Widow’s Bay 5-7: Tripping through history

Episode 5 of Widow’s Bay, “What to Expect on Your Trip,” felt like a transition episode, as the horror-comedy series began its full transformation into an ongoing mystery series.

I didn’t have much of interest to say about it afterwards, apart from a detail that I hadn’t noticed, but which was pointed out in a high-energy YouTube recap: the scene of Tom pressing his face against the car windows was reminiscent of scenes with the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

As it turns out, though, it just needed to wait a week to put the episode in its proper context, since episodes 5 through 7 are a perfect matched set.

First, we get the introduction of the mushrooms that grow only on the island, with the revelation that consuming them opens your “third eye” and invites communication with whatever evil entity is lurking within Widow’s Bay. The episode mostly consists of Tom going through an involuntary trip that lasts the entire day, which we only see through brief flashes separated by blackouts.

Because “Beach Reads” was such a high, and this episode had to transition into the centuries-old-mystery portion of the story, it felt more like a bridge than a standalone story. One of the highlights for me was the sheriff telling Evan over the loudspeaker, “Please step away from the creepy house.”

The other was Tom coming back after a blackout during an angry town meeting. We see that he’s holding a sharpie. We look over to the whiteboard to see he’s written “When I turn around everyone close your eyes.” Then we see that the room full of angry townspeople has completely emptied out. A janitor looks inside a waste bin and remarks that it’s full of vomit. Will we ever find out what exactly happened? I can’t decide if it’s better or not if we never do.

Plot highlights are the discovery of a lost page from the journal of Sarah Westcott Warren, wife of the island’s “lord protector” Richard Warren. A brief flashback at the beginning of the episode showed a man in colonial dress finding mushrooms peaking up through the snow and greedily eating them. And the finale had Tom, still under the influence, hearing the (unintelligible) voice of whatever evil entity lives at the core of the island.

Episode 6, “Our History,” tells Sarah Warren’s story in the early 1700s, as she’s writing her journal. She’s a devout woman from the mainland who’s come to Widow’s Bay1 to begin an arranged marriage with the Lord Protector. She discovers that he’s a cruel and possibly insane man, witnessing one night as he murders one of the townspeople who’s come to talk to him about the island’s plague victims and unexplained disappearances.

She learns that some of the residents, including the town’s pastor, are plotting to kill Warren, and she helps by leaving the door unlocked. When an assassin enters in the night, stabs Warren several times, but he’s still alive, she becomes convinced he’s the devil. After an attempt to drug him fails, one of his children knocks him unconscious and tells Sarah that he killed their mother, the first Mrs Warren. She takes the children to a boat to escape the island, first having to fend off the wife of the town physician, who seems to be under whatever evil influence possesses some residents of the island, and who seems to have killed her husband.

Meanwhile, the other residents have found Warren incapacitated and drag him out to the cemetery. He confirms that the island won’t let him die, and he mentions a pact he made with whatever entity he was able to communicate with while on the mushrooms. When he learns that Sarah has taken his children, he screams that they’ll all die, a reminder of the superstition that people born on the island can’t leave. The residents seal him in the coffin and bury him alive. Fast forward back to the present, and we see Wyck in the present, digging his body back up.

I already loved Widow’s Bay, so they really didn’t need to go so hard. The episode was directed by Ti West, and it has the feeling of a self-contained story intended specifically to let a well-known guest director do his own thing. Even more remarkable, the character of Richard Warren was revealed to be played by Hamish Linklater. This was just inspired casting, especially since Widow’s Bay seemed to call back to Midnight Mass so strongly, and Linklater as the town’s priest was the de facto face of that series. But my favorite choice was to cast Betty Gilpin as Sarah Westcott, the lead of this episode.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gilpin’s ever since her amazing performance in G.L.O.W. — initially kind of unlikeable, despite being the most justifiably angry, but so innately charismatic that by the too-early end of the series, you had no choice but to like her. I admit that I looked into the cost of airfare to New York specifically to see her be the first actor to take over the lead in the play Oh, Mary!, but it was just impractical.

It also occurred to me that Gilpin is a bit like Matthew Rhys, in that they’re both accomplished dramatic actors who have the souls of comedians. In other words, a perfect fit for Widow’s Bay.

Episode 6 is the plot-heavy flashback episode, and it was set in the 1700s, so it was more straightforward horror without a lot of opportunities for humor. But there were a couple that made me laugh out loud: Sarah’s appeal to the conspirators after deciding to flee the island, but most of all, when she sees the assassin lurking above her bed at night, about to stab her, and she exasperatedly points to her husband lying next to her.

Episode 7 picks up from Tom at the toilet, coming back from his trip. He learns that he’s been unconscious for an entire day since the last time we saw him. He gets summoned to the historical society building — which we see was originally the house of Richard and Sarah Warren — by Wyck and a visibly shaken Patricia. As is typical for this series, they only explain the bare minimum to Tom: they dug up Richard Warren’s coffin hoping to find the cylinder around his neck that had been mentioned in Sarah’s journal. They’ve got the coffin right there in the room.

And they didn’t find Warren’s remains inside, because he was still alive. They tell Tom that Warren is upstairs and will only speak to the current “lord protector” of the island. And they task him with finding out how to open the cylinder. (Based on the bandages around Wyck’s hand, and their reaction when Tom tries to open it, I’m guessing that they had an extremely unsuccessful attempt to do it on their own).

There’s so much packed into that setup that I think illustrates why Widow’s Bay is such a brilliant series. Every storytelling instinct would say that this is the one of the key moments of the series: meeting the founder of the island, who’d been foreshadowed since the first episode, the one person who can reveal the truth of what’s actually going on, how to defeat the evil, and how his successor Tom Loftis actually fits into everything. And it’s got obvious potential as a key dramatic moment: they open the coffin to retrieve a lost artifact, only to discover that the man had been alive for 300 years, buried beneath the cemetery!

Instead, we join the action after all of that has already happened. There’s a brief suggestion that maybe they haven’t opened the coffin yet, and they’re saving the reveal for when the three main characters are present… only for them to tell Tom that he’s waiting upstairs. For one thing, it’s just inherently funnier to rob us of that dramatic moment we’d been expecting. But more significantly, that dramatic moment wouldn’t actually have been that dramatic. We just heard him insisting that he couldn’t die, and we’d seen evidence of that ourselves. Anyone coming into episode 7 — even if we’d had to wait a week — would’ve been assuming there’s a 50/50 chance they’d find a still-living Richard Warren inside.

And in terms of the soul of what makes Widow’s Bay special, it turns what might’ve been a key horror mystery series moment into one that’s focused on the characters. The natives of the island are doing what everyone on the island does, trying to get back to normality while horrific events are playing out around them. Patricia’s trying to maintain what she believes is her image as an accomplished administrator, planner, and communicator. Wyck is pissed off and frustrated that his impulsive decision hasn’t played out like he’d hoped. And Tom is perpetually bewildered, having to step in and take charge of the insanity on the island that he’d had no part in initiating. Plus, it’s back to the familiar territory of everybody being annoyed at Tom.

The ending of “Beach Reads” suggested that the three leads had coalesced into a Scooby gang who’d set aside their differences to solve this latest mystery. I appreciated how quickly they settled back into their old dysfunctional relationships. I also loved the moment later on, when it feels like Sheriff Bachir is being inducted into the gang, and he simply nopes out.

I also appreciated how deftly the episode skipped over the traps where a more conventional take on the story would’ve gotten bogged down by exposition. Anything that could’ve been explained to us is stuff that we probably already knew or had guessed by now, after seeing the previous episode. I want to go back and study all of Widow’s Bay to try and understand how it manages to convey so much story and lore while almost never letting anyone explain anything.

My favorite moment in the episode is when Warren opens the cylinder, revealing the tiny scroll that was his pact with whatever demonic force inhabits the island. As Tom is trying to read it, Warren describes it as a pact “I signed with my own blood, feces, and semen.” Tom carefully sets the scroll down and as reverentially and politely as possible, wipes his hands on his pants. (Also excellent were Patricia’s polite interruptions. “Sorry, forgot my purse.”)

But it’s perfectly representative of the blend of horror and comedy to have a 300 year old living dead man blundering through the historical society, looking for traces of his children, going for a tender embrace of the mannequin of his second wife and then crushing its skull. And of course, Warren inside his coffin yelling at Tom to fuck himself, and the two swearing at each other.

And there’s something inherently funny in realizing that they spent hours talking to the immortal founder of the island and originator of the demonic pact, but still, none of them and none of us really understand what’s happening yet.

We don’t see what happened to Sarah and the children after they rowed away, or what happened outside the “dead zone” in particular. We’ve seen close-ups of a painting multiple times, depicting what seems to be a child lost at sea and drowning.

In the secret passages underneath the house, Sarah finds a chair to which someone has been tied, facing an ominous sealed door. It’s a colonial version of the exact same setup we saw at the end of the first episode. Warren mentioned a “sacrifice,” was it made explicit, or is it still just an assumption, that he sacrificed his first wife to the entity he’d made a pact with? And were the others who went missing or that he’d murdered also sacrificed? How often does this ritual have to happen? Or maybe this is all a misdirect, and the chair is used to commune with the entity?

Episode 7 ends with Tom’s son Evan discovering a photo of his mom with him as a toddler, contradicting Tom’s story that she’d died in childbirth. We’d seen flashbacks in Episode 5 that set this up, showing Tom and his wife leaving the island to have the baby. I was inferring from those flashes that something prevented them from leaving, so they were forced to deliver the baby on Widow’s Bay. And we get a brief glimpse of Tom’s wife in bed afterwards, sitting upright and catatonic, like the possessed fisherman in Episode 1.

It’s easy to assume that Tom has been telling everyone, including Evan, that his wife died during childbirth, because it’s more tactful and less painful than acknowledging that she was changed afterwards. But is he actively lying about it? Or in denial that something inexplicable happened? Or does he simply believe that there was a rational explanation for it, which he is only now realizing might have actually been supernatural?

However it ends up playing out, this is the first “ongoing mystery series” I’ve gotten invested in where I realize I’ll probably be equally happy no matter the outcome. The revelations themselves are never what makes Widow’s Bay special; it’s all in the execution.

1
Is it even called that yet? Or is she the source of the name? ↩︎

1 Is it even called that yet? Or is she the source of the name?