Netflix’s limited series Below opens with a sequence that immediately signals it has ambitions beyond a standard creature feature. In 1986, during Newfoundland’s resettlement program, the Penney family tows their house across the water from the remote outport of Little Pot Rock. When the house snags and begins to sink with patriarch Leo inside, young Calvin (Azriel Dalman) looks over the side and sees something staring back from the depths. He cuts the line, saving the rest of the family while losing his father. The image is stark, practical, and quietly horrific—an effective way to establish both the personal stakes and the sense that the ocean has long memory.
Forty years later, adult Calvin Penney (Josh Hartnett) is still living with that loss in Snook’s Arm. The fishery has collapsed, and the town’s economic survival now depends on harvesting icebergs for a local vodka operation run by the Crocker family. Calvin is a capable but financially strained ice hunter who refuses to abandon the place. His sister Ruth (Willow Kean) is equally stubborn about the community’s future, while a resettlement buyout offer hangs over the town. The required vote threshold has already been lowered once, and the pressure is only growing.
The episode’s present-day plot moves briskly through family and community tensions. Calvin’s children Mary (Ruby Stokes) and Jay (Rohan Campbell) return for the annual “Come Home Year” celebration, along with Mary’s boyfriend Noah. The reunion is warm on the surface but strained underneath: Calvin wants the older kids to help him launch an independent ice-harvesting business, while they have lives elsewhere and little interest in returning permanently. Meanwhile, his youngest son Wade (Charlie Heaton), who still lives at home, chafes at being kept off the water and ends up helping the rough-edged Jerry Biles (Joel Thomas Hynes) on a late-night ice run. Marine biologist Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) enters the picture after Calvin brings her a sample of foul-smelling ice coated in an ancient mucus membrane. Her investigation, plus a severed human leg recovered from a crab trap, points toward something large, old, and still active offshore.
The episode builds methodically rather than rushing to the monster. Small-town dynamics, economic anxiety, and Calvin’s unresolved trauma receive as much attention as the growing evidence of a threat in the water. When the violence finally arrives, it is sudden and gruesome. Jerry is caught in a winch line that severs him at the abdomen; Wade is left clinging to a buoy while holding the upper half of the body. Before the cable finishes its work, Wade sees the same enormous eye his father saw as a boy. Calvin and Fonda arrive too late. The sequence is effectively staged and leaves the episode on a stark, memorable image.
Hartnett anchors the hour with a grounded, understated performance. He plays Calvin as a man who has learned to live with guilt and limited options rather than as a classic action hero. Davis brings a practical, slightly prickly energy as Fonda that avoids the usual “outsider scientist” clichés, and Heaton captures Wade’s restlessness without overplaying it. The Newfoundland setting is used well: the muted color palette, the practical details of boats and ice work, and the sense of a community that has already been displaced once all contribute to the atmosphere. Some of the accents are uneven, but the production’s commitment to place outweighs the occasional distraction.
“Come Home Year” is a strong opening. It establishes a clear emotional through-line for Calvin, introduces the larger community conflict, and delivers a creature-feature hook without showing the full monster. The tone sits somewhere between a grounded family drama and a slow-burn maritime thriller, closer to the better episodes of Fortitude or a more restrained Jaws than pure spectacle. It does not yet answer what, exactly, is in the water or what it wants, but it makes a convincing case that the answers will matter to the people who live with the consequences. For a six-episode series that has already released in full, this is an effective invitation to keep watching.
