Below Ending Explained: What Do More Icebergs Mean for Snook’s Arm?

Netflix‘s Below is a six-episode limited series created by Jesse McKeown, and it spends most of its runtime pretending to be a monster show before revealing what it actually is. Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a widowed Newfoundland fisherman who watched his father drown as a boy when the family house was towed across the bay and something pulled it under.

Forty years later, a huge iceberg appears overnight in the harbour of Snook’s Arm, and whatever came with it starts killing people. Mackenzie Davis plays marine biologist Fonda Howander, and Charlie Heaton plays Calvin’s son Wade.

By the finale, the creature is no longer the villain, and the final shot of ice crowding the horizon is not the cliffhanger many viewers assumed. Here is what all of it means.

What Was the Big Mystery Surrounding the Giant Aggressive Cephalopod?

The twist is that the iceberg and the creature were never two separate problems. While the show initially made the discovery that the iceberg was made of some kind of mucous membrane secreted by the giant squid, it waited until the fifth episode to reveal why it was there.

Fonda works this out after chipping into a block stored in the town hall freezer and finding something alive inside. The membrane running through the iceberg is an egg sac. The iceberg is a nest. The creature’s Deep Arctic habitat has become unlivable as the water warms, so she drifted south and stopped at Snook’s Arm to spawn.

She destroyed boats, killed Jerry Biles, and sank a research vessel all for keeping the humans from approaching her nest. Her defence mechanism explains the rest. The gelatinous secretion townsfolk unknowingly consumed triggers a wasting illness that drives the infected to walk straight into the sea, which is how Fonda loses her colleague Barry.

The cruellest part is that none of it was working in favor of the giant cephalopod. Fonda tells the military plainly that these waters are too warm, the eggs will not survive, and the mother already knows it.

While Calvin and his family’s bravery set things straight for Snook’s Arm in the end, it may not be permanent. In the final minutes, Calvin and Wade take the High Hopes out and find the horizon is crowded with ice. Are there more eggs of the giant squid out there? Is it a hook for a second season?

Even if it’s not, Calvin no longer views them as the money-making opportunity that he did in the first episode. He will now be more cautious about approaching those icebergs.

Why Did the Crockers Want Everyone Out of Snook’s Arm in Below?

The Crockers are the real antagonists, and they were working on Snook’s Arm long before anything surfaced in the bay. A wealthy merchant family, they own the fish plant and much of the town, and have pushed resettlement for decades.

Calvin finds the answer in the penultimate episode, when he finds a mining permit carrying the Crocker name and enormous cobalt and copper reserves under his old hometown. Little Pot Rock, the island the Penneys fled 40 years earlier, was cleared the same way, which means Calvin’s father died inside a resettlement scheme nobody told him about.

The squid simply handed them a shortcut. Jim Crocker calls the creature providence, because an airstrike would wreck the harbour and leave residents with no livelihood and no choice but to sell. When Calvin tows the nest out to sea and removes the justification, Jim pressures the lieutenant to bomb anyway.

However, neither the lieutenant nor Fonda, whom he threatened earlier, fell for the threats. It gives Calvin the realization that the series builds to. He always believed his family was cursed. He understood there was no curse, only the Crockers. Toward the end, we learn that the Crockers are still pushing for a vote on resettlement.

What Happened to Calvin and Wade at Little Pot Rock?

Little Pot Rock is where the horror gets personal. When the resettlement happened, not everyone left. The Budgell family, including Walton, who knew Calvin as a boy, his elderly father, and Walton’s daughter Maggie, stayed. And they came across as the most terrifying part of this thriller, more than the giant creature.

Wade is drawn to this place through Maggie. The creature exerts a strange psychoactive pull on him after his encounter on Jerry Biles’ boat, bringing hallucinations, a raging thirst, and a scar on his back.

This brings him to Maggie, who seems to have captivated him. Calvin also reaches the island by accident, washing ashore after the squid destroys Steve’s research ship. Both their arrival and their experience on the island add some supernatural element to the show.

After Calvin discovers the Budgells’ unusual deal with the “Mudder”, aka the giant creature, he convinces Wade to leave. When Calvin and Wade finally pull away from the island, Walton is struck down, their cabin is burning behind them, and Maggie keeps screaming out Wade’s name.

The escape also helps Calvin understand Wade better and realize his mistake in keeping Wade away from the boat. He thanks his son for saving his life, then admits he was wrong to keep him off the boat, and that Wade would have made a fine hand.

What did you think of Below? Let us know in the comments!

Below is now streaming on Netflix.