As we reach the midway point, I’ve come to cherish our little weekly trips to Widow’s Bay as it’s nicely settled in to becoming a one-stop drop for cracking jokes and hovering dread. With the fourth and third episodes in particular, we’ve found the adventures of the island town really find its groove and while it feels that the overarching mystery of the titular destination has barely been scratched, the humour has been pitch perfect throughout.
This brings us to “What To Expect On Your Trip”, the fifth episode that seems to offer the promise of some greatly needed exposition, but instead wrong foots us into yet another 40 minutes of stressful farce as the union of Tom, Wyck and Patricia attempt to seek answers after the death of Reverend Bryce. Of course, fuck all goes to plan – but rather than detail it all, episode five takes a more broken, scattershot approach which leads to the installment being something of a wild trip – in many different ways.
In the wake of Reverend Bryce’s suicide, Tom has finally jumped aboard the Widow’s Bay curse bandwagon and ordered an immediate curfew which angers the residents as tonight is the night of a big fireworks display. But while Tom, Patricia and Wyck try to find clues that’ll reveal what caused Bryce to hang himself, their seach only turns up an old, charred piece of paper, a box of psychedelic mushrooms and a phone number that Bryce rang repeatedly before he hung himself.
After a little detective work, the trio discovers that the number belongs to local shaman (read: drug dealer) Todd O’Connor who reveals that not only do those mushrooms only grow on the island, but also have the power to induce terrifying visions. Determining that Bryce was trying to use a magic mushroom trip to unlock the secrets of Widow’s Bay, Wyck volunteers to imbibe a dose in order to try and open his “inner eye” to unlock those dark, unimaginable secrets. However, due to the fact that Todd’s not exactly the most focused dude on the island, he gives Tom the sizable dose instead who is understandably horrified at the revelation. While his evening was supposed to be taken up by trying to corral his wayward son, Evan, and trying to get the town to stick to the curfew, he’s now drenched in trippy paranoia and plagued with numerous lapses in time where he finds himself in various situations with no memory of how he got there.
As the mushrooms course through his system and Wyck and Patricia grumpily have to resort to other means of discovering answers, it seems that Tom’s drug fueled odessy is a complete and total bust – but after an argument with Evan, he starts to have visions of his wife’s death. Could this all be related to what’s going on, or is Tom’s frazzled synapses going back over past tragedies as they spectacularly misfire?
I’ve a feeling that the more offbeat stylings of What To Expect On Your Trip may lead to Widow’s Bay’s fifth outing to get a more divisive reception than your average episode. Oh the laughs are still there – great big belly ones if you must know – but there’s also a feeling that the episode is simultaneously the most serious installment we’ve had yet. For a start, compared to last week’s episode that had us outside looking in at Patricia following the malevolent whims of a shape-shifting grimoire, this episode has us inside looking out at the accidental twelve hour trip that poor old Tom has to take after the blitzed Todd doesn’t take the time to actually find out which one of them is Wyck before dosing one of the the fuck up with mind obliterating horror-shrooms. To its credit, director Andrew DeYoung doesn’t take the easy way out and deliver cartoonish, melty faces or random blasts of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida just to make it obvious and instead uses harsh camera angles and various, harsh lens to fully convey the terror he’s feeling after he realises he’s about to embark on a 12 hour drug trip that may very well cost him some permanent motor functions on an extremely important day.
The whole scene that starts with Tom, Wyck and Patricia arriving at Todd’s house and sees the psychedelic misunderstanding take place could, pound for pound be the funniest scene the show has thus produced as those wonderfully understated jokes fly thick and fast. Also, it’s been around two weeks since we last got to see Matthew Rhys’ anxious Mayor throw a major, panicked shit-fit and if you thought the actor managed to convey that barely contained hysteria brilliantly before, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In fact, What To Expect On Your Trip may be the best use of Rhys’ talent for fixing a permanently alarmed expression on his face yet, especially as he ends up going out and attempting his Mayorly duties despite blatantly being off his tits.
But it’s here that the shoe throws you a bit of a curveball. Usually, in other instances, we’d follow the tweaking victim and get an overview of what’s happening from multiple points of view to squeeze maximum humour from the situation. But here, we stick with Tom and only really experience what he feels, which is made all the more jarring by the fact that he keeps blacking out mid task and then snapping back at random intervals. The result may not be as overtly raucous as some may hope, but on the other hand, the show’s habit of being both understated with its humour and horror means that the rather unnerving experience fits the unpredictable style of the show perfectly.
True, some of the side-plots tend to throw the momentum a little. Evan’s trip to the house of the dilapidated house of the serial killer known as the Boogeyman may give him some needed screen time, but you’d much rather be spending time on the main plot as this father disturbingly trips balls. Similarly, trying to follow Tom as he lurches through his day means we amusingly ignore Wyck and Patricia as they actually manage to uncover some answers that his trip is failing to do. In many ways, Episode 5 seems to be an exercise in anti-exposition as the main plot is temporarily rendered unimportant thanks to the Mayor unwittingly kissing the sky, but while this may throw some people hoping for a more straightforward episode, the jokes are still damn good. Be it the gag about a drug inspired drawing of intricate “vaguely religious iconography” turns out to be just the tracing of a hand, the perfectly timed punchline to a warning about avoiding mirrors, or the fact that Patricia has attached a retractable dog leach to Tom’s arm to keep him in line, the willfully strange format is kept on track by some of the strongest laughs to date.
Describing an episode of Widow’s Bay as “being a bit of a weird one” may seem a bit of an understatement, but while we wait for the eldritch, supernatural shit to really hit the fan, this bizarre little detour manages to shake things up in a memorable way. With the hint that the death of Tom’s wife could be connected to the evil of the island (islanders don’t tend to last too long on the mainland, remember?) and a possible clue being linked to the burial site of Widow’s Bay’s founder, expect a more “normal” episode next week. But then, what’s normal in the world of Widow’s Bay?
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