Beth O'Brien

**Beth O'Brien** is a protagonist in The Descent. She is played by Alex Reid.

## Biography

Beth was the best friend of Sarah Carter, and, as mentioned in a line of dialogue, she also works as an English teacher. Beth had gone on a whitewater rafting trip with Sarah and Juno, shortly before Sarah got involved in a car accident that killed her husband Paul and daughter Jessica.

A year after the accident, Beth takes Juno and Sarah, alongside their friends Sam, Rebecca and Holly, up to a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina for a spelunking adventure. The next day, the ladies hike up to a cave entrance and descend, and begin exploring the cave system. While in the cave, Juno apologizes to Sarah for not being there for her after the car accident, but Sarah is distant.

The ladies resume their exploration of the cave, but whilst climbing through a tight passageway, Sarah gets stuck and starts panicking. Luckily, Beth manages to calm her down and help her out, but the passageway collapses behind them, leaving them trapped. Rebecca tries to help out, and reminds the other ladies that the guidebook told them of three separate entrances to the cave system. However, Juno then reluctantly reveals that she instead led the group into an unknown cave system rather than the fully explored one they had originally planned to visit, since Juno was hoping that they could claim the cave system as their own and rekindle their friendship. However, since it is unexplored, the ladies are unable to be rescued, and they angrily rebuff Juno.

The group reluctantly presses forward in the hopes of finding another exit, and stumble upon a deep chasm, where they discover climbing hooks from a previous caver stuck up into the ceiling above them. Using the hooks, they make their way across one-by-one using their limited amount of rope, although Rebecca ends up burning her hands on the rope after Juno nearly falls while crossing the chasm. After everyone is across the chasm, the ladies assess that the old equipment they found is at least a century old. As the ladies resume forward, they then discover a cave painting that suggests the existence of a second entrance to the cave.

Holly ends up running ahead of the group, thinking she sees daylight ahead (which turns out to be phosphorus in the rocks). She ends up falling down a hole and breaking her leg. As Sam and the other girls tend to Holly's injury, Sarah wanders off and observes a pale, humanoid creature drinking at a pool before it scampers away. Sarah tries to tell the other girls what she saw, but they don't believe her claims, and instead are more concerned with getting Holly to a hospital.

The group ends up coming across a den of animal bones at the top of an underground waterfall. The ladies begin to call for help, when a large group of crawlers suddenly attack them. Holly is quickly killed by one of the crawlers when it bites into her neck/shoulder, and the crawler drags her body away. Sarah runs, falls down a hole, and is knocked unconscious, while Juno, trying to prevent Holly's body from being dragged away, kills a crawler in self-defense with her pickaxe.

## Death

Beth goes up to the scared and unstable Juno from behind, but accidently startles her, leading Juno to accidently stab Beth through the neck in retaliation. Beth collapses with Juno's pendant in her hand, and a traumatized Juno flees while Beth begs her not to leave her. Later on, Sarah ends up discovering the fatally injured Beth, who tells her that Juno wounded and abandoned her. Beth also gives her Juno's pendant, which Sarah recognizes as a gift from Paul, implying that Juno had an affair with Paul before his death. In pain and not wanting to be eaten by the crawlers, Beth begs Sarah to begs her to mercy kill her, which she does so by bashing her head in with a rock.