It did a great job of not weaving in too many plot threads, too, and paying off those that it did. Hickey found Crozier’s note early on? And they brought it back into play. Hickey robbed a grave? Hey, Goodsir found the ring he stole.

I was just thinking about this! I get nervous and uncomfortable every time Hickey is on screen (wondering when he was going to start eating people was a hell of a bit of tension). There’s anxiety and fear in watching these poor men starve to death and succumb to poison, turning on one another and clawing at their soft…

It’s true. Most of the bad things that happened to them either happened because they didn’t tell one other important things, or they decided they needed to talk about dumb things in the heat of the moment, when they needed to be doing something.

Opening an episode with a personal discussion between two characters is a sign this show is going to go above and beyond for the rest of the hour, so far in the season.

Their relationship has been so well done from the start and their goodbye was amazingly well acted

And Erebus is even more forbidding.

Hickey’s whole thing has been a wild ride. I keep waiting for him to do something with that paper he read waaay waaaay back in the first few episodes, while everyone else was off the ship.

Agreed about the cold. I keep waiting for someone to get frostbite all over their face. But I think it’s one of the concessions you have to make for television. I know I have a hard enough time telling characters apart as is. If they were all more covered up, there’d be no way I’d know who was who.

I wish I were kidding. Well, I’m glad the show is different. I hoped it would be, they’ve changed a good bit of other stuff for the better as well.

Ugh, yeah. I’ve mentioned before how much I prefer the show’s version of Lady Silence, who gets to be her own character, instead of a Waif-y Mystic Native Girl-Child Occasionally Seen Naked By A Crewman Who Always Comments On Her Pubic Hair TM.

Yeah, I was not a fan at all, and it somewhat lessened my previous enjoyment of the otherwise pretty excellent book, but ymmv.

I mean, I think we only disagree about Crozier being a psychic all along (and our interpretations of what happened with Silence, which is fine). (And I did not want to go into the part with Hickey, since that, at least, is almost definitely going to make it into the show and I was trying to be considerate.)

Sure! Spoilers ahead, I’m not sure how many will be for the show, or if spoiler tags work on this system, but I guess we’ll find out, since there’s no preview button:

re: Simmons’ blend of the natural and supernatural: I thought a lot about that when I read the book, too. During my read, I half-anticipated that there was no supernatural bear, and that the creepiness was just them going crazy with possibly a murderer in the crew. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but the idea that…

Good points about the book; I’m still waiting for a change from the source material that I dislike, but so far they’ve done brilliantly with the adaptation.

That scene with Blanky and Fitzjames was amazingly written, acted, and scored. It provided an unreasonable amount of chills for two guys sitting at a table talking calmly about something that happened long ago.

Agreed, nothing seems quite as dire as I think they want it to. I think it’s a side-effect of them wanting viewers to be able to see the faces of the characters so we have some chance of figuring out who is doing what, but it does make the situation seem less severe.

One of these weeks I’m going to stop being surprised by how much I enjoy all the changes they made from the book, but not this week, I guess.

I read the book last summer and IIRC Simmons doesn’t focus so much on lead poisoning. Instead the problem is that the stores weren’t soldered properly and so a bunch of them eventually started to rot. I think they were expanding, too, which implied that they were full of Clostridium to me. They were also made with…

I just really want to talk about the changes from the book. Did anyone else read it? I have to say... I think the adjustments are mostly for the better?