It’s been quite the choppy journey for Netflix’s aquatic thriller, Below. Much like the ever-changing nature of the sea, the show opted to chuck in strange tonal shifts and random plots that bizarrely chose to go nowhere, and while I mostly enjoyed the unpredictable nature of the ride, the fact we’re at the final episode means that there’s a reckoning at hand.
Things started off predictably enough as the show first styled itself on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws much to the surprise of nobody; but as it went on, more erratic influences got added which took the show in wilder directions. Only, it didn’t – with hints that Below would spice up its killer animal vibes with a dash of George Romero’s The Crazies, a hint of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and some hallucinogenic goodies that invoked the likes of the Elder Gods H.P. Lovecraft, we find that in its final installment, everything else falls away to reveal that the last influence left standing is – Free Willy?…
After escaping Little Pot Rock and the giant squid worshiping community that lives there, both Calvin and Wade make their way back to Snook’s Arm to reunite with the rest of their family. However, once there, they soon discover that a few things have changed in their absence and the main one is that the cephalopod of the moment, Mudder, is sticking close to that bloody great iceberg in the bay. We now know, thanks to the work of Fonda, that the reason Mudder has been acting so aggressive is that her egg sac is located within the expanse of ice and because the waters are too warm for the babies to survive after they hatch, it’s made her extra anxious.
The other big change to the harbour is that the military have moved in under the say-so of the Crocker Group, headed up by opportunistic businessman Jim Crocker and backed up by his equally cold bloodef daughter, Jan. Their plan is to evacuate the town, then bomb the iceberg and the squid from the air – but while this would provide the surrounding area with a shitload of fried calamari and end the local death toll, it’s also a dastardly scheme to level the harbour meaning that the population would have to relocate, leaving the Crockers to once again take their land.
Knowing full well that the Crockers want to lay their hands on the cobalt and copper deposits sitting under their town, Calvin hits upon a ballsy plan – to tow the iceberg back out to sea to draw Mudder away and call off the airstrike. With his whole family working with him, Calvin finally manages to defy the Crockers and free Snook’s Arm from the aggressive nature of a brooding Mudder, but as ecological issues continue to cause the temperatures of oceans to rise, what’s to stop yet more icebergs suddenly drifting free and bringing more trouble with them?
While I think I might have been in the minority when it came to enjoying the many, fluctuating moods of the deeply uneven Below, I have to say that, for the most part, it all falls to pieces during a noticably lackluster ending. While the previous episode threw pretty much everything but the kitchen sink at us just to see what would stick, episode 6 suddenly turns frustratingly passive on us despite shelling out episode after episode of promise. Obviously, the shift to make Mudder a focus of pity all of a sudden is understandable – hell, even the first Lake Placid played the conservation card once upon a time – but the change from sub crushing, man eating, threat to cooing mother is so abrupt, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’ve somehow missed an episode somewhere. Similarly, the introduction of an unscrupulous businessman as the big bad ends up being horribly generic when you consider at one point we were dealing with a drugged-out remote community willing to murder for their beloved squid only a single episode ago.
Another thing that becomes frustratingly apparent is that the show has now dropped almost every single cool idea it once had in order to focus totally on the most boring one. A town driven crazy by squid toxin? Nope, everyone’s suddenly gotten better off screen. Squid worshiping cult? One episode and done, I guess, with no mention of what’s actually become of Walton and Maggie whatsoever. Big, Jaws-style battle to the death between man and nature? Forget it, Mudder’s too worried about her kids and now needs saving by the nan who once hated her the most. However, what’s most annoying is that by ditching its most far fetched ideas overboard, what’s left doesn’t actually make any sense.
If Mudder was brought to the surface due to rising temperatures and a drifting egg sac, why was she around to kill Calvin’s father forty years ago? If her threatened babies have made her more aggressive, then why does she allow Calvin to tow the iceberg in the first place? Are they suggesting that Mudder is smart enough to have figured all this out? Well, if that’s so, why has she been eating tourists and Portuguese fishermen? Why would the poisoned townsfolk just suddenly get better with no real after effects? What was the point of Jay owning money? What was the point of Wade falling for Maggie? To be honest, I don’t actually think that even the showrunners know the answers to some of these questions either, but that doesn’t stop them going even further with their eco message by saying that even after all that, Mudder and her brood we always doomed to succumb to the warmer climate. It’s an important message, sure, but it’s ultimately rendered a moot point by resulting in a deeply unsatisfying resolution that sort of makes everything that’s come before pointless. We’re supposed to be happy that the Penney’s have ultimately thwarted the Crockers, but that wasn’t the actual point of the show when it started, and shifting its maritime menace to a misunderstood creature just feels like something of a cop-out.
Still, for most of it, the disfunctional Penneys manage to carry us through the rougher patches, distracting accents and all, but considering all the aquatic, rural and contagion horror we were promised, I can’t help but feel we were cheated out of something that offered the world, but didn’t know how to deliver. Literally any of the other scenarios it raised would have been better than the simplistic squid-hugging we ended up with – and while I get and applaud the message, it doesn’t really excuse some alarmingly sloppy writing. Even the open ending the show leaves us with is confusing as Calvin is met with the sight of numerous detatched icebergs floating about the fishing grounds. Does this mean more squids, or does it just stand as a general warning about climate change? I honestly have no idea, and considering how cutthroat Netflix is with axing new shows, there’s a good chance we’ll never find out.
After running the gauntlet of numerous cool places to take its giant squid story, Below bows out by picking the most generic, bland one it can. I’ve enjoyed the lopsided ride to get here, but the fact that we skipped from Jaws to “Free Squiddy” just feels like a swift kick to the tentacles…
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Where to watch Below – Season 1, Episode 6: The Unfathering Deep: