When I was a TV-obsessed pre-adolescent, I loved the series Three’s Company. Technically, I was probably too young to be watching it, but all the “adult” humor flew right over my head1Except for the idea that gay people should be made fun of, which I internalized. So thanks for that, late 1970s media! as stuff that grown-ups must think is funny. I just treated it like a live-action cartoon. But even as a pre-teen, I quickly got frustrated with it. This is dumb. They could easily avoid all of these wacky hijinks just by explaining the misunderstanding!
I mention that to establish that I’ve got a long history of fundamentally misunderstanding how fiction works. For the record, I really despise Game of Thrones as well, for being nothing but contrived conflict and despicable behavior among irredeemably awful characters, just to satiate audiences’ bloodlust to see people get tortured and brutalized, I guess. It went past “not for me” to kind of quietly judging the people who like it.
I guess I’m also mentioning all of that to procrastinate, because I don’t want to admit the following: I was really disappointed by the season one finale of Widow’s Bay.
I didn’t hate it. And it didn’t change my opinion that this season has been some of my all-time favorite television. But it’s been so outstanding and confident from the outset, it’s a disappointment to see it have to go back to acting like an ongoing “prestige” television series.
For instance: Dale discovering the reels with old instructional films “for them” and “for you.” For the past few weeks, I’ve been marveling at how Widow’s Bay wasn’t falling into the trap of the mystery box series, despite all the fan attempts to concoct these wildly over-complicated theories. But here, it just felt like I was watching Lost again.
Granted, it was the part of Lost that got me really hooked on that series, and everything involving the Dharma Initiative was the most intriguing part of it. But it also means I’d already seen that gimmick, over a decade ago. I’d thought that even when Widow’s Bay was doing a direct take on something, like Halloween, they would change it up and build on it. No matter how well-done these films were, they were just using a format that’s not that interesting anymore, to confirm things that the audience has certainly already figured out.
Also, I thought the whole through-line of Evan being an annoying dipshit had finally been resolved, and the scenes from the previous episode showed that he was finally taking things seriously. But here he is doing the exact same things, and it ends up getting a guy killed. “He’s a bored and horny teenager who easily gives in to peer pressure” just isn’t a satisfying excuse anymore.
But of course the main conflict of the episode is between Tom and Ruth (and eventually, Bechir). And there were plenty of really clever moments, and great performances, so it’s not as if it were badly done. But it was like riding in a thoughtfully designed and meticulously crafted car to a destination I never wanted to go.
I appreciated the dark humor throughout; the episode was delighting in twisting the knife in Tom’s gut, and dragging it out for as long as possible. It was funny to see him arrive, first hoping that something had already happened to Ruth, and then seeing that she’s not the frail old woman he’d been imagining. Especially when she jogged up the stairs. And they kept piling on layer after layer of reminders that she was an inherently kind person who was still full of life.
For that matter, I thought it was genuinely surprising when Bechir did show up. We’d been expecting him to be the voice of reason, common sense, and “I haven’t got time for any of this nonsense” that he has been all season. The conflict would come from Bechir catching Tom in the act. So I liked the idea of subverting all of that, with a really shocking moment that landed.
My problem with it is that this is a character-based show that just ruined several of its characters, all in one episode.2So I guess maybe I do have something in common with Game of Thrones fans after all? What Bechir did was inexcusable, and there’s no coming back from that. Evan’s been set up to be the only teen on the island with a conscience, forced to hide a secret from everyone else. And we’re supposed to assume that Tom now has to keep it secret from everyone that Evan is the last Warren descendent (as everyone watching the series already figured out).
But Tom’s just not an interesting character anymore, to me. The scenes were written as if Ruth had never heard of the trolley problem before, and as if it were a complete non-sequitur, and yet she still immediately recognized the core idea of it. I’ve always thought that the trolley problem itself was fatuous, since it presents a contrived situation as if it were a complex moral quandary. But actually, it’s just the most fundamental and self-evident moral truth there is: you don’t choose to kill an innocent person.
So the scene feels equally contrived, to the point of feeling like an unforced error. Tom chose to do it, and there’s no recovering from that. It doesn’t matter that he had second thoughts — only after learning that Ruth was his son’s biological grandmother — and knocked the cup out of her hand. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he’d made an effort to undo it before he’d learned everything. His emotional monologue about his regrets was well-written and well-performed, but it felt like wasted effort on Matthew Rhys’s part, because the character was already ruined.
Not to mention that either the plan was pointless from the start, or I’m completely misunderstanding the whole storyline of the curse and the pact that Warren made. As I understood it, the island was evil, the colonists tried to settle there, and the only way to appease the entity was to make the pact and start sacrificing people to it. But is it actually that the island was just naturally inhospitable, the first winter was difficult, and Warren summoned the entity to help them survive?
The latter seems to be the direction they’ve gone, and I just missed it. It would at least explain why everyone is convinced that the island’s problems will stop once the last descendent of Warren is dead. Which again, feels like has been set up to be the driving conflict of the rest of the series.
But I’d been assuming that the rest of the series would be driven not by “who knows what and who knows what they know?” style drama, but just by an ongoing series of a bunch of weird people living on a ludicrously cursed island. The state of things at the end of season one just feels like it’s not fun anymore.
Which kind of stung even more, when the script had signs of what I’d been hoping the ongoing series would be. As Ruth is looking through her scrapbook, pointing out all of the men and women who’d made a pass at her — incidentally, is it just me, or does Widow’s Bay seem to have an unusually high percentage of lesbians? — she casually mentions an ex-boyfriend who “was bit by an animal and then turned into that animal.” That’s just solid gold. It seems to me like when you’ve got the potential for ongoing stories like that, you don’t need to be adding in contrived TV drama. Or protagonists wrestling with morally complex and completely relatable questions like “was it okay that I tried to kill a kind and defenseless woman?”
Before Widow’s Bay, the last series I can remember thinking was so much more smart, funny, and imaginative than TV deserves was The Good Place. Its season one finale definitely was not a disappointment, but the real surprise for me came in the second season. I thought I knew exactly how that season would play out, and how they’d spend several episodes just playing with different permutations on the new twist. Instead, they ended up doing everything I’d been imagining just in the first couple episodes of the new season, and then it went off in an entirely different direction.
So it’s entirely possible that the brilliant people making Widow’s Bay already have clever things in mind for whenever the show picks up again, and I’m simply thinking too small. But at least for now, I’m not as edge-of-my-seat eager to see what happens as I have been for most of the season, because they’re down to only one character that I still actually like. (Patricia, of course).
At some point in the first season, somebody asks Tom why is he mayor of a town where he doesn’t like any of the people. And I hate to say that at least right now, I’m feeling the same thing.
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