What happened to the meteorite in the end of Netflix’s Little Siberia?

Spoiler warning: this article covers the full plot of Little Siberia, including its ending.

The meteorite in Little Siberia ends up at the bottom of a frozen lake, lost to the water with the man who stole it. Tommi Korpela’s Tarvainen, a grieving ex-rally driver who seizes the rock during the museum confrontation, flees across what he cannot see is a frozen lake while escaping Eero Ritala’s Joel, and falls through the ice. He drowns. The meteorite goes with him.

Joel, stabbed and watching, is the only witness. He uses that single piece of information to construct a deception that saves his wife’s life. The rock never resurfaces.

Dome Karukoski’s film was released on Netflix on March 21, 2025 as the platform’s first Finnish original feature. The film shows the meteorite sinking and does not revisit its location.

How Tarvainen loses the meteorite

Tarvainen takes the meteorite by seizing an opportunity during the museum confrontation, and loses it when he runs across a frozen lake in the dark and falls through the ice. He arrives to find Joel already in the middle of a fight with two Russian operatives, Mikis (Haymon Maria Buttinger) and Petar (Rune Temte). Mikis has already been killed by Joel and Petar is incapacitated. Tarvainen takes advantage of the disorder to grab the meteorite.

When Joel moves to stop him, Tarvainen stabs him and runs. Joel, despite the wound, pursues him into the dark.

Tarvainen, without realizing it, runs out onto a frozen lake and falls through the ice. He drowns with the meteorite still in his hands.

Joel, who watched this happen, returns to face Karolina (Jenni Banerjee) without the rock but without telling her it is already gone. He hands her a fake stone. Karolina, believing she has secured her prize, shoots Petar in the leg and discards him. Joel then kills Karolina, and his wife Krista (Malla Malmivaara) is freed.

Why Tarvainen takes the meteorite

Tarvainen’s interest in the meteorite is personal, not financial. Multiple critics, including Roger Moore at Movie Nation, describe him as a “drunken, grieving” ex-rally driver who was in the middle of a suicide attempt, drifting his Mitsubishi Evo into a rock, when the meteorite fell and landed in the co-pilot’s seat beside him. He read this as a sign from his dead co-driver and, from that moment, believed the rock was rightfully his. His decision to steal it during the museum chaos and to keep running rather than negotiate is grounded in that belief, not in the rumoured value of close to one million euros.

Tarvainen is not a professional criminal outmaneuvering Joel. He is someone who attached the entire meaning of a near-death experience to a piece of rock, then ran the wrong direction in the dark and fell through ice. The meteorite’s fate is not cosmic. It is the result of a series of poor decisions made by a person in grief.

The scheme that organized the theft

Karolina is the architect of the operation. She organized the kidnapping of Krista, Joel’s wife, using a local gym trainer named Raystyainen (Severi Saarinen) who was in financial trouble and agreed to hold Krista in exchange for a promised share of the proceeds. The two Russians, Mikis and Petar, were her hired operatives. Krista’s captivity was designed to keep Joel cooperative during the hand-off.

The operation collapses in stages. Mikis is killed before the exchange happens. Tarvainen steals the rock before Karolina can take possession.

By the time Joel hands Karolina the fake stone, she has already lost the meteorite and does not know it. Nobody gets the rock. Multiple people die in pursuit of it.

What the film actually leaves open

The meteorite’s fate is specific and settled within the story. The pregnancy is where the film keeps its question open.

Joel’s military service as a peacekeeper left him with a war injury that, per a medical assessment he kept from Krista, made fathering children impossible. When Krista announces she is pregnant, he suspects infidelity. He eventually concludes, after learning that another local man is also infertile and can be ruled out as the father, that neither an affair nor his medical record explains the pregnancy. Near the film’s end, he calls Krista his miracle.

The screenplay, written by Karukoski and Minna Panjanen from Antti Tuomainen’s novel of the same name (described as a “Book of the Year” by The Times), does not confirm whether the pregnancy reflects a diagnostic error, a biological anomaly, or something the film deliberately withholds an answer to. It shows Joel’s interpretation and stops there.

The rock did not bring the village of Hurmevaara fortune. It fell through ice because a suicidal man ran the wrong direction and the weather was cold. The film does not connect the pregnancy to the meteorite’s journey from the museum to the lake bed. Our reading is that by showing the rock’s fate precisely, the screenplay leaves the pregnancy as the one event the story declines to account for.