Well, sadly it’s time for our stay in Widow’s Bay to end, but I’ve got to say, I’ve truly enjoyed visiting this wonderfully peculiar series that’s fast become my favorite show on at the moment. It’s impressive balance of well-judged laughs and subtle scares felt pretty unique in a time where everyone else feels the need to go big, but now that we’ve reached the end of the line, can the show send us out with a bang?
Well… no, but not for the reasons that you’d think. For a start, Widow’s Bay was never a show particularly interested in the “bang” and it’s that insidiously quiet nature that made me fall in love with it in the first place. Secondly, it actually technically isn’t the end either as news broke around the same time the episode aired that Apple TV has commissioned a second season, which means we’ll get to have a return vacation hopefully this time next year. While it was a bit annoying knowing that the curse of the island wasn’t getting lifted before seeing the last episode, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make if it means we get to come back – oh, and speaking of sacrifices…
Knowing now that the key to the evil that blights the island of Widow’s Bay is his elderly assistant, Ruth, Mayor Tom Loftis makes his way through the unnatural storm that’s buffering the island. As she’s the last living relative of town founder, Richard Warren, her death would finally halt his bloodline and end this terrible curse and after a quick stop to check on her health records, Tom arrives at Ruth’s house with the intent of murdering this sweet, 84 year-old lady. It’s probably worth noting that Ruth has no clue about her damned heritage either and is actually touched to see that someone has come to check on her while the storm rages.
This of course does nothing to help the inner guilt coursing through Tom’s body, and while he’s figured out the quickest, most painless way to snuff the old girl (mixing her meds and sticking it in her tea), a long talk about her varied life isn’t making things any easier.
Meanwhile, back at the shelter, things are starting to get ugly. Locked in and discovering that the rations aren’t going to hold, Patricia and Wyck struggle to maintain order among the panicking tourists – but matters are made even worse when Dale discovers evidence that previous generations have been willingly sacrificing people to the island’s evil and have even worked out a pretty disturbing, if chilling, practial method.
While all this is going on, Bechir discovers what’s truly going on and heads out into the storm to protect his unborn child from the curse, and Tom’s son, Evan, and his friends discover the room where people are fed to that eldritch evil. However, the most devestating thing to occur is that as she gradually fades away, Ruth has a secret to get off her chest. A secret about her affair which led to a pregnancy that no one knew about, and the birth of a little girl who grew up and fell in love on the island. A girl who was named Lauren and that had a child with a man named… Tom Loftis.
For a show praised so much for it’s comedy/horror elements, Widow’s Bay’s season finale finds itself in something of a somber mood. Oh the laughs are still there and so is that reliable, creeping dread, but the majority of the episode is mostly taken up with Tom slowly trying to work himself up towards euthanizing a harmless old woman in the gentlest way he possibly can. Like the majority of the series, the laughs here are mostly generated by an outlandish scenario that sees the long-suffering Tom forced to try and achieve some deranged goal while constantly being thwarted by the niceties of basic human interaction; but aside from that, there’s a lot more gravity here than the usual scenario. Amusing as a lot of it is, there’s some real dramatic meat to Tom trying to find some moral way to make his grim deed easier on him, especially as Ruth keeps unknowingly countering him with offers of calm tea that take 25 long minutes to brew and a strangely pragmatic view of the trolly problem. However, we’re only being softened up for something of a gargantuan series of twists that manage to draw out the series’ lore in preparation for that newly announced second season.
Obviously, there’s a big, honking one that we’ll get to momentarily, but deep in that storm shelter, while Patricia and Wyck struggle to keep everyone calm despite moldy rations and stale water, Dale discovers old film cans that reveal that the town has not only been performing sacrifices to feed the evil for decades (the ringing of the church bells signifies how many souls the force requires), but they even have a public service film on how to best do it. Meanwhile, Evan has gone on one of his bored walks with his stoner friends and located the killing room where victims are brought so the evil can claim them. After accidently feeding someone to it, the violent storm finally breaks and everyome is inadvertently saved, but back at Ruth’s house, significant damage has been done.
Virtually everything Tom has tried to do, be it getting tourists to Widow’s Bay in the first place or agreeing to assassinate an octogenarian, has been to grant his son a fuller life, but ironically, thanks to the revealed bombshell about Evan’s secret lineage, he proves to be the last living descendent of the man who made the pact in the first place. It should be outlandish as fuck, but considering how much damage Tom has unwittingly done in Evan’s name already, it’s actually quite horrifying and the future of Widow’s Bay and everything in it now depends on the impossible notion that the Mayor will give up his only son. Escalating matters even further is the arrival of Bechir who, in an attempt to save his own unborn child from the curse that kills anyone born on the island if they try to leave, shoots Ruth to mistakenly end the threat. While the laughs are a bit more muted than usual and the horror is merely implied, it’s the dramatic weight of the tenth episode that stops it from just being a glorified preview for a yet unmade second season. With such emotional stakes on the table and the episode ominously ending with the church bells sound once more (eight times no less, which means the evil requires eight victims), we leave Widow’s Bay in something of an intriguing pickle. Will Tom and the townsfolk restart the sacrifices in order to save the island for another summer, or resist and incur the wrath of an already hungry eldritch force? How will Patrica and Wyck feel about it either way? Will the rest of the Mayor’s office be brought into the loop to help facilitate whatever comes next? I legitimately can’t wait to see what comes next, especially considering that no matter what goes down, you just know that it’ll be shrouded in the excruciating type of social awkwardness that Matthew Rhys has perfected over the last ten episodes.
The best show currently on television (or streaming at least) closes out in style thanks to the attention and moral dilemmas it hogpiles onto its now-beloved cast. But while a more definitive ending and more for Patricia and Wyck to do would have been nice, the fact that we get to visit Widow’s Bay once more means that the sting of leaving is minimised. I hope you enjoyed your stay, because I’m now counting the days until I can return.
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