Season1: In 1847-8, the crew of a real life Royal Naval expedition (later known as Franklin's expedition) led by three captains, Sir John Franklin, Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, is sent to find the Arctic's fabled treacherous Northwest Passage but instead discovers a monstrous polar bear-like predator, a cunning and vicious Gothic horror that stalks the ships in a desperate game of survival. However, it soon becomes clear that that's just the beginning of their troubles. As things worsen and civilized behavior disintegrates in favor of survival at any cost, the crew must simultaneously battle the elements, the supernatural and eventually - themselves. The captains' only ally in all of this becomes a mute Inuit woman, who lives as an outcast from her tribe but still follows their old animistic religion. Season 2 (titled "Infamy") follows the inhabitants of the L.A.-based Terminal Island camp for Japanese Americans during WWII and a string of brutal deaths caused by a mysterious ... Written by AMC
Based on the book by Dan Simmons, The Terror gives a somewhat fiction account of the real-life doomed 1845 Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest passage - with an added element of supernatural danger.
Having watched the entire season I feel a little cheated by the final episode. The atmospheric tension throughout the first 9 seemed to vanish as episode 10 progressed, in a race to get to the punchline with the little screen time they had left - and the rushed punchline became a total anticlimax. They strayed a little from the book, which happens, but, you can't help but think that with a little more time, and some better editing, the finale could have been so much better.