Let’s not beat around the bush here: How about that jump scare, huh? Or more accurately: Jesus Leweezus, how about that freaking jump scare?
Even at my most bullish on Widow’s Bay, Katie Dippold’s extraordinary horror comedy, I didn’t expect the single biggest freak-out of my television year to happen on the same show that got major laughs out of “The Rhythm of the Night,” you know? I just didn’t think it had it in it, or that it was really setting out to do stuff like that. But nope, this episode contains an unbelievably straight-up frightening moment, in which the killer Patricia has long feared finally appears at her front door.
By this point she’s already realized someone has snuck into her home while she went out to see to the car alarm he’d set off in her bookmobile as a distraction. She can even hear his heavy breathing in the dark. So for several painstaking minutes, she walks as carefully and quietly as she can down the stairs and out the door, stopping along the way to pick up a taser with a near-dead battery. Then she’s out on the street, looking around, calculating what to do next.
From the moment she returns home, the camera — which has already simulated the killer’s point of view — is used to show her house as a warren of nooks and crannies, aiming the lens straight at corners to create a maze-like visual effect with rooms and halls that diverge from one another at those points. The street outside hums with suburban menace out of Halloween or It Follows.
And then BANG, there he is: The Boogeyman, a hulking maniac in an expressionless rubber mask, wielding a machete. I don’t blame Patricia for being freaked out, that’s for sure. It freaked me out, and I’m sitting at home watching it in an Apple TV sitcom! For her, this is real, as it has been since he first broke into her home when she was a teenager but couldn’t find her.
Okay, so the menacing calls to her house were a lie. She admits this to the other women from her class later on, when she breaks into their book club meeting to hide. But the Boogeyman really did come to her house, and now he’s back, and they’ve got to call the police. When the ringleader of the mean girls mocks her instead, Patricia responds by knocking her out with the taser. “She’s the fuckin’ worst, I’m sorry,” says Patricia by way of a half-apology as she hustles out of there to find shelter elsewhere.
But the Boogeyman has already entered through the back door. Rather than massacring the book club (The Lovely Bones is an amazing choice), he throws himself out a second story window, then gets back up and starts chasing her once again. He similarly survives getting run over, living to kill the driver, and getting set on fire, living to kill the gas station employee who was nice enough to put him out with a fire extinguisher.
The killer even gets a slice in on Sheriff Bechir (fortunately, it’s just a flesh wound), leaving him unable to defend himself. He’s about to get sliced and diced when Patricia blows the Boogeyman away with shotgun blasts. She keeps the gun trained on his corpse all the way to the morgue’s crematorium, then points it at his ashes and bones, too. As Ali put it on Euphoria earlier this week, “Just in case.”
This entire time, by the way, the killer’s speed never rises above “going for a walk with the cousins after Thanksgiving dinner”: in classic slasher-movie style, he’s still able to keep up with Patricia even as she runs full tilt. But even this is elevated from a mere bit by how good Kate O’Flynn is at, for lack of a better phrase, running in character. Her screams mix fear and irritation, and by the end she’s clearly physically run down. You can see from her outfit that Patricia’s not the kind of person built to run for her life. On the other hand, boy oh boy is it awesome to see her cock a shotgun.
People can surprise you here in Widow’s Bay. Take Wyck, the salty dog who turns out to be not such an insufferable coot after all. The smiling solidarity he shows Tom and Patricia over breakfast the morning after the debacle with town father Richard Warren is genuinely heartwarming — like, in a real way, a way that’s earned, not because that’s the reaction you’re supposed to have.
On the flipside, the discovery that Wyck’s old squeeze Gerrie the town historian has a perfectly nice husband, who even likes Wyck quite a bit. You can’t even root for him to get the girl when the girl is perfectly happy with the boy she’s got. You witness two perfectly nice people accidentally crush a man’s dreams. It feels bad, man.
So does the way Evan Loftis grills his father Tom about the letters and photos he uncovered, proving his mother lived for some time after he was born. The letters, which a savagely embittered Evan makes Tom listen to as he reads them aloud, reveal that his mother was a thoroughly broken woman, only in touch with reality long enough to express her belief that she’s already dead.
That is effectively how Tom describes her to Evan. She suffered a stroke from preeclampsia that transformed her personality, making her dangerous. She succumbed to a brain aneurysm a couple of years after Tom had her institutionalized. He never told Evan, he says, in part because revisiting it would make him sadder about it than he already is, and in part because Evan’s mom, his real mom, wouldn’t have wanted him to remember her that way at all.
But now that the curse is (allegedly) broken, things are gonna change. The two Loftis boys re-bond over sandwiches as they get psyched for an upcoming surprise trip to Boston to see the Red Sox play, purchased by Tom now that he feels it’s safe for Evan to leave the island.
All this business about Evan and his mom runs parallel to a side plot involving Sheriff Bechir and his very pregnant wife. It’s urgent for Bechir to recover and get the hell to the mainland before their baby is born in Widow’s Bay and suffers the same curse as all the other residents.
Because the curse is very much still operative, obviously. After discovering the Boogeyman’s return, Wyck relays the bad news to a heartbroken and frightened Tom at the end of the episode, while the wind howls. If, as it seems, Evan Loftis is the last surviving descendent of Richard Warren through his mother’s side, does anyone else see a Wicker Man in Widow’s Bay’s future?
I hope they go for it, frankly. I want a full-on Shirley Jackson “The Lottery” situation. I want villagers with torches and pitchforks. I want some kind of horrible betrayal that will make me hate one of these adorable weirdos. I want more beautifully filmed nighttime exteriors, filled with rich patches of black in which even darker things lurk. I want my Widow’s Bay.
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.