Widow’s Bay 8: Bye-bye

I wasn’t wearing my watch during Episode 8 of Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage,” which is probably for the best. My heart rate was elevated for the entire first half of the episode, and it might have gone past giving me warnings and made the executive decision to call 911 on my behalf.

I would be curious to see the resulting graph, though. It felt similar to episode 4, where I got so wound up with tension and dread that it seemed I couldn’t possibly handle anymore, and then it delivered the most absolutely perfect punchline. At the time, I said that nothing in horror hits me as hard as social anxiety. As it turns out, though, a good old-fashioned Boogeyman home invasion can work just as well.

The thing that stood out to me throughout this episode was that it wasn’t putting a clever twist on a Halloween story, or deconstructing it, or parodying it. It was just doing it, and doing it exceptionally well. Building tension from before the episode even started, really, since the “previously on” clips were perfectly chosen.

But it came right out of the gate hitting hard on the idea of “the evil is vanquished, everything’s good,” and it didn’t seem at all intended to fool the audience, but to stretch out the tension of our knowing more than the characters do. We know that it’s not all good, since there are three episodes left in the season. And also, because every time any story shows us scenes like this, it always means that something terrible is about to happen.

So we get the reveal of the mask that’s been stolen from the museum. And the door of the creepy house, which has been blown apart from the inside. And Patricia alone in the house at night, with a running story thread of a Boogeyman that still hasn’t been resolved. And the sound of a car alarm outside. And the sight of a bloody handprint on the hood of the Pattiwagon as she turns off the alarm. And a front door that she doesn’t notice is now standing wide open, even though we’d just seen her close it behind her.

But what follows is a sequence that follows the standard and familiar slasher movie setup, and it stays tense as hell all the way through, but without the potential victim wandering blithely through the house unaware, or making bad decisions in a panic. She’s just as aware of how horror movies work as any of us in the audience. And not in a Scream-style self-referential way, but simply a reasonably smart adult in 2026. So she quietly makes her way down to a potential weapon, and gets out of the house as quickly as possible.

So as the jump scares and the chase scenes start, she reacts not just with blind terror, but more a sense of “I knew that was going to happen!” It gave me the same feeling that the best moments in Widow’s Bay have delivered over and over again: that I was perfectly in sync with the people making this show. I wasn’t tense or scared or laughing because the show was telling me I should be, but because I actually felt it.

It all keeps building, as you realize she’s not going to be able to get help from anyone else. When she finally ends up at the home of the awful Kris and her awful friends, it feels like the show is twisting the metaphorical knife: the one potentially safe haven isn’t safe at all. They’re going to kick Patricia out and back into danger, or they’ll all learn their lesson far too late, as the Boogeyman bursts in and goes on a killing spree.

But instead, it breaks the tension with the single most satisfying moment in the entire series so far. Chief Mean Girl Kris gets tasered right in the middle of her asinine “bye-bye”s, and she falls with a thud that I have now rewound and rewatched 100 times as of this writing. And in the middle of being pursed by an unstoppable knife-wielding murderer, Patricia shrugs and says what everybody’s been thinking. “She’s the worst. She’s the fucking worst.”

Not only does it break the tension with an intensely enjoyable comedy moment, but it’s such a great character moment as well. She doesn’t have any more to prove to a bunch of assholes, and for the first time in decades, she doesn’t need anybody to take her story seriously from back then, because it’s happening now. She’s more or less transforming from the person who always wants to be confidently in charge of the situation, to the person who actually can be.

We saw Kris — who turned “I’m sad about my friends” into self-righteous justification for years of deliberately mocking and ostracizing the night’s only survivor — again repeatedly tell Patricia, “Stop making it about you. It’s not about you.” And then we get a scene where Patricia is hilariously and horrifically vindicated, as the killer ignores a house full of defenseless women and instead backs up, runs full speed, and flings himself out of a second story window just to get to Patricia.

As soon as she regains consciousness and sees The Boogeyman on the ground, she’s demanding the EMT driver give her his keys, because “I’ve got to run him over.” At the gas station, she takes the stance of someone making a final stand, aggressively brandishing a gas nozzle, only to see a weak trickle come out. She runs into the brightly-lit station, where the clerk and the sheriff are both standing, and instead of screaming and asking for help, she decisively says, “I need twenty on three.”

The Patricia that we’ve been watching all season would come up with an elaborate plan like this to save the day, only to have it all comically fall apart at the last minute, and she’d shrug and give a resigned, “Well of course, what did I expect?” But here, it works spectacularly. It’s only foiled by the characters who typically would’ve been called in to help. But again, Patricia comes in with a shotgun blast that saves the sheriff’s life. And another blast that takes down the killer.

And then she slowly walks up to the killer’s body and cocks the gun, ready to deliver another blast the second he so much as twitches, as Enya starts playing.

And then we see her in the ambulance, having held the gun on the killer for the entire ride to the hospital.

And then in the coroner’s lab, as they’re examining the body.

And then in the morgue, as they’re putting the body into the crematorium.

And then she politely confirms that there’s no way out of the crematorium, and answers “Okay, thank you so much.”

And then as they open the doors of the crematorium, she holds the gun trained on the remains, before finally saying, “Okay,” and standing down.

You’d think I would’ve gotten the joke and stopped laughing out loud at some point earlier in that sequence, but I cackled at every last one.

The last 15 minutes of this episode are like Widow’s Bay giving us one gift after another, with scene after scene that made me say “Oh hell yeah!” And as Patricia leaves the morgue, she smiles at Wyck in a way that suggests that the worst night of her life is over, she’s done with the past several decades of being haunted by it, and not only is it over, but that she’s the one who ended it.

I realized that a whole rat’s nest of unresolved story threads had either been tied up, or been shown not to matter. Yes, a teenage Patricia had lied about getting menacing phone calls, because that’s the kind of thing a teenager might do in a traumatic situation, but she didn’t lie about a killer getting into her house. (Clearly, because he came directly to her place to finish the job). And it’s so bizarre for her former classmates to still be upset about that, so many years later, that it’s clear they’re the ones who haven’t been able to get over it, and they’re not worth any concern. Instead of the satisfaction of proving herself right to them, it’s so much more a satisfying victory for Patricia to realize that she doesn’t care what they think.1

I was initially confused as to why we’d been denied the scene where they rip off the Boogeyman’s mask, but I almost immediately realized that that scene would never have worked. We wouldn’t recognize whoever it was. And any reveal after the fact — like it’s Mr Wilson, the creepy gym teacher who disappeared under mysterious circumstances! — doesn’t matter to the story. He’s just a faceless evil who was presumably created by the island, and has now re-awakened. We’ve already gotten everything we need from this character: Patricia being a bad ass and in one night, taking out all of the monsters that have terrorized her for years.

Meanwhile, Evan confronts Tom about the photos he found of his mother, proving she hadn’t died in childbirth. It’s been set up to be a moment of peak dramatic tension, and just about any other series would’ve wrenched a few For Your Consideration scenes out of it for Emmy season. But here, it’s just Evan reading the letters from his mother, which we can infer he’d already read.

Maybe he’d started it with the intention of being accusatory, and making Tom feel bad. But it’s also clear from the letters that she was mentally unwell, and he’d probably already come to that realization. He just needed to hear an explanation of what exactly happened. So the scene we got was a scene of two characters finally connecting with each other, instead of angry histrionics.

And it quietly tied up a lot of other mystery-box-style questions that had been lingering, without drawing attention to them. How much did Tom know? What was he hiding? Has he been lying this whole time, just to attract tourism to the island? We now know that he was a grieving husband who went through two years of a nightmare, and he’s been telling his son a simpler version of what happened, so that he could be left with happier memories. And we know that there was a rational medical explanation for all of it, which didn’t require any earnest belief in the supernatural.

Way back in episode 1, he told the travel writer that of course his son has been off the island, even though we later learn that wasn’t true. My take is that he hadn’t consciously thought about it; he might not even have considered it until that moment. The fact was that he’d had a traumatic experience trying to leave the island with his wife. Even if he believed the legends were pure superstition, and there was a rational explanation for what happened, why risk it? An over-protective father fits with the series a lot better than a years-long conspiracy.

And when a series can deliver something that actually makes Halloween scary2, it doesn’t need to gin up drama or tension with moments that don’t feel true to the characters. Just like you can generate laugh-out-loud moments that aren’t just making fun of the characters, but drawing out what’s funny about them.

The other great thing about a series that mimics but never quite behaves like a mystery-box series: I have no idea what’s going to happen over the next two episodes. The lingering questions have mostly been resolved or shown not to matter that much. All we’ve got left is Sarah Westcott’s boat full of Warren children, a child lost at sea, and a storm that’s coming in to Widow’s Bay.

1
So maybe the Necronomicon/self-help book actually helped? ↩︎

2
Don’t come at me, but I’ve never thought any of the Halloween movies were the least bit scary. ↩︎

1 So maybe the Necronomicon/self-help book actually helped?

2 Don’t come at me, but I’ve never thought any of the Halloween movies were the least bit scary.