So like everyone else here I absolutely find this show some of the best work out there hands down. I just watched it for a 3rd time after staying away from it for a few years just because it's so good. Very few productions compare to the quality of work done here - especially in the horror category and especially in the historical fiction category, both of which can give way to exaggeration and poor writing way too easily. When I first saw the show I described it as a slow descent into chaos or madness. They did it right!

One of the more controversial aspects of the show (and book) is Tuunbaq, and with good reason. This is a true story and both the book and the show take painstaking efforts to get those parts right. When Crozier struggles with alcoholism and lost love or Fitzjames gives his sordid history as a fraud or Blanky gives his details of Fury Beach or when Lady Franklin rallies a mission together despite the lack of effort by the admiralty they all have a lot of historical accuracy related to them.

So why throw in Tuunbaq? It adds an arguably unnecessary unrealistic horror element that draws away from the very real horror they experienced with each passing day. I'll be the first to admit Tuunbaq's CGI was not the best, the way he shows up is pretty unrealistic in an otherwise very real situation... How about how he grabs the one individual by the head through the canopy in the tent in the scene where Franklin ultimately dies or climbs up the mast after Blanky? The show could've eliminated all of Tuunbaq and I'm confident it could've been just as good. Yet I think the addition of Tuunbaq was a good call (although in some ways I wish it was portrayed more realistically as a crazy polar bear or something).

But why I think Tuunbaq was a great addition is because Tuunbaq is the spirit of the Arctic. This is something I don't feel is stressed enough in comments about the creature. The way I see it is that Silna's father (or elder) represented the prior generation of Inuit before contact with the civilized world. Tuunbaq was dangerous, yes, but it was understood and an "agreement" could be made between its native inhabitants and the stark, beautiful, and deadly landscape of the Arctic. The Inuit survive in this place because they respect its dangers and because of that Tuunbaq doesn't wantonly kill them at will. There is no hubris in the Inuit regarding where they are. That's why Silna and her father could be essentially in the same place as the men of the Terror and be well fed while they slowly die aboard their ship.

The moment when Silna's father is shot and killed symbolizes the moment of bloody contact between the civilized world and the world of the Inuit who had been there for thousands and thousands of years. The fact that the death was an accident doesn't take away from the fact that this is how the "civilized" world acts with all natives. It didn't take long to get nearly the entire crew in a frenzy over a "savage" attack in the fog at their first land camp, blaming Silna for all of their problems with Tuunbaq, leaving only Crozier and Goodsir to see the humanity in her. There is a beautifully done naive moment where Goodsir tries to tell Silna that the English are not the ruthless people that she is repeatedly exposed to and her eyes say everything looking back at him with maybe pity or maybe more accurately incomprehension, but it isn't the language barrier, it's how he's convinced himself that is true.

Because the show demonstrates clearly that the true savages are the civilized. They come rolling into the Arctic with such hubris - led by Franklin's evangelicalism - and that alone is what provokes Tuunbaq's wrath. It's not their home. They don't belong there. And they're not there to learn, they're there for "God and country," for glory. And with them they bring the rot and decay of civilization symbolized by the lead filled tins which they gorge themselves on daily. They're quick to commit violence, first on Silna's father and later Hickey on the family along with how easily they all convinced each other on a native attack - "it's all trumpery" as Crozier put it.

Silna did not yet learn all the ways of her father and so she is scared and why she voluntarily returns to the ship. She understands it's her responsibility, her generation's responsibility, to learn the ways of the Tuunbaq - the Arctic. And she tries. Whether Hickey's story on what he saw regarding Silna was true we do see her more knowledgeable and aware of Tuunbaq and how she has to face it, most strongly portrayed when she returns back to her people and has a shaman help her go back and try and control it (or as I see it, find a way to live within balance with the Arctic with the full knowledge she might die trying). There is even the scene where Tuunbaq gives her a seal - this is because of her respect for the Arctic (or as I see it, her ability to hunt properly in the Arctic whereas the hubris of the English will not allow for it).

And meanwhile throughout the entire show Tuunbaq gorges on the English, the "civilized" - easily at first, but with more difficulty in time. Likely at first it was easy due to the hubris but as time went on the awareness of the men of what the Arctic was like grew. The English only saw Tuunbaq as an enemy to be defeated whereas Silna used cultural knowledge to grow her understanding of it. The weapons surely played a role in this weakening but more likely it was the poisoning of civilization that truly did Tuunbaq in, represented by each lead filled body it consumed, the Arctic slowly becoming polluted inside and out - not due to Silna's people - but due to the civilized people. Someone pointed out in this subreddit the final scene where Tuunbaq was eating both human and chain that Tuunbaq had lead poisoning himself before dying. We killed Tuunbaq, all of us.

It is at that moment of Tuunbaq's death that the shaman helping Silna turns around, he knows it's too late, but Silna keeps going. Silna walks past all of the horrors caused by the civilized to each other with only passing glances of horror, disgust, or no emotion at all. She didn't protect Tuunbaq as was her responsibility, but one wonders whether anyone could knowing what she was up against. She saves Crozier, who also saved her on several occasions, but ultimately she's banished from the tribe. Was it because she couldn't tame Tuunbaq? It died on her watch? She intermingled with the civilized too much and therefore was not true Inuit anymore? How many native people have struggled with where they belong after the encroachment of the civilized and loss of their land?

To me, Tuunbaq symbolized those parts of the story we truly don't know. Where the chaos of the Arctic took a toll on the men in ways we will never fully reveal. Whereas no Tuunbaq would mean there is a much firmer storyline that we grasp to but is still entirely fictional. Tuunbaq reminds us that the real tragedy of the Franklin expedition was the civilized hubris of the Arctic. And how can you not connect Tuunbaq's death from civilization's poison to the 21st century knowledge of global warming, a time where no true Tuunbaq gets in the way of the Northwest passage anymore and each year the ice melts more and more.

And these are just my thoughts on Tuunbaq. There's so much more about this show that makes it great, but just wanted to share those thoughts with true fans because I haven't seen Tuunbaq really described in this way on here.