First up, I looked into a bit of the history of why there's a kind of mixture of Irish and Canadian accents. Turns out that there was a migration of Irish labourers during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Unlike later migrations driven by the Great Famine (1840s), the early migration to Canada (especially Newfoundland) came almost entirely from the southeast counties of Waterford, Wexford, Kilkenny, South Tipperary and Southeast Cork. British migratory fishing vessels stopped in southeastern Irish ports to pick up seasonal labourers, provisions and salt meat before heading across the Atlantic to harvest cod in North America.
Over time, these temporary workers settled permanently along the bays and coastlines of Newfoundland, parts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Once settled in remote outports, these communities had virtually no contact with outside populations for over two centuries, and many ports were accessible only by boat until well into the 20th century. The Irish-Canadian communities preserved archaic 18th-century Irish English phonetic structures, vocabulary and grammar. So there's that! They never taught us any of this in history at school. Or maybe I wasn't listening! So, anyway - onto the giant squid story!
The series starts 40 years before the rest of the series' current events, all in the remote coastal town of Snook's Arm, Newfoundland. Calvin, a boy at the time, is on a boat with his family, pulling their 'floating' home to another location due to pressure - which we'll come to later - to relocate. The 'house' is attacked and starts to sink. Calvin's dad tries to rescue it but only gets himself trapped inside and subsequently drowns. The quick-thinking lad cuts through the tow-rope in order to save himself and the other members of the family.
So now, yes, leap forward 40 years and Calvin is all grown up and has two sons and a daughter - and his sister, Ruth, who was also in that tow-boat, is part of his life as well, acting now as the harbour-master of sorts. Calvin tries to scratch a living from fishing and anything else he can think of. His daughter, Mary, played by the very cute Ruby Stokes (Una), lives away but arrives back for a 'homecoming' event. She has a boyfriend with her, Noah, played by Kaleb Horn. One of the sons, Jay, played by Rohan Campbell (The Hardy Boys), has gone off to make money working on the rigs, but it turns out that he owes money to some people who, throughout the series, hound him for it. The other son, Wade, played by Charlie Heaton (Shut In, Stranger Things), has not left the town and supports his dad in whatever venture he's involved in. So those are the main players and characters.
One morning, the town awakes to see a huge iceberg in the bay; they discover a mysterious toxicity in the water and suffer power cuts. To make things worse, the town is haunted by historic trauma - decades prior, the wealthy Crocker family pushed for the town’s resettlement (back to that tow-boat and opening scene), ruining local livelihoods. As boats start to go missing and townspeople suffer strange symptoms, Dr Fonda Howander, played beautifully by Mackenzie Davis (Station Eleven, The Martian) at the Ocean Science Centre, investigates. Turns out that there's a huge, preternatural giant squid-like cephalopod defending that iceberg in the bay. She further discovers that the giant iceberg isn't just ice - it's an egg sac/nest. The sea creature isn't attacking boats and people out of malice, she is a mother protecting her unborn offspring, driven into warmer waters because of melting glacial ice caps (aha - the global warming 'message')!
While the town fears the sea creature, it turns out that the true villains are the Crocker family. Our leading man, adult Calvin, played by Josh Hartnett (30 Days of Night, Black Hawk Down), discovers mining permits proving the Crockers have known for years that vast reserves of cobalt and copper lie directly beneath Snook's Arm. They want to scare people off the land so they can buy it up cheap, mine the stuff, and make a fortune. Scooby-Doo episode, anyone? "If it wasn't for those pesky, meddling kids..!"
So the Crockers use the creature's attacks as an excuse to bring in the military, force an immediate evacuation of the town, and declare Snook's Arm uninhabitable. Realising what's going on, Calvin and his family defy the evacuation order. They take Calvin's boat (High Hopes) out into the bay, break the iceberg free from the harbour and tow the giant egg sac out into deeper, colder international waters. So the military stands down. In the deep ocean, the mother squid protects her egg sac until it breaks open. Because cephalopods reproduce semelparously (mating/spawning once before dying), she expends the last of her strength guiding her eggs into the deep and dies. Due to the warming ocean temperatures, Fonda later notes that none of the newly hatched baby squids survived.
However, back in Episode 5, Fonda had chipped a live baby squid out of an ice sample in her lab, which escaped into a cooler. That single hatchling remains unaccounted for. Aha - Season 2 afoot! A year later, Snook's Arm has survived. Armed with the truth about the mineral deposits, the townspeople refuse the Crockers' buyout offers and Calvin and his family open the "Big Squid Distillery & Brewery". There is a grand finale and a very final scene which certainly sets it up for a new season to be shot, as you might imagine. I hope they do it!
A word of warning about Episode 5. Apart from Fonda finding the little squid, the episode largely follows Calvin heading to a remote island after Wade goes missing following a sub crash. On this island, the story turns into a kind of folk horror, hallucinogenic hippy-trip with bizarre cult-like stuff going on. I got totally lost in that episode as to what was going on and how it fitted in, but I think I got there in the end! The family living there refused to be relocated 40 years back and developed a twisted local cult centred around worshipping the sea creature, which they call "Mudder", drugging people to keep them docile and impressionable! Calvin manages to snap Wade out of it and escape back to the mainland.
It's all quite complex, so keep watching and working out what strings fit where as you view, and you might keep up (better than I did)! It's very nicely shot, very well acted - certainly by the main leads - but the whole cast does well. It was created by Jesse McKeown, who made the whole series atmospheric and nicely produced. The word eerie comes to mind as low-lying fog often sweeps across the waters, and at any minute, we don't know what the creature might leap out of the water and do! There were clear nods to Jaws here and there - in fact, plenty of them, so that was fun to discover too.
It's a nice little series and kept my attention, even if it did meander off a bit during Episode 5! The six episodes and most are under 45 minutes long, so it's bingeable if you fancy. I watched it over two evenings and would recommend a viewing very much.
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