alistair Petrie) with accompanying young men on their deathbeds or dishing out potions and lotions to patients, he is often performing crude and grisly, yet necessary, surgeries.

More so even than Crozier, Goodsir has befriended a Netsilik Inuit woman the crew have taken on board after an encounter which results in her father's death. Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen), named because she initially refuses to converse, is treated with suspicion by some and curiosity by others but only Goodsir offers her kindness and sets about trying to learn her language and understand her world.

Caulker's Mate Cornelius Hickey (Adam Nagaitis) has, quite clearly from the off, a very different agenda. Unafraid of, quite literally, frigging in the rigging with fellow sailors even if it does see him suffer the on ship punishment of being lashed "as a boy" (across the bare buttocks) in front of fellow crew members.

Humiliation and pain all in one. But what's Hickey's true agenda? Is he a working class hero, a maverick out to strike a blow for the lowly crew members who may be sacrificed to save the captains, commanders, and lieutenants or is he merely a mercenary, a coward, or, worse, a violent traitor?

While Lady Silence worries about the fearsome 'bear' she calls the Tuunbaq, others become equally concerned with Hickey's behaviour. A carnival of plague masks, magic lanterns, and people drinking grog from prosthetic limbs has all the elements of a Roman bacchanal but it gives way to a chaotic inferno that proves the lie to the world these people have chosen to live in.

While everyone, from commanding officer to ship's boy, converses articulately and seems to have a working knowledge, at least, of Latin, Greek, and even Persian history it soon becomes clear that many of these heroes have feet of clay and that the Empire they so proudly represent is more indifferent to their fate than they may care to imagine.

While, ostensibly, celebrating a bygone era of Empire and expansionism, The Terror also shows us that that very Empire and expansionism was not possible without huge sacrifice of human life, mostly for those at the lower end of the class system. A monumental folly where the benefits, surely, were never worth the price in human flesh that paid for them.

As a woman eats raw seal innards, as men tell their stories and reveal their long held secrets, crisp white snow falls into a deep well already stained crimson with blood as a reminder of this cost. A compass spins like a roulette wheel as if to indicate just how much chance really plays in the likelihood of survival and when the Tuunbaq finally does appear it is no more, or less, terrifying than anything else these men have already encountered. 

It could almost be, perhaps is, a monster conjured up by the dark imaginings of their own fertile, and febrile, minds. When you finally see the thing that is most feared in any horror it is often disappointing and though The Terror does reasonably well with this, the Tuunbaq isn't the key to understanding, enjoying, or being gripped by fear with this series.

That is already there, the Tuunbaq merely adds to it. A wonderful ensemble cast in which nobody, not even the ship's monkey, literally an Arctic monkey - Jacko, is less than great is headed up by exemplary performances by Harris, Menzies, Ready, and Nagaitis with other stand outs including John Lynch as Officers' Steward John Bridgens and David Walmsley as Sergeant Solomon Tozer of the Royal Marines.

There's even a guest appearance from Greta Scacchi as Sir John Franklin's wife, Jane. Screenwriter David Kajganich (with the help of a plethora of Executive Directors that include both Ridley Scott and David W. Zucker) has adapted Dan Simmons' 2007 novel into a thing both of beauty and of fear but, more than that, a thing of awe and tension. Two days ago, in London, in April, it was snowing and that was cold enough for me. Having seen The Terror, I'm now even less likely to set sail for Baffin Bay than I ever was.