Widow’s Bay
Our History
Season 1
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
Finally, we meet the “great” Richard Warren and his devoted and not-at-all-terrified wife, Sarah.
Photo: Courtesy of Apple
The very beginning of last week’s episode of Widow’s Bay showed a brief scene of a man with very long hair discovering the mushrooms, called truesight, that grow solely out of the soil on this isolated island. It was unclear how that moment related to what followed or who exactly he was. But this week’s episode, “Our History,” a flashback to 1702 and Sarah Westcott Warren’s arrival in Widow’s Bay, provides some clarity. It seems obvious now that the man with the long hair at the beginning of “What to Expect on Your Trip” is Richard Warren, portrayed by Hamish Linklater, and that what we witnessed was his arrival on the island and his discovery of the funnest fungi in fungi history. (Just kidding, those mushrooms are not fun at all.)
This sixth episode of the season confirms that some key things hinted at in the fifth episode are true. Richard Warren was not the great guy everyone claims, and was, in fact, a murderer who killed his first wife and seems poised to do the same to Sarah. We actually see Sarah voice her fears in her diary, jotting down her thoughts on a page that Wyck will recover decades later. (Brief diary summary: My husband definitely bludgeons people to death, but he’s standing right here, so I should clarify and say that what I just wrote is actually me starting to work out a tight five for my new stand-up act. In conclusion, my husband absolutely did not use a dude named Ezra’s own cane to beat the bloody life out of him, jk jk jk jk jk.)
The origin story of Widow’s Bay does indeed appear to have been written like the early seasons of Saturday Night Live: by someone using very hard drugs. That someone is Richard Warren, who tells the townsfolk before they bury him alive that if they break the pact he made with the island, they are doomed. (Between this and Euphoria, hell of a week for people being buried alive on television.) “The pact must be honored,” Richard insists. “The pact which spared us in that first winter. It spoke to me through the mushrooms.” He adds, “Fulfill the pact and the plague will stop. If you do not, the terrors will not cease.”
It seems fair to assume that whatever spoke to Richard is the same entity that Tom saw while he was riding his own truesight wave. But just because the mushrooms make Richard believe in the pact does not mean that the pact is real. Like, if someone takes an edible and starts watching Dude, Where’s My Car?, they may become completely convinced that the 2000 movie starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott is the best comedy of all time. But that does not mean this is true. It just means they got high off their ass and came to a misguided conclusion. Maybe Richard Warren did the same thing.
We, the viewers, still don’t know for sure exactly what’s causing the island’s calamities. But “Our History” does an excellent job of connecting some important dots and furthering our understanding of how the island’s past and present are connected. This episode has many fewer laughs than the previous ones. But it’s still incredibly compelling and extremely unsettling, which makes sense since Ti West, director of the X trilogy, directed this episode.
It’s not easy for a show to take a detour with a flashback, stand-alone episode and still hold the audience’s interest, but Widow’s Bay makes it look easy. The writing in this episode is not just solid, it’s sometimes gorgeous. When Ezra Lowery describes the symptoms that befell the plague-stricken Widow’s Bay resident Cornelius Evans — “His eyes were yellow with spoiled moons” — the prose sounds damn close to poetry. Shout-out to Alberto Roldán, the credited writer of “Our History,” who has previously worked on Mrs. Davis and Gaslit, two shows that star Betty Gilpin.
Which brings us to another massive asset in this episode’s favor: Betty fucking Gilpin. The first scene introduces her as Sarah Westcott Warren, and as soon as it did, I actually yelled her name in appreciation. As she does in much of her work, but maybe especially in Mrs. Davis (watch it if you haven’t!), Gilpin does an exceptional job of playing the emotional authenticity in every moment — her panicky gasps and pillow-muffled screams are believable on a visceral level — while highlighting the comedic subtext, without sacrificing that authenticity. The way she spits out the poisoned liquor that Richard offers her, for example, is hilarious but still genuinely terrifying. Not every actor can do this sort of thing. Betty Gilpin does it like it’s second nature.
Poor Sarah arrives in Widow’s Bay specifically to wed Richard Warren, a man she has never met but is marrying anyway because Sarah is almost 40, and in the 1700s, a (barely) middle-age woman has to take what she can get. The buzz about the guy initially is pretty good. “’Fore he arrived, it was a place with nothing but barren dirt,” says the carriage driver who escorts Sarah into town. (He fails to mention all the teeth that were also apparently in that dirt.) “But today, blossoms on the trees, food for every hungry mouth, mild winters.”
“He controls the weather, does he?” Sarah jokes. But the real joke is that people on the island think that he probably can control the weather. “They say that you’re in communion with this island,” Ezra Lowery tells Richard, portrayed hauntingly by Linklater, before Richard brains him to death. “That you whisper to it. You tame it. You turn it to your will. That you are the only reason we survived the first years.” Pastor Collins later confirms to Sarah that everyone in Widow’s Bay is suspicious of Richard and fears “that the devil himself has chosen your husband, for what cause I cannot tell.”
Certainly, there is evidence that something dark-arts-ish is going on. The balls of hair left outside of doorways where someone has been killed have a Blair Witch flavor. More importantly, it’s pretty weird that Richard cannot be killed. When the Pastor essentially sends a hitman to take him out, Richard is stabbed repeatedly, but it’s the failed killer who dies while Richard is covered in blood, but somehow perfectly fine. That can’t be explained away by a few shots of mushroom tea, although I absolutely think mushrooms are what Richard keeps in his necklace. (That’s not a covenant in there, dummies, it’s the ’shrooms!)
It is fair, if not common sense, to assume that the island requires human sacrifice. Again, Richard says, “Fulfill the pact and the plague will stop.” It seems like Richard believes that if he can kill enough people, the island will stop killing them with disease. He’s also certain that Sarah and his children will die for attempting to escape Widow’s Bay, something they seem to somewhat succeed at accomplishing near the end of the episode, if success qualifies as getting in a boat without getting eaten by Contagious Zombie Abigail. (Based on the painting of the boat at the inn, which Tom noticed in episode two, that voyage probably does not go well.) “The island won’t let them leave,” Richard shouts from inside his coffin. “Please. You’ll kill them all.” I mean, the place is called Widow’s Bay, so.
In the next episode, which conveniently also dropped today, we should find out how much of Richard’s prophecy is valid. That’s because in the last scene of this one, we return to the present, where we find Wyck digging up Richard’s grave and beginning to exhume his body. If the island’s original protector was right all those years ago, he should still be alive inside that box.
• If the Warrens’ home looks familiar, that’s because it is the same building as the Widow’s Bay Historical Society. It’s ironic that the place Sarah was first brought is the same location that Arthur, the New York Times writer, visits when he first arrives on the island. It’s fun that the historical society is literally built on top of lies and secrets. There are definitely some creepy tunnels under there, as Sarah found back in 1702, and they lead to a well, the same well that Rev. Bryce visited before his death and where he seemed to hear voices.
• Speaking of the dearly departed Reverend Bryce, who was confused and agitated by the ringing of the church bells, when Richard suddenly says he has work that needs doing on his wedding night, he does so right after the church bells toll. Clearly, that’s the island’s version of a calendar notification, reminding Richard (and later, maybe, others) he has a job to do, and that job involves killing people and, also, sometimes, stabbing himself in the hand and rolling his eyeballs to the back of his head. He can’t complain that he has to do this, it was right there in the job description.
• So Richard Warren was buried alive. Know who else was (supposedly) buried alive? The Boogeyman, as P.J. explained in last week’s episode. Which makes me wonder if the Boogeyman might be Richard Warren himself. Maybe?
• A Shout-out to Looking Glass!: When Wyck is digging up Richard’s grave, the radio in his car is tuned to an AM station playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” a 1972 hit that is now filed in the yacht-rock section at your local record store. It’s a clever needle drop since the song is about a bartender in a harbor town who falls for a sailor she can never have: “Brandy, you’re a fine girl / What a good wife you would be / But my life, my love, and my lady is the sea.” Much like the lore around Richard and Sarah Warren, the lyrics play like a romanticized version of what was probably a much more problematic situation.
• Funniest Line of the Week: The honor goes to Sarah’s line when she starts to have a meltdown in front of Pastor Collins and freaks out about leaving the island. “I am but four and ten years almost,” she weeps. “Allow me to wither in my father’s attic as is my womanly destiny.” She can barely choke out the words “womanly destiny” because it’s obvious she doesn’t believe that should be her destiny, she’s just willing to say or do anything to get away from her new husband. And I get that. If the choices are (a) keep living with the guy who does murder on behalf of an island, or (b) wither, I’m going wither every single time.
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