I can’t say precisely why I decided to give AMC’s The Terror (2018), now available on Netflix, a try. Perhaps it was the photograph of Ciarán Hinds in Royal Navy full regalia—does anyone wear a captain’s cocked hat better?—or the call of a real-life 19th-century expedition: in this case, the 1845 attempt to find a Northwest Passage through the labyrinthine Arctic islands. And then there’s the terrific British cast—Hinds, Tobias Menzies, Paul Ready, Adam Nagaitis, and, first among equals, Jared Harris. Shortly into Episode One, an entrancing overhead shot says it all: two tiny ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, are like toys in a vast blue-black sea of floating white ice. Within 26 minutes the ships are heading into “pack ice”—not good. By the end of the episode, the sea has frozen around the ships. The next nine episodes unfold over three years in a seamless journey through hope, fear, poetic remembering, choral camaraderie, existential silence, and yes, sci-fi terror. We see how vanity begets folly, how the die was cast from the start, in character. Based on Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel of the same name, created by Max Borenstein and Alexander Woo, The Terror is astonishing. —Laura Jacobs