Widow’s Bay
Seasickness
Season 1
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Courtesy of Apple
As the episode “Seasickness” opens, Widow’s Bay Mayor Tom Loftis is just waking up from a long summer’s nap brought on by a heavy dose of island mushrooms. Immediately, Patricia calls, lets Tom know he’s been fully asleep — with his cheek on a toilet seat, no less — for a full day, then invites him to join her and Wyck at the historical society building, a.k.a. the former home of Richard and Sarah Warren. That’s where she very nonchalantly informs him that while he was snoozing post-puke, they have dug up the body of Richard Warren, and oh, hey, guess what, he’s still alive. Also, he’s waiting upstairs to have a conversation with Tom since Tom is technically in charge of the island that Richard first began to protect more than 400 years ago. This is a lot to process, even if you haven’t been on a mushroom bender for upwards of 24 hours.
It’s a lot to process as a viewer, too, because the seventh episode of Widow’s Bay functions on two primary levels: as a suspenseful reveal of the island’s powers and a frequently solid riff on the movie Jaws. It’s also yet another example of how well this show can toggle between different tones and emotions — horror, moving drama, absurdist comedy — without ever missing even a millisecond of a beat. Perhaps the most Widow’s Bay thing in this installment of Widow’s Bay is the scene where Tom meets with Richard for the first time and is nervously attempting to communicate with him. The silence in the room primes the nervous system for potential jump scares, and the jump scares arrive. But most of them are caused by Patricia, who keeps re-entering the room — the same space that was once the Warrens’ bedroom — at inopportune moments. This is how Widow’s Bay operates: it will drag a dead man who may be possessed by a demon out of his grave, then startle the shit out of you by making Patricia come back in to get her purse.
After this episode, you can’t complain that this series isn’t making enough of an effort to answer questions about the island. I mean, you can complain if you want, but you would be wrong, and you should probably stop. In this 43-minute chapter, Richard explains how this whole curse began, at least from his perspective, in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from a speaker located in the deepest bowels of hell, on a sound system where the mix is all bass, no treble. When Tom asks how Richard’s still alive, he says: “I was tricked by a devil and betrayed by my lessers. But an evil power sustains me.” Turns out he did, literally, make a deal with the devil, out of desperation. When there was nothing for the first Widow’s Bay settlers to eat, Richard miraculously came upon those very special mushrooms, ate one, and that’s when “something else” came to him. When Tom asks what that something else was, Richard is maddeningly vague. “A demon? The island itself?” he offers.
Somehow, this vague entity presented Richard with a covenant that would save the members of the settlement, who had resorted to eating dirt as well as other corpses. When Tom asks what Richard offered in return to the demon or the island or whatever, he deflects again. “If I had refused, none of you would be here.” Isn’t it interesting how people who sell their souls to the devil always insist they had no other options? When Tom confesses that he also saw what may have been the entity, all Richard tells Tom is that, “It knows frightened men will do desperate things.”
It’s notable that we never see what the covenant, a tiny piece of paper that Richard keeps in his locket, actually says. As soon as Richard notes he signed it with “my own blood, feces, and semen,” Tom swiftly puts it down without looking at it. (Matthew Rhys, as per usual, plays this moment perfectly straight, and it’s that much funnier because of it.) Technically, we don’t know what Richard agreed to, exactly, but it seems fair to conclude it involved offering human sacrifices to satisfy the “starving” island. Why exactly does the island need to be fed in this way? We still don’t know.
But Richard offers a way to break the supposed curse: since he’s the last of his bloodline, all they have to do is take him out to sea —“past the point where sailors fear” — which is where the hex on him will be broken, and he’ll finally age normally and die. So Wyck puts Tom and Richard on his boat and heads out to a very specific distance from the island, marked by buoys. If they go any farther, Wyck, a Widow’s Bay native, may not make it back alive.
This is when the episode goes full Jaws. On the boat, Wyck delivers a lengthy monologue about a haunting, dangerous encounter he had at sea as a teenager. He describes a trip he took with Mark Doyle, brother of Gerrie, where they came into contact with some kind of underwater beast. For the record, it was not a shark, because one of the boys in their group saw a tentacle when they were attacked. Wyck says he tried to swim away, then felt something grabbing his foot, kicked it off, and realized it was Mark, grasping onto his friend for help in what would turn out to be his final moments alive.
Wyck’s story sounds like a description of something that happens in Jaws, but it’s also reminiscent of the famous speech made by Quint, played by the great Robert Shaw, about the soldiers on the U.S.S. Indianapolis who got stuck in shark-infested waters during World War II after their boat was hit by Japanese missiles. The score during this scene, composed by David Fleming, even echoes the famously creepy tuba notes from John Williams’ Jaws score. In the same way that Quint’s story helps explain his fixation on sharks, Wyck’s tells us why he’s so obsessed with removing the curse on the island. He believes this is the only way he can redeem himself. He didn’t save Mark, but he could save others on the island from meeting a similar fate.
The story of Mark Doyle may help explain Gerrie’s focus on the island’s history, too. Surely it helps to think that her brother’s death was caused by this haunted place, as opposed to a youthful mistake that could have been avoided. She surrounds herself with artifacts that help her maintain that world view, which is tragic and deeply sad. There’s more to “Museum Gerrie” than you might think.
As frustrating as it may be that we still don’t know what the demon or entity is or looks like, this also feels a bit Jaws-esque. The smartest thing Steven Spielberg does in that movie is to delay the reveal of the Great White, a choice he had to make because the fake shark famously didn’t work the way it should have. But it also made the movie more suspenseful. That approach works just as effectively on Widow’s Bay.
The subsequent scene where Richard and Tom share some spiced rum is even more reminiscent of the Quint U.S.S. Indianapolis sequence. It’s staged around a table in the boat’s small cabin, almost exactly the way Spielberg staged his scene. In Jaws, Quint sings the classic “let’s order another round” crooner, “Show Me the Way Home.” Here, Richard sings a sea shanty called “Last Man,” written specifically for Widow’s Bay; writer and star Neil Casey (he plays Kurt) handled the lyrics, and the music was written by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire.
Then, as Wyck predicted he would, Richard has a change of heart and wants to live after all. Which, to be fair to Richard, is a natural impulse considering he spent more than 300 years stuck in a coffin. The boat gets jostled, just as it does in Jaws, and a skirmish ensues. “I’m gonna make you eat my dick,” Richard yells at Wyck, and I gotta be honest, given his willingness to sign documents with his own blood, feces, and semen, I think he really would.
After a struggle that involves a harpoon (again: Jaws!) Wyck and Tom manage to get Richard back into his coffin. Wyck briefly gets lost at sea with a life preserver, but eventually returns to the boat unscathed. Tom checks the coffin and Richard has been reduced to bone and ash. (His last words were exactly what he predicted: “Let me live.”) Would I feel better if I had seen Tom throw the coffin into the sea? Yes. Yes, I would. Still: the show wants us to celebrate that they pulled this off.
Which, sorry to be a buzzkill, but the idea that Richard’s beyond timely death has lifted the curse seems unlikely, for a few reasons. First: this is only the seventh episode, and there are still three more to go. Second: back on land, Kelly prompts Evan to start searching for answers about his dad, which is how he discovers photos of him as a baby with his mother, who is clearly very much alive and survived childbirth. Evan will likely have a lot of questions for Tom when he gets home. This realization, coupled with the depiction of the physical weakness that Wyck experiences when the boat gets a little too close to the so-called danger zone, confirms that the business about not being able to leave the island is real. It’s not clear that Richard’s death can remedy it.
But most importantly, the closing shot of “Seasickness” takes us back to the inn, where yet another satisfied customer (comedian and Trump impersonator Anthony Atamanuik) is storming out of the place while telling Kurt he smells “like a cabbage took a shit in a baby’s diaper.” The camera pulls in tight on that painting in the lobby that seems to depict Sarah Warren and Richard’s children departing the island in the boat, as seen in episode six, but with one child paddling helplessly in the water. Why would Widow’s Bay show us this right now, if it wasn’t trying to tell us that there may be more surviving Warrens than Richard believed?
•Before they dig up Evan’s baby pictures, he and Kelly are watching an old movie called Horror Hotel — perhaps a good name for Kurt’s inn! — which is set in an odd Massachusetts town where two witches who were burned at the stake, make a deal with the devil to give them eternal life and continue inflicting pain on the place. Sound familiar?
• When Tom first arrives at the historical society at the beginning of the episode, the camera scans briefly past a letter that’s been partially destroyed. “I wish my words alone would convey the gravity, but this is the only way you will understand,” say the only readable words. It’s signed by a Rev. Theodore Roberts, which suggests that Bryce isn’t the only holy man who may have ended his life thanks to the island.
• Best Visual Gag: In another moment where gravity-meets-ridiculousness, Richard walks around the museum, looking at the items his children once owned that are now on display. At one point, he stands in front of some Richard Warren merch that I have to assume Gerrie can barely keep in stock. My favorite, and I assume the gift shop’s No. 1 bestseller: a T-shirt that reads, “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warren You.”
• Funniest Line of the Week: Everything Patricia does and says in this episode is absolutely hilarious: the way she follows her “How sad” with a surprised “Oh,” when Richard tries to gouge out the eyes of the Sarah Warren statue; her decision to steal the sheriff’s Jeep — “I got this,” she assures Tom when she says she’ll get rid of Beshir, but she absolutely does not have this; and her sobbing revisitation of her Boogeyman story. But the thing that made me laugh the hardest was what she wrote in the notebook to try to communicate with Richard.
“Hello, I am Patricia,” says the first page. Then the second, scrawled down after Richard failed to respond to her, I assume: “Are you mad at something I said?” It is so funny and sad that within a few seconds of meeting someone — a someone who has been buried alive for hundreds of years and unable to speak to any other humans — she’s already asking if she’s offended him. It’s like walking up to Rumplestilskin right after he wakes up from his nap and being like, “Oh my God, are you mad at me?” Patricia, you’re such a glorious mess. Never change, girl!
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