Okay maybe I’m gonna sound like a lunatic but hear me out here. This is my terror theory:
Hickey never killed anyone.
- Gibson: he was dying anyway so this was purely a noble, heroic act of euthanasia to ease his suffering. Vets do this, we don’t call them murderers. But maybe we should?
- Macdonald: explicitly an accident! 😁 and he looked like he felt really bad about it too
- The dog: he said it broke its leg and as Mr Hickey is such a trustworthy and reliable member of the crew I believe him. I simply don’t think he would lie to a senior officer.
- Farr: we didn’t see it happen so who’s to say he didn’t collapse from an undiagnosed heart condition and Hickey was kneeling over him with a knife in hand to perform emergency surgery? And he was half naked because he gave Farr his clothes to keep him warm? What a generous individual!
- Irving: he was homophobic and Hickey’s a gay man so I think we can all agree that stabbing him 23 times in the chest was an act of self defence. Next!
- The Netsilik family: this one was hard I can’t lie. However you spin it it’s just bad optics to kill a six year old. But… we never see it on screen, it happens between episodes. So, no one can say for sure that Irving didn’t turn out to just be asleep instead of dead, and got up and killed the family, perhaps because he thought they were gay, and then Hickey bravely killed him to end his rampage. We just don’t know!
- Everyone killed in Tuunbaq’s attack on the camp: now it’s very easy to lay the blame at Hickey’s feet for invoking Tuunbaq’s wrath. But we’ve already discussed how this is Irving’s fault instead so let’s move on. His revenge from beyond the grave to clear out all the gays on the expedition. Shameful.
- Everyone killed in Tuunbaq’s final attack (Tozer, Hodgson, Armitage etc): you could argue this is even more Hickey’s fault than the last one. And it’s true that he did take them all there, chain them together so they couldn’t escape, and deliberately call Tuunbaq to their location. Certainly none of those men would have died right then if he hadn’t done that. But let’s take a look at the bigger picture. Would those men have died at all if Sir John had listened to Crozier and turned the ships around so they didn’t get stuck in pack ice? NO. And frankly I think trying to pin it on a working class gay man when the true culprit is upper class and straight is very telling. Try examining your prejudices.
and original Cornelius Hickey accidentally fell into regent’s canal bequeathing his name and identity to E.C. 😅
with a little knife he stabbed himself with by accident.
