Breaking Down the Ominous Ending of Below
Time · LC · trust 40/100
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Below finale.
Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) cuts his engine far from shore. Behind his boat, the High Hopes, trails a slab of iceberg the size of a church, netted like a catch. He looks at it for a while. “Nice and deep, about 2,000 meters to the bottom, and not a soul around to give you and your youngsters any grief,” he tells the creature clinging to the base of the ice, the one he glimpsed in the water the day his father died. “Most of my life, you had me scared half to death. But I dare say we’re more alike than I ever expected.” He moves to cut the line. His confession is where Netflix’s six-part limited series arrives after five episodes of a different kind of dread. Jesse McKeown’s Below opens on a family towing their house across a Newfoundland bay until something drags it under, and for most of its run it behaves like the creature feature that scene promises. Calvin, a widowed fisherman with three kids, teams up with marine biologist Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) as an unidentified cephalopod tears through his hometown of Snook's Arm and exerts a strange psychoactive pull on his son Wade (Charlie Heaton).
It draws Wade to Little Pot Rock, the island the Penneys fled 40 years earlier, where the Budgells stayed behind: Walton (Shawn Doyle), who knew Calvin as a boy, his elderly father, and his daughter Maggie (Marthe Bernard), who quickly captivates Wade. The Crockers, a wealthy merchant family, own the local fish plant and much of the town, and for decades, long before anything surfaced in the bay, they've pushed to resettle Snook's Arm, moving its residents elsewhere.
The penultimate episode offers Calvin the truth: a mining permit with the Crocker name on it, cobalt and copper under Snook’s Arm, and a plan to move a town rather than pay it what it’s worth. The same day, Fonda chips into a block of harbor ice in the town hall freezer and finds something alive inside. The creature is a mother, and the iceberg is her nest.
Those two discoveries set the finale in motion. The monster the show spent five episodes running from turns out to be a refugee, and the people it kept calling saviors turn out to be the threat. What’s left is a question of what a man does once he can see that. “The whole story has been a kind of slow awakening for Calvin,” McKeown tells TIME. “That’s what the finale is: eyes wide open. What are you going to do now?”
Willow Kean, Rohan Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Ruby Stokes Courtesy of Netflix
The episode begins small, on the dory Calvin and Wade used to flee Little Pot Rock, the Budgells’ cabin still burning behind them. Calvin thanks his son for saving his life, then admits he was wrong about him. “You and me had a hard go of it since your brother and your sister left, and your mother before that,” he says. “I should never have kept you off those boats. You’d have made a fine hand. I can see that now.”
Heaton describes Wade at the start of the series as a “lost boy,” a young man with “all this energy” who “doesn’t really have anywhere to put it.” The only Penney child who stayed
behind, he spent most of the season looking like a failure to launch. “To finally be trusted, I think, is a big thing,” Heaton says. For Hartnett, what matters is that Calvin can say it at all. “His fear was holding him back and making Wade the person that Calvin was upset he became,” he says.
Snook’s Arm, meanwhile, is emptying, with the military clearing everyone away from the water and the creature in it. The lieutenant overseeing the evacuation is grateful for the Crocker helicopters; with wildfires burning out west, his men are “spread too thin.” Shaking his hand, Jim Crocker introduces Jan (Natasha Henstridge), as his daughter. The night before, the creature went on a rampage when they tried to force her out of the harbor. “Where is it now?” Jim asks, and the show’s title appears over Calvin and Wade, drifting past the iceberg in their small boat.
Fonda spends part of the morning on an informal memorial. She lays Barry’s blue shirt on the rocks above the water and weighs it down with stones. Her one colleague in Snook’s Arm, Barry caught the infection from the creature earlier in the season and in Episode 4 ran to the pier and dove in. Davis calls him Fonda’s “lifeboat,” and says his death helps awaken a “deep well of rage.”
She needs it. In the command tent, Fonda explains that the creature is a deep-water cephalopod, highly intelligent, unlike anything on the taxonomic record, and female. “Her egg sac is frozen in that iceberg out there,” she says. “These waters are too warm for her. Her eggs won’t survive, and she knows it.” As the soldiers confer, Fonda insists the creature, maybe “the only one of her kind,” deserves “to be studied, not bombed from the sky.” One soldier answers with the toll. “Respectfully, this thing has downed three vessels and killed 19 people so far,” he says. “We have a duty to eliminate the threat.” Jim then offers Fonda exclusive access to the remains once the creature is “dealt with.” “She may be the last of her kind,” he says, turning her own words back on her.
Davis frames Fonda’s eventual refusal less as a moral awakening than as the end of a comfortable denial. “It’s easy to turn a blind eye to it until it’s placed very baldly in front of you,” she says. Fonda had “convinced herself she was doing that before” while remaining “pleasantly ignorant.” The creature has never been prey to her, or a trophy. “She’s moving through this whole experience with curiosity rather than vengeance,” Davis says. That’s what makes Jim’s offer so ugly: it asks her to trade the mystery for its corpse.
At the Penney house, the family is packing and cursing Jan’s name when Calvin shows them the mining permit. His speech is the finale’s turn. “All my life, I thought we was cursed, like there was something in our blood, boiled in our bones,” Calvin says. “Blaming myself for every little thing that went wrong:…
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