Breaking Down the Ominous Ending of ‘Below’

Fonda 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.