When Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) was a child, he experienced an unexplainable tragedy.
The 10-year-old, alongside his mother, sister, and father, had to leave the island he called home, Little Pot Rock, after it was snatched up by the government. So they hitched their house to a boat and towed all their belongings across the ocean. But en route to their new home in Snook’s Arm, a mysterious underwater force began dragging the house into the depths of the ocean — with Calvin’s father inside. The boy, panicked, sawed off the rope that attached the boat to the house, to prevent the rest of his family from being sucked under and drowning as well. Amid all this mayhem, a bright blue eye appeared below the surface, looking at Calvin intently.
Decades later, we’re reunited with Calvin, now a widowed father of three. A down-on-his-luck fisherman, Calvin is struggling to make ends meet in the dying Newfoundland fishing village of Snook’s Arm. He lives with his son Wade (Charlie Heaton), a restless troublemaker, and misses his other children, Mary (Ruby Stokes) and Jay (Rohan Campbell), who have left the island for greener pastures. When the whole family — plus Mary’s boyfriend Noah (Kaleb Horn) — reunites in Snook’s Arm, trouble starts to bubble up from below.
First off, there’s a vote looming that will determine if locals should accept a buyout in exchange for vacating their land, something Calvin is firmly against. Then, there’s the mysterious underwater attacks that threaten to take over the town if the locals can’t figure out what’s causing them and how to stop it. But some of them are a little preoccupied when the local drinking water causes them to experience terrifying symptoms, some of which seem to border on the supernatural. Alongside a marine biologist from the mainland, Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis), Calvin sets out to unravel the ocean’s mysteries, once and for all.
Let’s dive underneath the surface to find out how they fare, and how Below (now streaming on Netflix) ends — with help from Hartnett, Heaton, Davis, and creator Jesse McKeown.
That would be a highly intelligent deep-water cephalopod. While the creature is painted as the villain for the duration of the series, she’s actually not the one Calvin and his family should be concerned about. Much more on that later.
As underwater attacks start to plague Snook’s Arm, the townsfolk begin experiencing violent and unexplainable symptoms — including an unquenchable thirst and the terrifying desire to plunge themselves into the ocean. While Wade is dealing with similar side effects after getting a bit too up close and personal with the creature, he’s also facing increasingly darker issues. A large circular welt appears on his back, which Fonda identifies as the scarring sperm whales receive after fighting with giant squids. He’s also having visions of a dark-haired woman, known as the Old Hag in Newfoundland lore, who has been ominously haunting him at every turn. It’s unclear whether or not she’s a hallucination — until Wade wakes up to find her lying directly on top of him.
The Sea Hag straddles Wade, and he’s terrified … until he realizes, actually, she’s very pretty. The pair share an intimate moment and she whisks him off to Little Pot Rock, the very same island that Calvin and his family left behind decades ago. When Calvin tracks down his son, Wade is living happily with this mysterious woman on the deserted stretch of land — and she’s got some familiar faces with her.
The Old Hag is actually a young woman named Maggie (Marthe Bernard), who’s the daughter of Walton Budgell (Shawn Doyle), Calvin’s childhood friend. When the rest of the locals were vacating Little Pot Rock decades ago, Walton and his family secretly stayed put. Walton cryptically hints that they struck a pact with the sea creature — who he calls Mudder — but doesn’t elaborate further.
While on the island, Calvin is startled to discover his father’s grave. Walton explains that they were able to find what little remained of his body and gave him a proper burial. A shocked and heartbroken Calvin reveals to his childhood friend that he killed his father when he cut the rope that attached their house to the boat. Walton pushes back, insisting that if Calvin hadn’t made that decision, the rest of his family would have died too.
As Calvin tries to accept the reality that he might not be responsible for his father’s death, there are even more surprises in store for him. It turns out that Walton’s family has developed a special relationship with Mudder, wherein she procures them massive amounts of fish from the sea in exchange for their feeding her right back. What does that mean, exactly? Well, it entails sacrificing the bodies of others so that Mudder will continue to supply them with food. That includes a Portuguese fisherman named Phil (Raf Rogers), whom they’ve been holding hostage on the island and been feeding to Mudder one limb at a time. They eventually plan to offer all of him as a tribute to the giant squid.
Calvin begins to realize that Walton has gone completely nuts. He also discovers that Walton believes that Mudder “marked” Wade for Maggie, sparing the young man so that the pair could have a child together. Calvin suspects that, after Wade gives Maggie a child, he will be sacrificed to Mudder just like the rest of them. He rushes to Wade’s side to try to convince his son to leave, but Wade is deeply smitten with Maggie, who has given him an engagement ring. (For the record: she stole the ring from Mary’s boyfriend Noah, who had been planning to propose.)
“He finally feels like he belongs, and he’s not the stupid kid that everyone makes him out to be or the idiot son that his dad puts on him,” Heaton explains. “He finally feels like he can express himself.”
Ultimately, though, Wade chooses his dad over Maggie. He saves Calvin’s life when Walton tries to attack him, and the pair escapes together into the darkness, as Maggie’s heartbroken shrieks echo throughout the ocean. The whole bizarre, dark escapade wasn’t for nothing, though: Calvin made a discovery while in Little Pot Rock that’s about to change the whole course of the story.
As it turns out, the call was coming from inside Snook’s Arm. The real villain of the story is the Crockers, a wealthy, merchant-class family, led by patriarch Jim Crocker (Frank Moore), who have long held tremendous power over the codfish industry in Newfoundland, but pivoted to oil, mining, and other forms of resource extraction once the codfish ran out. Calvin makes this discovery while in Little Pot Rock, when he finds an old mining permit that reveals that the Crockers had pushed locals out of their homes to procure valuable cobalt and copper, which ran all the way through Little Pot Rock, under the ocean, and directly into Snook’s Arm.
That’s why Calvin and his family had to leave their home decades ago. And that’s also why the Crockers have been commandeering a resettlement vote for Snook’s Arm, where locals have no idea they are living on top of incredible riches. As Walton explains to Calvin, “It’s cheaper to move folks than to pay them what they’re worth.” The Crockers are now using Mudder as the boogeyman to push villagers out of Snook’s Arm.
McKeown pulled inspiration from actual resettlements that occurred in Newfoundland. “It’s a big part of the history here, a lot of people’s families were affected by it,” he explains. “There are lots of small towns still in the province that are grappling with this decision of whether to stay or whether to be resettled.”
Jan (Natasha Henstridge), the woman who’s overseeing the resettlement vote — and is also having a fling with Jay — is revealed to be Jim Crocker’s daughter, who moved to Snook’s Arm to help manipulate the vote. This is all huge news for Calvin, who always felt like he was to blame for everything that had gone wrong in his life, starting with his father’s death. “Turns out there is no curse, there’s only the Crockers, they’ve had this thing rigged from the get-go,” he says.
Suddenly, Mudder is no longer the culprit. Finding out about the Crockers was the greatest “unburdening” for Calvin, Hartnett explains. “All of this was beyond his ability to comprehend or to stop when he was a kid,” he says. “Big money and the government had a hand in everything that had gone wrong in his life, which relieves him of guilt entirely. Once he finds out that there is someone to blame, that’s when the engines really kick in, and he starts to need to do something about it.”
Turns out, Mudder wasn’t trying to infect the townsfolk of Snook’s Arm, nor were the symptoms they were experiencing supernatural. Her mucus spread to icebergs, which were swiftly melting into the ocean and cycling into the local water supply. You see, the Mudder’s secretions are actually used for her to hunt her prey. The mucus infects its host with an unquenchable thirst, drawing it to the ocean where she consumes them as her food.
That’s why, early on in the show, when Calvin is trying to sell ice to make some extra money, it was rejected as “bad ice.” The particles were infected with Mudder’s organic matter.
Ultimately, it was climate change that led to Mudder’s arrival in Snook’s Arm. She had been “unleashed” on the fishing town because of global warming and the melting of the ice, McKeown notes. If the creature had been able to find cold enough water to safely hatch her eggs, she wouldn’t have inflicted such harm on the town.
There’s a mandatory evacuation order in Snook’s Arm when Calvin and Wade return to the island. As locals prepare to leave all their possessions behind and flee in helicopters provided by the Crocker family, Fonda pleads desperately with the military on the ground, who — with Jim Crocker’s forceful encouragement — plan to destroy Mudder. As Calvin later explains, an air strike against the cephalopod will destroy the harbor and make it impossible for the residents of Snook’s Arm to move back. “Then, they can gut this place for all it’s worth,” he says.
The marine biologist tells the group that she discovered Mudder’s egg sac is stuck in the iceberg — that’s why she’s acting so aggressive. The water is too warm for her babies to survive, and she knows it. “This is an extraordinary creature — maybe the only one of her kind — she deserves to be studied, not bombed from the sky,” Fonda emphatically says. Essentially, she’s not a monster, she’s a mother in crisis.
Fonda’s words fall on deaf ears. As one military official informs her that they have a “duty to eliminate the threat,” Jim coyly reassures her that she’ll be given the remains to study exclusively.
Meanwhile, the Penney family is boarding a helicopter to head off the island. Just as they’re getting ready to take off, Calvin hops off the aircraft, with Wade enthusiastically joining him. “I can’t just roll over, I need to see this thing through,” Calvin says, before the two men depart. After some hushed back-and-forth, the rest of his family deplane as well, ready to fight for the town alongside their dad. “Suddenly, they’re all together again … we called it Scooby Doo, we were Scooby Doo-ing together,” Hartnett says.
Fonda reveals to Calvin that Mudder wasn’t acting vindictively this whole time — she was trying to look after her unborn children. This really resonates with the father of three, who declares, “All this time she was trying to protect her youngsters.”
A plan begins to form. They’ll safely move Mudder and the iceberg containing her egg sac into deeper, safer waters before the military strike begins.
Fair question. First, Mary and Wade shoot the massive iceberg, causing it to crumble into smaller pieces and making it far easier to move. Then, Calvin attaches a giant net to his boat, which he uses to surround the part of the iceberg that contains Mudder’s egg sac, pulling it safely alongside him to deeper waters, where she — and her soon-to-be children — can peacefully co-exist.
For most of Calvin’s life, the creature had filled him with terror and a need for vengeance. “Then he realizes he’s never going to vanquish this beast,” says McKeown. “And in fact, he learns what she’s all about and that there is this way of coexisting, which he hadn’t thought of before.”
The Crockers, meanwhile, have discovered that Calvin knows about their devious mining plan and confront Fonda, demanding that she radio Calvin’s boat and tell him to abandon his plan.
Despite Jim’s threats, which include stripping her of a job, the marine biologist stands her ground. When Jan tries to grab the radio from her, Fonda punches her in the face … and then profusely apologizes. “That was the last thing we shot,” Davis says. “I like it when characters step into superhuman realms for a split second, it’s fun to touch that and then immediately return to earth.”
Calvin successfully moves Mudder into safer waters and tells her that there won’t be a “soul around to give [her] and [her] youngsters any grief,” before cutting the cord that attaches the boat to the net, mirroring the very same shot we see in the show’s opening scene.
“I think it’s a vindication, it’s a moment of finding oneself,” Hartnett says. “It’s where he thought he lost himself early on, and it turned out that was false, but now he gets his chance to redeem himself and to do something that he knows is right, to save this creature and the creature’s children, and to make things right.”
In their last moments together, Calvin makes eye contact with Mudder’s blue eye once more. “He’s having what I would call a cosmic sort of moment,” McKeown says. “He learns what she’s all about and, I think at the end, realizes that they’re not that different.”
Sadly, no. As Fonda explains in one of the show’s final scenes, the water was too warm for Mudder’s babies to survive. “And it’s just getting warmer,” the marine biologist adds in a matter-of-fact manner.
That line of dialogue “echoes” the state of the world today, Davis says. “Things haven’t gotten better,” the actor continues. “So, the new philosophy I have is be involved and passionate and kind and follow your ethical roadmap, but you also need to be alive and happy and live every day with some degree of joy.”
Yes! Good cheer is back in Snook’s Arm, cod supply is up (for now), and the Crocker family’s name has been yanked from storefronts. On top of all that, the resettlement vote has officially been tossed out — though Mary learns that the Crockers are pushing for another one. “At least we now know what everybody’s worth,” she says, unconcerned, as she passes by the bustling Big Squid Distillery, a new watering hole operated by the Penneys.
“Calvin gets to stay, he gets to keep his family,” says McKeown. “It won’t be forever. Like we say at the end, the Crockers will be back, and they’ll be fighting for another vote and the world is changing, but for now he’s going to stay.”
As life on the island flourishes, Fonda comes by to check out the new bar. She shares some sweetly awkward eye contact with Calvin before he offers to give her the grand tour later that day.
“For me, the interesting part is that he’s open enough to say, ‘I'll see you later on’ and that she’s sort of open enough to say, ‘I’ll stick around,’ ” McKeown says.
For the first time, it looks like all might be right in Calvin Penney’s life. But, in the final few seconds of Below, we see several more icebergs cresting out of the water. The primary thought going through Calvin’s head in that last moment is, “ ‘Oh, shit,’ ” Hartnett tells Tudum. “In the world of this show, that one iceberg had some pretty intense secrets. Are there any other things that are about to come out of these many icebergs?”
That last ominous image is a glimpse of what’s to come, especially when it comes to climate change, McKeown explains. “Things are going to get worse, they’re going to get weirder, they’re going to get a lot scarier, and it’s going to happen really quickly,” he says. At the beginning of the series, Calvin sees a plethora of icebergs as luck, a sign that he can make some quick money in town. But now, McKeown says, “after everything he’s been through, he doesn’t see dollar signs. I think he sees something much darker.”
Below is streaming on Netflix now.
