Jikes posted:

A lot of changes were made between the book and series, almost always for the better. The screenwriters did an outstanding job of adapting the book and I think they improved on the source material, which is pretty rare.

LadyPictureShow posted:

Oh God, like I said earlier in the thread, I thought Jopson quietly drifted off after Crozier was telling him childhood stories.

I...much would have preferred that to be what happened.

etalian posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYg8rEDT1RU

Quixotic1 posted:

I was confused with Jopson's final scene, he looked angry but a part of me wants to say he just wanted to just get back to his captains side, pushing aside food that would nourish him and seeing an illusion of him at his best.

UNRULY_HOUSEGUEST posted:

I thought that scene was a great expression of how Jopson was feeling over his abandonment: that Crozier at his best was an illusion, hence he's pompously overdressed, detached, literally going through the empty motions of leadership. A great detail it's easy to miss is how grotesque and unappetising the mirage-banquet actually looks; it's a weird stylised mess of jellies, feathers, and chicken legs. The series did a fantastic job with the counterintuitive idea that if all these men are doomed from the start, how they choose to face it down matters a lot.

alf_pogs posted:

yet again we return to Mr Blanky being a god drat badass

etalian posted:

The rope and fork scheme was brilliant, as well as his parting insult to the virgin tuunbaq.

etalian posted:

The rope and fork scheme was brilliant, as well as his parting insult to the virgin tuunbaq.

Quixotic1 posted:

I was confused with Jopson's final scene, he looked angry but a part of me wants to say he just wanted to just get back to his captains side, pushing aside food that would nourish him and seeing an illusion of him at his best.

LadyPictureShow posted:

The anger (and boy does Liam Garrigan emote well) was him deliriously believing Crozier and the rest had abandoned him whereas previously they’d dragged the sick and weak in the sledges.

That for all Crozier had said and done before, he didn’t actually give a poo poo about his men, only himself and his position.

Hasselblad posted:

Quite honestly I do not view one or the other version as better. They are both solid.

Professor Shark posted:

Yeah, him dying with his last thoughts being that despite all his service and loyalty, Crozier had abandoned him, when we know (and the book stresses this even more iirc) that Crozier's primary concern is his men makes it extra painful

Professor Shark posted:

Yeah, him dying with his last thoughts being that despite all his service and loyalty, Crozier had abandoned him, when we know (and the book stresses this even more iirc) that Crozier's primary concern is his men makes it extra painful

LadyPictureShow posted:

Usually in a show like this, at least a couple of the actors put in a clunker of a performance, but this series had goddamn dynamite performances from even the ship’s pet dog. Are most of the cast stage performers or character actors in general?

UNRULY_HOUSEGUEST posted:

Yep, most of them have a strong theatre acting background. The casting agent deserves a lot of credit though, the older actors are fairly well established in the UK and Ireland but everyone under 40 was unknown to me and have pretty thin film/TV credits. Apparently Adam Naigaitis (Hickey) and Jared Harris (Crozier) are both going to be in an upcoming HBO series about the Chernobyl disaster, so that could be a winner.

LesterGroans posted:

The cast was incredible. It was a deep bench too. Even when the ranks thinned out in the later episode the increased focus on background characters paid off well. It was heartbreaking when John Bridgens went off to die alone with his partner's journal.

Milo and POTUS posted:

Were they def an item or was it just speculation?

Milo and POTUS posted:

Were they def an item or was it just speculation?

LesterGroans posted:

They didn't state it outright, but I assumed they were. Henry even had a sketch of Bridgens' tattoo in his journal. That seems like the sailor version of writing "Mr. Henry Bridgens" surrounded by hearts in your trapper keeper.

quote:

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
‘That night they got all their belongings together and took off to the southwest’Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

quote:

In 1854, Rae had just come back from a return trip to the Arctic, where he had been horrified to discover that many of his original Inuit sources had fallen to the same fates they had witnessed in the Franklin Expedition.

An outbreak of influenza had swept the area, likely sparked by the wave of Franklin searchers combing the Arctic. As social mores broke down, food ran short.

Inuit men that Rae had known personally had chosen suicide over watching the slow death of their children. Families had starved for days before eating their dog teams. Some women, who had seen their families die around them, had needed to turn to the “last resource” to survive the winter.

quote:

In order to figure out whether end-stage cannibalism happened, Mays and Beattie looked at three Franklin Expedition skeletons for evidence of burning, for specific patterning of fractures in the bones, and for evidence of “pot polish,” where broken or cut bone ends become smooth from being tossed in a metal or ceramic vessel during cooking.

None of the bones the researchers studied were burned, but there was some evidence of smashing while the bones were fresh. However, it is unclear if these breaks were made by people immediately after death or by animals trampling on them much later.

But when Mays and Beattie found pot polish on two leg bones, they knew there was clear evidence that someone boiled parts of these men’s bodies for at least 20 minutes in a cooking pot. Even more interesting is that one of the bones with pot polish was probably also reused. After its marrow was consumed, someone used the human bone fragment as a spoon or knife to scrape more fat from the rim of the pot.

quote:

1852–58 (?): Inuit may have seen Crozier and one other survivor much further south in the Baker Lake area

LadyPictureShow posted:

In cool science stuff, here’s an article about how they figured out one of the skeletons was Goodsir:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/07/skeleton-may-help-solve-mystery-doomed-franklin-expedition

quote:

mitochondrial DNA analysis supported a western European origin for the crew—consistent with historical accounts ... It also increased the minimum number of individuals at Erebus Bay from 11 to 21, and suggested movement of remains between sites some decades after the crew perished...

a mysterious cloak posted:

Just ordered the Frozen in Time book to further my obsession with the expedition. Wife just saw Sir John's perfect, stockinged leg last night. I told her I would hang it on my wall, with pride.

Actually, I might make it my av... maybe use his "greatest argonauts of our time" speech for text

Despera posted:

It's the bizarre behavior of the crew that is the biggest mystery of the Franklin Expedition. This is why the lead poisoning theory has legs. I never bought the "well they were victorian englishmen of course they had high lead concentrates" explanation for the lead levels found on the beechy corpses. They would have long lost any hair/nails that had grown in Britain and regrown it on the ship given the time. Whatever caused the high lead levels was on the ship.

Hasselblad posted:

They should sell Franklin Leg Lamps.
(Or use them as major awards)

a mysterious cloak posted: