Billionaire Island is, on the surface, a story about salmon, but its ending reveals it to be something else – a story about betrayal and self-interest, about how money and power corrupt even an institution as sacred as the family unit. But it is also about salmon.
The Norwegian Netflix series hinges on salmon breeding, a surprisingly lucrative affair which, on the fishing island of Brima, is monopolized by two families – the Langes and the Meyers. But the industry could be anything. What matters is what it represents, and why the spoils are so tempting that the Langes and the Meyers can’t stop fighting over them.
A Lucrative Merger
The plot is kick-started by the death of 35-year-old businessman Ole Richard Lykke, a shareholder in Meyer Fjordbruk. Since he died without specific instructions for what ought to happen to his stake, Julie Lange, the CEO of rival company Marlax, swoops in to try and purchase his shares.
Julie eventually succeeds with a mind to unite both companies Voltron-style and sit at the head of a salmon-breeding mega-corp, controlling the entire industry, much to the obvious horror of Meyer Fjordbruk’s CEO, Gjert, who knows he and his family would quickly be axed in the merger.
The business processes here are largely an excuse for the family dynamics to take center stage, with each of the children getting a focus and their own personal subplots that unfurl throughout the six-episode season, so it makes sense to break down the climax in terms of how each character is involved in the events.
Joining the Family Business
JJ is in many ways the black sheep of the Lange family as he doesn’t care about the family business. But his aspirations to be a Hollywood actor are a little naïve and cause him to overlook how his familial status makes him easy to manipulate. He doesn’t realize that his biggest enemy is his supposed friend and “personal manager”, Ivo.
Throughout Billionaire Island it becomes clear, first to the audience and then, eventually, to JJ, that Ivo is siphoning money from him and using it to try and buy fame and fortune under false pretenses. The efforts lead to an embarrassing scenario with a grand screening that finds JJ cut almost entirely from the final edit of a film, and the disaster opens his eyes to Ivo’s motives.
But Ivo is a symptom of a worse disease. JJ’s entire life has been a product of his family’s success; his dream of becoming an actor was massaged by paid-off acting coaches and false praise. JJ’s arc is realizing that he has no business in Hollywood but that he has an actual business, the family kind, at home in Norway.
Environmentalism
Hennie, the youngest Lange, is the voice of the marine life and the everyday workers who largely get overlooked when it comes to big business. Her arc involves realizing that the family business, for all its upsides, causes a great deal of unnecessary harm. And it isn’t just the fish who suffer.
Hennie’s boyfriend Jakob’s father is a Marlax employee who stands to lose his job with a lot of other fish farm workers as a result of the merger (which is to say nothing of what happens to the fish.) With the backing of her sister, Amy, Hennie works against their mother in a bit of corporate espionage to mail out details of Julie’s synergy plan, which she had kept between herself and her assistant, Rishi.
In many ways, Hennie’s story is the opposite of JJ’s. While he finds a clearer purpose in the family business, Hennie comes to see it as a blight on their society.
Casting (And Cutting) A Net
On the other side of the aisle are the Meyers, most prominently Gjert’s daughter Trine and her husband Eigil, one of the company employees. Given the differences in the families – the Meyers are much more conservative and traditional – Trine has been kept away from the family business, but when she comes to learn of Julie’s potential takeover and merger, she and Eigil sabotage Marlax by hiring a diver to slice open the nets in the company’s salmon enclosures, leading to a calamitous financial loss and a police investigation.
Trine’s big heel turn in Billionaire Island is implicating her father in the sabotage, motivated largely by jealousy over his relationship with Amy, with whom Gjert had formed a plan to prevent Julie from becoming CEO.
Trine frames Gjert by planting documents on his personal computer, and he’s subsequently arrested. This turn is central to the ending of Billionaire Island, since one of its final developments is Gjert, still in prison, realizing that it was his own daughter who engineered his incarceration.
The Takeover
As mentioned, Amy Lange was working against her mother with Gjert and Viljar Meloy, who despite trying to engineer some kompromat to use against Amy, ends up working with her to pitch a deal to Trine and Eigil after Gjert’s arrest.
Amy’s motivation was being overlooked by her mother in the company hierarchy. She wanted power for herself and knew the only way to get it was to ensure her mother didn’t become CEO of the company. She’s willing to compromise with Trine, who gets a seat on the board, and Eigil, who becomes Meyer Fjordbruk’s new chairman, to make this happen.
After – again, as mentioned – Hennie liberates the synergy plans, Amy is able to turn the board against Julie and install herself as the new CEO.
Billionaire Island Season 2
As is almost mandatory for Netflix originals these days, Billionaire Island ends with a tantalizing setup for Season 2.
With Julie and Gjert both having been betrayed by their children, they realize that the only allies – even reluctant ones – they have are each other. Gjert pitches to Julie a deal in which she exonerates him by proving Trine’s guilt in the Marlax sabotage, and in return she becomes the new CEO of Meyer Fjordbruk.
Seems like a compelling offer to me.
