Josh Hartnett leads the Below series as Calvin Penney, and the six-part supernatural thriller turns a harbour sighting into a mess of vanishing trawlermen, bloodied body parts, and a town already under strain. The review calls it ridiculous but fun, which is about right for a story that treats a monstrous ice formation as the first bad sign.
Snook’s Arm and Calvin Penney
In the present-day story, Calvin’s first reaction to the object in the harbour is, “Jumpin’ Jesus,” followed by “Will ye look at dat!” That surprise is the series’ entry point: a fishing community in Newfoundland has to read a threat before it has a name, and the show keeps the response local rather than abstract.
Charlie Heaton plays Wade Penney, who sets the mood early with, “I tells ye, these waters can be deadly,” and later, “It’s been one seafarin’ tragedy after another for us.” Those lines do more than decorate the script. They place the six parts inside a community already carrying loss, so the new horror lands on top of old damage instead of arriving in a vacuum.
Dr Fonda Howander at Ocean Science Centre
Mackenzie Davis plays Dr Fonda Howander, who arrives with the series’ hard pivot away from ordinary disaster logic. “It’s not an iceberg,” she says, before identifying it as “one big frozen mucous membrane!” and Calvin’s answer — “You mean,” he gulps, “like … snot?” — gives the show its nastiest joke and its clearest tonal promise.
The review says the creature is not just weird but active: a massive squid is unleashed through thawing ancient Arctic permafrost, then rubs itself over icebergs in a desperate act of territory marking. Jesse McKeown built Below around that collision of monster movie and community drama, and the strange biology gives the series a tighter engine than a simple haunted-town setup would.
Faint climate signals in Below
The review also says the eco theme is nearly inaudible in the mix. There are fleeting references to warming oceans and “systems breaking apart,” but the series does not push those ideas hard enough to become a clean climate allegory. That leaves Below closer to a creature feature with environmental static in the background than to a message-first thriller.
Set against fishing bans, economic uncertainty, and a government-led resettlement programme, the six-part structure gives the town’s collapse room to breathe without turning the show into policy drama. The result is a horror series that works best when it stays with Calvin looking at the harbour and trying to make sense of what he is seeing. If the question is whether the climate-breakdown thread runs through all six parts, the review points to no: it is there, but just barely, while the squid, the snot joke, and the fishing-community fallout do the heavier lifting.
