Explorer: Lost in the Arctic Thursday, Aug. 24, 10/9c, National Geographic

“WHAT WOULD YOU do? If your friend died and you were starving, would you eat him?” National Geographic Explorer Mark Synnott (inset) mulled the unthinkable while trying to solve one of history’s greatest seafaring mysteries: what happened to the 129 men of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition whose ships got trapped in the Arctic ice while the sailors were trying to be the first to navigate the Northwest Passage

- Kate Hahn

“We know they all died,” Synnott says. “I’m curious what people do when it’s pure survival.” This need for answers has fueled multiple searchers from 1848 until the present day, and even inspired the horror novel The Terror, adapted in 2018 to launch an AMC anthology series.