i'm cringe and that's based

ALSO re the points in this post about hickey and fitzjames' boots he is literally a corpse walking around in the garb of other corpses <3 the status of any of the members of the expedition as fully "alive" is questionable throughout the narrative and if a murderer is as good as dead anyway hickey is basically a walking graveyard. by the end of the story his clothes, his name, even his food is sourced from the dead. literally "dis-moi ce que tu manges et je te dirai qui tu es" he's a corpse!! his laser focus on survival costs him his life far before he's physically killed!

renaming my ships to HMS We Won't Die in the Arctic and HMS No Scurvy before successfully navigating the northwest passage

there are so many FUCKING psychopomps in this show it shouldn’t be allowed. silna staying with the men, not helping them eat but not leaving them either, because they started something that will finish them eventually that she is only bound to watch. bridgens giving peglar permission to sleep. crozier giving blanky permission to die. crozier helping fitzjames to his end. goodsir telling young that angels are waiting for him and telling gibson that only pain is waiting for him. hickey hearing that and sparing gibson the pain, even as bad as that ended. goodsir washing his own body as if for burial. dr. stanley’s own attempt to be merciful. crozier and silna killing their own identities. it’s so haunted in this arctic

i also think that with the show’s whole poison colonialism symbolism goodsir’s thing where he turns to Silna and is like i wish you could come to england and see that there’s good people there we’re not like we are here goes crazy. like Dr. Goodsir you brought the empire with you!!! you all ARE the good people in england you are referring to. the land that you think turns you into monsters is her home and the monstrousness is fundamentally your own

the fact that crozier has the names and hometowns of everyone on his crew memorized…the fact that it only ever comes up under the worst possible circumstances. (deliriously reciting their names after they’re all dead, trying to talk morfin down from suicide, “you’re a limerick man?”)

Oh SHIT I never. I never thought but. Its Goodsir who stops Silna from getting the charms she needs to, like, inherit her fathers position... The Tuunbaq one n that yken? Like he tries, he does, but... Its Goodsir that brings him in to die in the ship instead of beneath the sky, and its Goodsir that ensures those charms are lost, and there is really no innocence in imperialism, no innocence in colonialism, its violent in every possible respect that they don't let the people who actually fucking live there take the lead, huh

#as i argued at Terror Camp (2021)#goodsir's culpability is not an accident#it does not stem from a place of a few cultural misunderstandings#but illustrates the inability of his liberal imperialism to meaningfully engage with the other#the liberal impulse to assume familiarity dooms them#not a little 'whoopsie' moment on goodsir's part (via @veganthranduil)