Josh Hartnett in Below —Courtesy of NetflixWarning: 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?”A fine handWillow Kean, Rohan Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Ruby Stokes —Courtesy of NetflixThe 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 stayedbehind, 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.The nest in the harborMackenzie Davis as Fonda —Courtesy of NetflixFonda 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.There is no curseAt 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: can’t fish, can’t make a living, can’t keep this family together. Turns out, there is no curse. There’s only the Crockers.” A curse is something a family inherits, but a company is something it can fight.McKeown reads the adult Calvin as a man who took every loss personally because no one told him the truth. “Calvin has been lied to his whole life about what he saw in the water, what happened to his father, the reasons why this town is no longer a viable place to live,” he says. The word he reaches for is “gaslit.” Hartnett hears relief in the speech, and something underneath it: “a bit of guilt for all of the time that he spent feeling that way, and therefore putting pressure on his family.”A soldier interrupts with orders to evacuate, now. Calvin climbs into the helicopter with his family, reluctantly, and when Mary (Ruby Stokes) tells him to buckle up, he refuses. “I can’t just roll over,” he says. “I just need to stay and see this thing through.” Wade unbuckles his own seatbelt. “If Dad’s staying, I’m staying too,” he says. When Mary begs Calvin to stop him, he won’t: “Wade’s his own man. He can do what he likes.”Wade scrambles out after his father, and Heaton laughs at the memory of shooting it. “I crawl over everyone like a child,” he says. He finds Calvin’s line sweet precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. “There is something so childlike about Wade,” Heaton says. “He’s got such great energy and exuberance for life.”With Calvin and Wade’s minds made up, the others start having second thoughts. Jay (Rohan Campbell) and Ruth (Willow Kean) climb out too, and Mary’s boyfriend, Noah (Kaleb Horn), tells her she belongs here. Hartnett says their choice to stay “means everything” to Calvin. “He can’t believe that now they’re standing by him when the guns are out,” he says. “This is insane. But it’s his lifelong wish to reestablish his family unit.”A solution inspired by iceberg cowboysAzriel Dalman, Kamryn Pliva, Rhiannon Morgan —Courtesy of NetflixHoled up in the old packing plant with Fonda and Wade, Calvin watches the harbor and hatches a plan that sounds outlandish. If the eggs are in the ice and the mother won’t leave the eggs, then move the ice itself. “That ice weighs over 100,000 tons,” Fonda says. “150,000 probably, but it still floats, though,” Calvin replies.The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. McKeown met Newfoundlanders who harvest icebergs for a living, selling the meltwater as luxury water and vodka, and describes them as “just wild, crazy, adventurer kind of guys.” The offshore oil and shipping industries taught him the other half. “You can’t melt them, you can’t destroy them,” McKeown says. “All you can do is sort of manage them, and that often means steering them out of the way or breaking them up into smaller pieces.” It made Calvin, whose livelihood adapted around the ice, the natural man for the job. “It’s one of those simple but genius Newfoundland kind of ideas,” McKeown says.The family reunites in the plant, Mary and Noah last of all, and Calvin, who spent the morning refusing to leave, now tries to send them away. “Now you want to stay?” he says. To Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “The Passenger,” the Penneys rig an enormous net. Wade heads to the shoreline with a rifle to shoot the berg into smaller, towable pieces, hands Mary the heirloom ring Noah had planned to propose to her with, and watches her shots finally crack the ice.Elsewhere, Jim Crocker sees the creature as a gift. “That is providence,” he tells Jan. “That is manna from heaven. Thanks to her, we have the cover we need to clear this place without a fight.”The Crockers never needed the creature to be a monster, only to be useful. McKeown frames Below as a story of three families: the Penneys, the Budgells, and the Crockers, split along an old Newfoundland line between the fisherman class and the merchant class. The latter, he says, “sort of represents capitalism” and will “exploit these resources until they’re all gone,” a dynamic he connects to Newfoundland’s overfishing.Calvin and Wade get two boats around the last remaining chunk and tow it out of the harbor, whooping across the water. On shore, Jim and Jan corner Fonda and ask her to call him off. When she won’t, Jim reminds her whose endowment pays her salary and warns that all of it goes away “right here and now.” “Good,” Fonda says. “I don’t want anything to do with your money.” When Jim reminds her of all the Crockers have done for the community, she has a sharper answer. “You’re not saving the world,” she says. “You’re stripping it for parts, and patting yourselves on the back.”When Jan moves for Fonda’s radio, Fonda hits her in the face. Davis shot the punch on the production’s final day, in a take or two she remembers as “just sort of sloppy and messy,” which makes the brief dust-up feel all the more real. What stayed with her more was Newfoundland itself. “Every visual memory I have from making this show is like a Turner painting,” she says. “The most beautiful, sublime, terrifying nature you’ve ever witnessed.”'More alike than I ever expected'Ruby Stokes in Below —Courtesy of NetflixMcKeown says the bond at the center of the finale, between a fisherman and the creature tangled up in the worst day of his life, is what the nest reveal sets up. “It would have been much easier for this to be a creature that just had to be destroyed,” he says. Instead, the finale asks Calvin to recognize himself in her. “They’re just trying to protect their youngsters,” McKeown says. Both have also been forced out of their natural environments by powers beyond their understanding.Hartnett puts Calvin’s recognition in terms of siege. In his reading, Calvin sees “someone who is besieged by the powers that be,” and the kinship comes from a shared certainty. “They’ll do anything to protect them,” Hartnett says. It also explains why Calvin climbed out of the helicopter. “He can do something that he knows is unimpeachable,” Hartnett says. With the forces against Calvin finally clear, he can put himself in harm’s way for something he believes is right. “What else would you do that for?”For a moment, the sacrifice looks literal. A military helicopter finds Calvin inside the strike zone, and Jim, listening from the command tent, presses the lieutenant to authorize a strike anyway. The lieutenant refuses. The harbor is clear. The people of Snook’s Arm can go home.Calvin cuts the last rope. The creature rises and glides alongside the High Hopes, and for a long moment, she and Calvin seem to take each other in. McKeown wanted the stillness to feel bigger than a truce. “You realize you’re connected to something much bigger than yourself,” he says of those rare “cosmic moments.” “I think Calvin is having one of those moments.”It’s just getting warmerDavis as Fonda —Courtesy of NetflixFonda’s voice carries the episode from there, over aerial shots of open water. Most cephalopods mate once, she explains. After they spawn, they die. When the eggs are ready, the mother stops hunting and eating, gives everything in her body to her young, and uses the last of her oxygen to push her hatchlings out of the deep. Then her ordeal is over.At the institute, an assistant asks Fonda whether any of the eggs she froze survived. “No,” Fondasays. “Water’s too warm.” The assistant says that’s sad. “And it’s just getting warmer,” Fonda tells her. “And who knows what’s next.”Davis has thought about that line more since she said it, through a hot, dry summer in England, and she hears in it a woman who refuses to soften bad news. “Things are horrible, it’s not getting better. I’m not saying this to scare you. It’s too late,” Davis says of the moment. Then Fonda steps outside into the wind, where, as Davis tells it, she “breathes the air and looks at the waves on the rocks and sees a whale pod cresting.” For Davis, that’s the other half of the scene. “That’s beautiful, though,” she says. “I don’t want to not appreciate the beauty while it lasts.” Holding both at once is what the actor took from playing Fonda. “Things are bad, but also things are beautiful,” she says.Two lonely animalsSnook’s Arm comes back to life. At the Big Squid Distillery & Brewery, Ruth tells Mary and Noah that the Crockers, their first vote tossed out, are already pushing for another. “At least we now know what everyone’s worth,” Mary says.McKeown is firm that this is not a happy ending. “For me, it’s just a reprieve,” he says. “The Crockers will be back. The glaciers are still melting.” What Calvin won for the town was information: the next offer will come with more money behind it, but “at least they can make an informed decision.”Calvin watches from the edge of the crowd. Fonda spots him and laughs. “Congratulations,” she says. He tells her he’s glad she’ll get her cut. “It’s the only thing keeping the lights on right now,” she says. He looks at her a beat longer than he needs to. “Will you be around later? I can give you the guided tour.” “Yeah,” she says, smiling. “Yes, I’ll be here.”For McKeown, the possibility dawns on the characters and the audience in the same instant. “Calvin and Fonda are two lonely animals,” he says. “They’re both in their own little cages at the beginning, and then they go through this thing together.”The moment surprised the people who made it, too. “We shot that scene, and it just did feel kind of romantic,” Davis says. Hartnett, also an executive producer, wanted a Calvin who doesn’t complain, modeled on the blue-collar Minnesotans he grew up around. A man who keeps his troubles to himself tends to keep his feelings there, too, and that reticence carries into the invitation. “He doesn’t have any game, and I think that’s really lovely,” Hartnett says. Calvin is “now aware that there could be a different future,” he adds. “Is he imagining it yet? I don’t know.”When Calvin excuses himself, it’s to meet someone waiting at the harbor: Wade. The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues” plays as father and son board the High Hopes together, and this time, Wade takes the wheel. Calvin’s hand settles on his shoulder. It was one of the last moments of a five-month shoot whose boat scenes were filmed for real, out on the open water, and Heaton remembers feeling “a lot of pride” as production reached the finish line.Heaton sees Wade arriving somewhere most children reach eventually, if they’re lucky. “You finally get to that point where you see your parents as just people,” he says. “You can kind of understand their choices.” Wade is proud of his father, too. “You want approval from your father,” Heaton says. “That’s like the biggest honor.” For a few seconds, the finale is exactly the family story it kept promising to be.Then the music sours. The High Hopes slows and stops, and the camera cuts behind the boat to show what the two men are looking at: ice on the horizon, more of it than they’ve likely ever seen. The last shot rests on Calvin’s face, squinting, before the cut to black.What’s coming nextCharlie Heaton as Wade —Courtesy of NetflixThe ending traces back to McKeown’s first encounter with a berg, on a drive along the Newfoundland coast, when he rounded a corner to find one filling the sky, then another corner, then a dozen. “It’s so beautiful and it’s so majestic,” he says, recalling the “cosmic feeling” of seeing them. But once his mind “kind of recovered,” another thought intruded: “Where are these coming from? … Isn’t that a little bit scary?” In the premiere, Calvin greets news of a heavy iceberg season as “music to my ears,” because ice is money. By the finale, that bounty reads as a climate warning. “The fact that Calvin sees all these icebergs coming his way should be good news,” McKeown says. “But after everything that he’s been through, he looks at that now and goes, ‘Oh sh-t, what does this mean for our future?’”For Heaton, the last shot is where the show sheds its genre. Much of the series deals in science fiction and horror, he says, but the icebergs point somewhere more immediate. “At the end, it’s like there’s a very harsh reality of actually what’s coming.” Calvin could move one iceberg, but he can’t move all of these.McKeown considers Below complete. The six episodes tell a full story, he says, and leaving Calvin in a “slightly ambiguous and unfinished place” is realism rather than setup. He isn’t ruling out a return, though. “If there’s another story to tell with these characters, great,” he says. “But that’s not my intention.What he wants viewers to sit with is more existential. “That ending is not a cliffhanger, like, oh my God, what’s going to happen next?” McKeown says. “It’s what’s going to happen to us next.” He means the question to travel well beyond Newfoundland. “Climate change eventually will make refugees of us all,” he says. “It will start with the most vulnerable, these people who live on the brink. But eventually, it will come to us.”Looking back on making Below, Hartnett returns to Calvin, a character he loved playing because he is “someone who tries that hard and figures out that they’ve been trying in the wrong direction for most of their life.” By the end, Hartnett says, Calvin has learned to “trust the people around him, to recognize that he is not holding this world together on his own.”Calvin is facing the right direction now. Below ends with him gazing out at the water instead ofaway from it, his son at the wheel and the rest of his family back on shore. He won everything he stayed for, but none of it stops what’s coming. The boy who once leaned over the side of a boat and glimpsed a shape in the water is a grown man now, squinting at the horizon from the deck of the High Hopes. This time, he knows exactly what he’s looking at.