Despite all the warnings from his salty constituents—and that perilous night he just endured at the local historic inn—Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) has succeeded in making Widow’s Bay a newly popular tourist attraction. He’s thrilled! Things are looking up! So why won’t the cursed island stop throwing weird new worries in his path?
This week, “The Inaugural Swim” introduced Widow’s Bay viewers to a quaint tradition in the seaside town, as well as another of its fearsome legends come to life.
You’d think being chased through a crawl space by the ghost of a killer clown would’ve made Tom pull the plug on his tourism push. But he’s happy as can be seeing all the new faces milling around downtown, and his mood brightens even more when he spots Marissa (Elizabeth Alderfer), a pretty visitor using the map in the brochure Tom created to find her way around the island.
Or trying to, anyway. Since the map’s not to scale, but mostly because someone’s been going around altering the street signs (“Dickens Street” now reads “Dickhole Street”), Marissa is more than a little lost, so she accepts when Tom offers her a lift. He eagerly invites her to the “inaugural swim,” an annual tradition where the Widow’s Bay mayor takes a dip in defiance of what he hastily describes as “the island’s history of ocean dangers.”
He also mentions there are “sunset cocktails” planned for after—you know, if Marissa and her friends, who’re visiting the island as part of a bachelorette party, are in search of nightlife. Marissa mentions they might be checking out a local dive (a place we know well after the first two episodes: the Barnabus Tavern) later on. Maybe she’ll see Tom there?
It’s very casual. But Tom can’t stop grinning about it as he goes about his town hall business, where we learn as an aside that Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) is in charge of planning the cocktail event. Marissa is still on his mind later when he tells his son, Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick)—who is almost certainly behind the sign alterations, though his faux-shock reaction to the idea (“Somebody did that? That’s horrible”) is deadpan gold—that he’s heading to the Barnabus to meet “colleagues.”
When Marissa doesn’t show, Tom’s bummed. It’s not like they had made set plans or anything, but it’s a blow to Tom’s newly optimistic state of mind. His dream of making Widow’s Bay a hotspot has seemingly come true, and when he sparked with Marissa, he dared to imagine more good things might not be far behind.
But this is Widow’s Bay, after all. You can never let your guard down. That’s hammered in most horrifyingly when Tom, glumly driving home from the bar, spots a lone figure on a backroad. It appears to be an elderly woman in distress. But there’s something odd about her. Why is she suddenly running at top speed toward Tom’s car?
He doesn’t wait to find out, but he makes the mistake of not driving far enough away before stopping to freak out. The woman creeps up and scratches his arm—a deep gouge that requires medical attention—and Tom (dear lord, his scream!) soon learns a scar isn’t the worst thing that could come from this.
Still, though, this is Tom we’re talking about. He’s somehow able to cling to denial when Rosemary (Dale Dickey) takes note of his injury the next day at the office and raspily informs him it sure sounds like he’s met the sea hag. She’s a creature known for scratching sailors and then hunting them down—a trickster who uses her powers to make a man weak, get him alone, and seal his doom.
That is worrisome. Even a diehard skeptic might start to cave at this point. But Tom, still reeling from his back-to-back humiliations, puts all his focus on the inaugural swim. After a few classic Widow’s Bay technical difficulties, Tom successfully makes his speech and awkwardly heads to the water’s edge.
His journey to the buoy is smooth and perfect; it’s maybe the most blissful moment we’ve yet seen in Widow’s Bay. Tom looks deeply satisfied.
But what is that peculiar shape bobbing up and down a few feet away? Has the sea hag come to stalk her prey?
Of course she has. In a sequence that pays cheeky homage to Jaws—not the first time this episode has referenced it; did you catch that chalkboard shark in the town hall?—Tom, a mayor who can’t wait to open the beaches, frantically makes his way to shore; Sheriff Clemons (Kevin Carroll) steps in to “rescue” him as he thrashes around in the shallows. The crowd that’s gathered for the occasion (and has been watching this entire display) politely, hesitantly applauds.
There’s no more evading the truth. Tom’s got a hag problem, and there’s only one person he can turn to: Wyck (Stephen Root). Though these two have had some major clashes, the mutual dislike is perhaps starting to crumble a bit as they share the realization that Widow’s Bay is approaching a crisis.
That does not mean Tom will immediately obey Wyck’s recommendation of locking himself inside a chest until his wound heals. Otherwise, it seems, he’ll die when the hag crawls into his bed and sits on his face. (That’s her MO, apparently.)
It’s silly-sounding enough that Tom’s able to dismiss it, again, despite everything. He even pushes it to the back of his mind enough to go meet up with Marissa. She’s been elusive since their first encounter but has invited him to the Driftwood Diner for dinner.
It’s a sweet first date. Marissa is funny and cool and offers genuine sympathy when Tom explains that he’s not divorced; he’s a widower—his wife, Evan’s mom, died in childbirth years ago. There’s seemingly real chemistry there. But when Tom suggests they hit up Patricia’s cocktail shindig, Marissa offers a more intimate alternative: why not go back to Tom’s place instead?
In that moment, Tom’s walls go back up. Maybe it’s the mention of his much-missed spouse. Maybe it’s that Marissa seems a little too good to be true. But he politely turns her down, and it ends there.
Or does it? When he gets home, he has two messages waiting (because in Widow’s Bay, a place without cell service, is also a place where you still need an answering machine): Patricia, wondering why he’s not at the party, and Wyck, reiterating his dire warning about the sea hag. “If she’s not inside yet, she’s gonna find a way! You won’t be able to fight her off!”
Moments later, there’s a startlingly loud knock at the door. It’s Marissa, who’s taken it upon herself to find out where Tom lives and try her luck a second time. Tom, who’s realizing how little he knows about her, refuses to let her in, yelling, “I know what you are!”
You can’t blame him. He’s spooked, not just by the threat of the sea hag, but by the prospect of new romance. And “The Inaugural Swim” has certainly made it very easy to assume Marissa is the sea hag in disguise. Why else would she be pounding on Tom’s door after he rejected her at the restaurant?
Except, well, Marissa is just a regular woman who decided to be persistent with a guy she liked. As she leaves Tom’s door, we see her get into a waiting taxi and tell her friend she feels humiliated.
Tom will probably never find out the truth, though, because shortly thereafter, as he’s starting to feel very groggy—and has a sweet vision of his late wife, Lauren (Meredith Casey)—the sea hag appears and starts chasing him around his house. Tom, cowering in his bathtub, is close to succumbing when Wyck appears with a shotgun, blasts the hag into supernatural ash, and ends Tom’s torment.
“Why is this happening?” Tom asks.
“I don’t know,” Wyck sighs. “You just survive.” Has Tom finally learned that crucial lesson?
Next week, we’ll presumably find out more about the apparently very troubled Reverand Bryce (Toby Huss), not to mention what’s behind that frantic radio call from Sheriff Clemons regarding Patricia’s cocktail party. What could have gone wrong? In Widow’s Bay, anything is possible.
New episodes of Widow’s Bay arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
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