Near the end of Dan Simmons’s 2007 novel The Terror, which has been adapted into a grueling miniseries for AMC, a character slips loose of their timeline and sees a vision of things that have been and things to come, culminating in a vague warning of the Arctic waters warming, of future cataclysms.

Rating: 5 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark

It’s Simmons’s biggest swing, decoupling from the book entirely to suggest that the apocalypse is no one moment but rather unfurling all around us all the time. Your best day is the end of the world for somebody else. And on it goes.

The irony of bringing the specter of climate change into his book so late is that Simmons has set the bulk of his novel amid the story of the doomed Franklin expedition, which set sail for the Arctic in 1845 in hopes of finding the Northwest Passage, only to find itself iced in for years on end.

The expedition vanished, the men never to be heard of again. The HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, the two warships they retrofitted to be icebreakers, were finally found on the ocean floor in 2014 and 2016, respectively. (You may have read about it.) What remains we have found of the expedition suggest a long, slow descent into utter hell, with the survivors perhaps even resorting to cannibalism.

The melting of the polar ice cap may yet bring about an extinction-level event for humanity, but the members of the Franklin expedition encountered their own apocalypse out there, on all that ice, amid the bleary white. If that sounds like a depressing thing to make a 10-episode TV series about, well, it is. It’s also tremendous.

The Terror is the rare too-long TV show that uses its length well

The first thing you’ll notice about The Terror is that it’s long. While Simmons’s novel — which has been somewhat reimagined for television, especially as more information about the Franklin expedition’s ultimate fate has rendered inaccurate some of the book’s extrapolations about what “really” happened — was probably too overstuffed for a two-hour movie, a 10-hour miniseries is too big.

Do you really want to spend 10 hours watching a bunch of men slowly die, slowly realize that the nation and cause and perhaps even God they sail for are lies? Do you really want to spend 10 hours watching bad decisions compound upon bad decisions, until a handful of these men are barely scrabbling out an existence in a land where nothing grows? TV sometimes gains power from knowing what’s coming, and I’d argue The Terror does too, which may be why its very first scene suggests what’s to come. But 10 hours? Probably not. Maybe eight. Maybe ... six?

And I’ve talked to a number of critics who found the early going a slog, too decompressed and slow-moving. Intellectually, I get it. The first few hours of The Terror are a little light on incident, preferring instead to depict the harshness of the Arctic and all the exciting ways one can die there. They also spend copious amounts of time sketching out the miniature societies on board both the Erebus and Terror, the better to unravel those societies later.

I’m normally the first to sigh over a TV series that doesn’t seem to start its story until hour four or five — as is arguably true of The Terror — but the storytelling here, from a team led by David Kajganich and Soo Hugh, gains strength from its slow burn. The utter desolation and horror of the series’ back half is made more potent by how relatively normal things are for the first few episodes, before reality starts to buck and heave like the ever-shifting ice. (Those worried that this will play very slowly week to week should know that each episode has a “mission” at its core that the men undertake to survive. You have a reasonable expectation it won’t go well, but the show is surprisingly episodic and engaging from week to week.)

This sounds a little like the old eye-rolling excuse of “Just wait until it gets good!” but I would suggest that the things that make The Terror such terrific TV are, ultimately, inextricable from the things that make the first few episodes a tougher sit. You need to feel the boredom and the anxiety that stems from waiting for the ice to open up just enough to press forward, on toward the North American west coast. And the more the men are cooped up together, the darker their feelings toward each other turn, which really requires living in the stew with them for a while.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the production elements are first-rate. The production design, costumes, and makeup transport viewers to the 1840s, then work doubly hard to show the passage of time, the way the ships slowly deteriorate, the way clothes turn to rags, the way skin stretches taut and turns unnatural colors from the cold. The music (much by experimental composer Marcus Fjellström) is appropriately alien and icy. The cast — headed up by Mad Men and The Crown’s Jared Harris, in the star performance he’s clearly been capable of all along, if somebody would just trust him with it — commits, too, dissecting the ways the social compact frays quickly in the face of such horrors.

And oh, yes, The Terror is a horror series, but not in the way you might be thinking.

The Terror boasts many, many monsters

Readers of Simmons’s book — or even just the back cover of Simmons’s book — will know that Simmons has chosen to explain many of the hardest-to-understand decisions the men of the Franklin expedition made by suggesting that they were being stalked across the ice by some strange, intelligent creature, similar to a polar bear, but much larger and much smarter. (Then again, considering lead poisoning likely contributed to their deaths, and lead poisoning can cause horrible hallucinations, maybe Simmons is onto something.)

On TV, The Terror has preserved this element, but has also preserved the sense that maybe none of it is happening, that maybe it’s all a shared delusion among these men. It’s also preserved the sense that the darkest things that can happen out on the ice will happen between the men — and that the most horrible thing of all is either the unrelenting ice and cold or the insistence that it must be tamed to find a newer, quicker, more profitable shipping route.

This sense of squander and loss makes the last four or five episodes of The Terror some of the bleakest television I’ve seen, but not in a way that feels exploitative or needlessly miserable. Even though the series has nature itself and a monster roaming the ice, the most terrible choices are always made by people, and you always understand just why they make those choices. The series follows follies as they beget other follies, but always traces them back to the one central folly of believing technology could best the ice at all.

It all culminates in the final three episodes, which won’t be for everyone but which I couldn’t stop myself from consuming in one gulp, filled as they are with sequences like a strange, muted battle in the fog (much of it shot in one take, but not in overtly showy fashion) and a dying man having a few last glimpses of nature’s occasional beauty and perfection in his mind’s eye, before being carried away by death, nature’s ultimate equalizer.

Fans of the book may find themselves missing certain elements of Simmons’s go-for-broke ending, but the series has its own riff on those same central themes, one that I found just as arresting and just as involving. Sooner or later, the world will end for you and for me, but the world itself will go on, even if all of us humans die in some great reckoning, in fire or flood or famine.

We believe ourselves conquerors, but we are prisoners of the gravity that binds us to a planet indifferent to our survival and our own feeble bodies that break so easily. And there is so much out there that can kill us in an instant.

The Terror debuts Monday, March 26, on AMC at 9 pm Eastern, with two episodes. One episode will air every week thereafter on Mondays at 9 pm Eastern.