Who is Maggie in Below? Netflix kept her off the cast list
For most of Below, Maggie isn't a character. She's a woman in white with wet hair over her face, and the only proof she was ever in the room is a wet patch on the floor by Wade's bed.
Jesse McKeown's six-episode series arrived on Netflix on October 8. Josh Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a widowed fisherman in Snook's Arm, a dying Newfoundland village where something in the water has started killing people. Charlie Heaton plays his son Wade, the one who survives the first encounter with it, and the one who starts seeing her afterward.
How the show introduces her
Netflix gave nothing away in advance: the cast it announced before release didn't include Marthe Bernard, who plays her. On screen, she arrives in pieces:
- The dream — after the attack at sea, Wade keeps dreaming of a woman in white, her face hidden by wet hair, beckoning to him from an iceberg.
- The bedroom — then she's under his bed, crawling over him. His brother writes it off as a nightmare. The wet marks on the floor stay.
- The name — Wade calls her the Old Hag, out of the island folklore he grew up with.
- The missing things — small items start disappearing from the Penney house, including boxes of tea and the engagement ring Noah has bought for Wade's sister, Mary.
The name is the show's best piece of misdirection, because it's real. In Newfoundland, being "hagged" is the traditional name for sleep paralysis: waking up unable to move, with a weight on your chest and the sense that someone is in the room. The folklorist David Hufford built a classic 1982 study of the experience, The Terror That Comes in the Night, around Newfoundland accounts of the Old Hag.
Who she really is
The answer comes in episode 5, "Little Pot Rock," named for the island the Penneys and their neighbors abandoned decades ago. Calvin tracks Wade there and finds that not everyone left.
Maggie is the daughter of Walton Budgell, Calvin's childhood friend, played by Shawn Doyle. When the rest of the island took the buyout and moved, the Budgells stayed. By now there are only three of them: Walton, his father and Maggie. She isn't old, and she isn't a ghost. She's been crossing the water to Snook's Arm, getting into the Penney house and getting into Wade's bed.
What she was there for
The Budgells survived on the island by making an arrangement with the creature they call Mudder, a giant squid. Maggie's visits were part of it:
- The pact — Mudder brings the family fish and spares them at sea. In return, they feed her people, starting with the old and the dying.
- The mark — Wade came back from his encounter with a circular welt on his back, the size of a sucker. Walton believes it means Mudder chose him for Maggie.
- The plan — Wade is supposed to stay, marry Maggie and give the island children. Calvin suspects that once a child arrives, Wade becomes the next offering.
- Her part — Maggie keeps Wade compliant with a drugged concoction, and Calvin watches her drug Phil, a Portuguese fisherman the family is holding, and cut into what's left of his leg.
Wade, for his part, tells his father he loves her and feels appreciated on the island in a way he never did at home.
The show spends four episodes asking whether the hag is a ghost. The truth is bleaker: she's a lonely young woman who was raised to believe a squid had picked out her husband.
Her family wanted an heir. She wanted Wade. By the end of the episode, she has neither.
How it ends for her
Wade chooses his father. Walton kills Phil with an arrow and then turns on Calvin, and Wade saves him. The settlement burns as the two of them get away by boat, and Maggie's last scene in the series is her screaming Wade's name across the water.
She doesn't appear in the finale. The pact she was raised inside doesn't survive it either: Mudder dies after releasing her eggs, and McKeown has said there are no plans for a second season. Whatever Maggie does next, she does it on an island with no creature to bargain with and no one left to marry.
Bernard, the actor Netflix left off its announced cast, is from Newfoundland herself, and she's married to McKeown.
"I married into Newfoundland," McKeown told Fangoria, "so that's sort of my second home."
The Old Hag is one of the oldest stories the province tells about itself. McKeown gave the part to the person who brought him there.
Previously we wrote: Crystal Lake episode 8 recap: who dies in the finale