On this week’s flashback episode of the Apple TV horror–comedy miracle Widow’s Bay, it’s 1702, and Sarah (Betty Gilpin) is on a ship headed to the titular island, having been granted a reprieve from spinsterhood because widower Richard Warren, the island’s founder and Lord Protector, has five kids and needs a new wife. The first islander Sarah interacts with is a weirdly pleasant wagon driver who picks her up at the pier. He praises Sarah’s soon-to-be-husband for making the trees bloom and the winters milder. Trying to joke a little with the guy, Sarah says, “He controls the weather, does he?” (Gilpin’s self-conscious delivery is perfect.) The driver’s reply is to quote Warren himself: “No. But a cold breeze cuts half as quick when you’ve got a warm home and a strong coat.” The man’s excessive positivity immediately gives you the creeps, especially when he proceeds to drive the cart right past a villager’s cabin where a man is sitting up in bed, looking sick unto death. A woman in the cabin sees Sarah staring and closes the door; it’s marked with a scarlet “X.”
If you’re not already watching Widow’s Bay, you really should be. As its growing legions of fans know, this is a show that refuses to submit to the sameness that marks streaming TV, offering instead a distinctive point of view that’s so confident, it dominates your attention. You cannot second-screen with phone or laptop while watching Widow’s Bay. You’d miss slapstick set pieces, on-point cultural references that work without being annoying (harder than it sounds!), props that each nail a single perfect in-universe joke, and dialogue showcasing the cast’s excellent comic timing. All of this fun stuff is highly necessary, because without it, you’d be scared out of your wits. Bad things are afoot in Widow’s Bay—at every turn, there’s a cabin with an “X.”
This week’s twin episodes of Widow’s Bay, coming two-thirds of the way through the first season, are a turning point for the show, and a good illustration of its deft approach to plot, theme, and meaning. We get “Our History,” the Sarah Warren flashback episode directed by horror genre stalwart Ti West, and “Seasickness,” directed by Sam Donovan, a return to the present in which our heroes, island mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) and fisherman Wyck (Stephen Root) believe that, having dug up Richard Warren and seen he’s still alive, they’ve solved the mystery of the island’s curse. People born on Widow’s Bay die if they try to leave, and the island is haunted by mysterious outbreaks of violence. Could it really be true that all Loftis, Wyck, and their co-conspirator Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) need to do to fix everything is to take zombie Warren out to sea, past the island’s sphere of influence, so that he will finally die?
Widow’s Bay treats history with the same perfect light touch it has for horror. The character of Richard Warren is played as a grim and looming presence by Hamish Linklater, last most memorably seen as the priest of a flock on a different slowly dying island on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror series Midnight Mass. But this terrifying leader is also very funny, as when Loftis and Wyck feed him Starkist tuna and canned vienna sausages, and Linklater scarfs them up with the gusto of a rooting hog. Loftis, sitting across from Warren, gags, and we can add another perfectly-timed Matthew Rhys facial expression to the long list of great ones we’ve gotten from Widow’s Bay. This exalted founder, we discover, is just a human who wants to keep on living—and who, when he gets in a scuffle with Wyck, yells in his basso profundo voice, “I’m gonna make you eat my dick!”
We know from tagging along on a visit to the historical society in an earlier episode that the first white settlers to arrive on the island of Widow’s Bay found nothing there—except, as the docent adds forebodingly, “the teeth.” In that first winter, the settlers struggled, and the struggle led Warren to make some kind of devil’s bargain—the effects of which the island is still feeling. This backstory evokes that of any number of European colonies in New England and Virginia whose early years were not promising. In the context of Jamestown, this was called the “starving time,” those first winters of labor, hunger, sickness, and death that would either kill a colony or become a dark origin story full of anecdotes that would confound later residents who’d prefer a more heroic and noble usable past. (In the case of actual colonies, part of this story was warfare with the local Native tribes, an element absent from the history of Widow’s Bay—at least, from what we’ve seen so far.)
In one such dark tale from Jamestown, as the colony’s leader during that time later wrote in a memoir, a husband in the colony murdered his wife, ripped their child out of her womb, then turned cannibal, salting her down and eating her in pieces. The stress of the starving time disrupted everything, including domestic tranquility. The colonists afflicted by the “mania” in Widow’s Bay seemed to prefer to stick their thumbs in their wives’ eyes, a practice the resurrected Warren proves he remembers when he angrily eye-thumbs a mannequin of Sarah in the historical society. This isn’t the first mutilated image of the early settlers; we saw in another episode that the town’s statue of Warren is missing its head.
Widow’s Bay loves to refer to other horror movies—we’ve had direct and indirect allusions to The Fog, Halloween, Psycho, The Shining, It, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and now, with “Seasickness” and its dangerous strange-bedfellows mission on a small fishing boat, Jaws. In that same episode, Loftis’ son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) watches a much more obscure title, The City of the Dead (1960), with an off-island girl, sitting silently on opposite sides of the couch. The City of the Dead, which stars Christopher Lee and a bunch of actors whose fame is lost to history, is about a Massachusetts town called Whitewood, which lies under a spell of enchantment after a few witches it tried to burn in its colonial days made a deal with the devil to remain immortal in exchange for a human sacrifice made on a regular schedule. The end of this regime comes about after outsiders finally arrive in enough numbers to fight the witches to the death. The story of Whitewood is like the story of Widow’s Bay: a closed town, at a crossroads.
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What these two new episodes give us is not just a strictly plot-based clue to what exactly is enchanting the island, but also a suggestion that we think about what ties Loftis and Warren together. Both born outsiders to the island that they would go on to oversee, they desperately want to see it succeed. But Loftis’ standards are way higher than Warren’s. “It’s easy for you to judge, when the island is flourishing around you,” the resurrected Warren says to Loftis. “Flourishing??” the current-day mayor replies. “My son is stuck on a fucking hell rock.”
Warren staved off his colony’s death by making a deal: He’d take economic security (food, shelter) along with the curse. Loftis is trying to bring life of a different kind: tourism money, which might lead to the place finally getting 5G, and a flow of outsiders, so that the island becomes part of the world. These are modern desires, as is the desire to find a way for your child to leave your town without dying by dark spellcraft. Is what Tom Loftis wants good? Is openness going to mean freedom for Widow’s Bay? The show leaves open the possibility that Loftis is signing a different kind of deal with the devil. Anyone who’s ever tried to brave summer traffic in a bucolic tourist town in New England knows the one.
