Under normal circumstances, death “betwixt her thighs” is one of those “well, if you gotta go…” situations. It’s also one of the funniest running gags on The Golden Girls. But when the “her” in question is
In this clever episode of Widow’s Bay, writer Neil Casey (who co-starred as innkeeper Kurt last time) weaves together a wide variety of source material — folk tales, sailor stories, The Ring, It Follows, Jaws, The Shining, the classic Stephen King short story “The Raft” — in the form of the Sea Hag (Carryl Lynn). This entity singles out lonely sailors, scratches them with her fingernails, and uses their traces of skin to track them down like a bloodhound until she finally kills them by…well, I’ll let Wyck, to whom Tom finally comes for advice, take it from here:
“She crawls into your bed and sits on your face.”
Tom’s problem at this point isn’t that he doesn’t believe, it’s that he has no choice but to believe. Twice the Hag appears to him, chases him down, and scratches him: first on a stretch of deserted road where he finds her wandering, then during the ceremonial Inaugural Swim at which the mayor takes a dip in the ocean to prove it’s safe from, y’know, whatever, it’s probably nothing, just an old tradition, haha. The first time he’s all alone with no witnesses, the second time surrounded by onlookers who don’t or can’t see the thing that attacked him anyway, but the scratches are inarguably real. Something supernatural really is coming for him.
At the same time, however, Tom may be on the verge of getting lucky. The tourist boom he anticipated really has materialized, and with it comes a woman named Marissa (Elizabeth Alderfer). The two strike up a friendly, flirtatious relationship as he drives her back to town from the middle of nowhere, where she’d become lost because his son Evan defaced a street sign with obscene graffiti. She no-shows the dive bar where she says she and the rest of her friend’s bachelorette party will be hanging, but she keeps leaving messages trying to set up another rendezvous. When they finally get together at a restaurant, she straight-up invites herself over to his place. Shaken by his experiences, he says tonight’s not a good night.
But that doesn’t deter Marissa. She shows up unexpectedly at his house, where he’s alone as Evan spends a night out with his delinquent friends and some summer girls. She says her friends dropped her off and she’s just shooting her shot, but all Tom can hear is a voice and an insistent knock on the door. “I know what you are!” he says, refusing to let her in and barring the door against her with a chair.
So Marrissa, who is 100% a real human, apparently very horny, audibly very humiliated, gets back in the car she took there with her friends, and the real Sea Hag shows up. She doesn’t come in the form of anyone living, though, but as a vision of his wife Lauren (Meredith Casey), whom he told Marisa died in childbirth. Just like that, the Hag pops up between his legs. Since he’s nearly paralyzed by the poison in her scratch, all he can do is fumble for the lever on his recliner, which sends her flying in one of the show’s funniest and least expected bits of physical comedy so far.
Tom can crawl, but he can’t hide. He seeks refuge in his bathtub, but since he’s unable to lock the door, the creature crawls right in after him. Only the timely arrival of Wyck, who harpoons the Hag and turns her back into seawater, saves Tom from death by cunnilingus.
But the horrors aren’t over by a long shot. Earlier in the episode, we see Rev. Bryce, the town priest, running through the woods to a big square brick well. He leans in to listen to the darkness, and the screen goes full black. Several scenes later, he staggers out of the woods to the old car graveyard where Evan and his friends are hanging out, and he looks like he’s seen the face of the Devil himself. “There is evil here,” he warns, before wandering away.
At the end of the episode, he calls Tom. “I heard it. I’m so sorry. God forgive me,” he says cryptically, before the bell begins to toll. Over the police band, the Sheriff radios for help at the town’s Sunset Cocktails festivities, where god knows what is apparently happening.
“Why is this happening?” Tom asks Wyck.
“I dunno,” he says. “You just survive it.”
Am I wrong to say whoa here?
Don’t get me wrong, Widow’s Bay remains an extremely funny show. These characters are so well drawn, so precisely acted, that it feels like you’ve been the one subjected to Wyck’s obnoxiousness, Ruth’s senility, Rosemary’s ramblings, and Patricia’s passive aggression for all your years in the mayor’s office. And you understand Tom’s impatience, neurosis, stubbornness, pride, and especially his inability to deal with or even accept adversity. I love the prosaic way he describes the Hag to the Sheriff: “OLD WOMAN / POSSIBLY DAMP / FASTER THAN AN OLD WOMAN SHOULD BE!” Look at the effort he’s making not to say what he clearly knows, deep down, he actually saw. It tells you so much about this guy, and it’s hilarious.
With characters this well drawn and this locked down this early, there’s almost no limit to where you can go. Look at Cheers or The Golden Girls: Those characters were those characters immediately, and thus their pilot episodes contain some of the funniest jokes in the entire run of the series. Kind of reminds you of a show we’re watching right now, right?
The show’s high concept, too, has been note-perfect from the start. This means that when you deviate from the expected course, the payoff is huge. The fact that if Tom had simply looked at his driveway he’d have seen that he just missed out on a legit chance to score with a very nice-seeming lady killed me, because like Tom, I fully thought she was the Sea Hag all along too! They caught me hook line and sinker.
But the show is more than just funny. To my outright shock, I’m finding it legitimately scary, too. I got the heebie-jeebies when I was up late by myself in a quiet, dark living room after the clown episode, and it takes some doing for horror to do that to a jaded horror-hound like me.
The Sea Hag is a very effective monster, too, deviating just enough from similar concepts — Sadako/Samara from the Ring films, Mrs. Kersh from It, the It Follows entity’s old-lady incarnation, the dead woman in the bathtub from The Shining — to work well as its own thing. You can feel in your gut why it would be bad for this thing to touch you, why it would be bad to so much as see it standing there in the middle of the road, motionless. By the time it reaches that bathtub you’re nearly as desperate for someone or something to stop it as Tom is. It’s very effective horror.
It needs to be. That exchange between Tom and Wyck, the first one where neither man is trying to outsmart, lecture, or condescend to the other, packs a wallop when you unpack it. Why is are the horrors happening? Whatever the reason, you have to keep living through them. You have no other choice. It’s a familiar feeling these days, right here on the mainland.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.