What’s the only thing better than a new episode of Widow’s Bay? That’s easy: two new episodes of Widow’s Bay. The Apple TV schedule quirk this week makes perfect sense once you watch “Our History” and “Seasickness.”
There’s a certain character whose arc takes them rather memorably through both episodes—while bringing fresh context to the island’s escalating peril.
Last week’s “What to Expect on Your Trip” followed Mayor Tom on a mushroom-enhanced journey through space, time, reality, and property damage. It ended with Tom’s desperate plea to God to protect his son, Evan.
To his utter horror, he received a response that seemed the opposite of divine. Was that gutteral grumble merely a drug-related auditory hallucination? Or did Tom hear that sound because the shrooms opened a new channel of communication?
“Our History” digs into that dilemma while also offering some clarity on the opening scene of “What to Expect on Your Trip.” Remember that silhouetted figure seen gobbling from a patch of black mushrooms? We get to know him very well in both “Our History” and “Seasickness.”
It’s Richard Warren—previously mentioned at the historical society as the founder of Widow’s Bay. His formal titles are Reeve Prime of the Colony and the Lord Island Protector. The first mayor, basically. He led the first settlers to the island in 1681. And he’s also the reason Widow’s Bay carries such a peculiar curse.
In “Our History,” we meet Sarah Westcott Warren (Betty Gilpin), Richard’s second wife, who arrives from the mainland in 1702 to marry a man she’s never met, figuring it’s a step up from spinsterhood. She records her nervous excitement in the diary we’ve glimpsed in the museum. She’s ready to start a new life!
But there are immediate red flags. There’s a violent plague ravaging the island, for one thing. People react very oddly when Richard comes up in conversation. Richard’s five children seem glad she’s arrived, but her new husband barely pays her any notice. Instead, he’s consumed by his mysterious “work,” which has him out at all hours.
(Fans of Midnight Mass—a different show about a cursed island with an off-kilter leader—should especially appreciate the choice of Hamish Linklater as Warren. Both he and Gilpin are A+ additions to the Widow’s Bay cast.)
In addition to being distant, Warren is also menacing and violent. On her wedding night, Sarah comes upon her husband locked into an eerie trance with a cylindrical object—the very one he’s wearing in his museum portrait—arrayed on the table beside him. When he realizes Sarah’s there, he barks at her to leave him alone. Then, on her second night there, Sarah witnesses him beat a visitor to death after the man raises too many questions about Warren’s diabolically weird connection to the island.
The next day, she discovers a trap door and a hidden room. Later, she realizes it’s actually a network of tunnels—including a spooky chamber where a lone chair sits facing a large set of doors. (We’ve seen something like that before, all the way back in episode one.)
You don’t even have to be a deeply religious person, as Sarah is, to suspect the forces of darkness are involved here. When she turns to the local pastor for help, he tells her that many islanders have come to believe Richard’s in league with the devil. Then he all but forces her to become part of a community assassination plot. But when Richard is attacked that night by a knife-wielding intruder, he somehow doesn’t die.
In this interlude, we see Sarah writing that ominous last page in her journal, which Richard then snatches from her. He’s curious to read what she’s been writing about him in there.
It takes a second attempt—with an assist from Richard’s son, who rescues Sarah by knocking his father over the head, explaining, “He killed my mother”—before the Reeve Prime of the Colony is successfully, if temporarily, subdued. Sarah and the Warren children grab a small boat and make their escape.
Or do they? The townspeople decide the only way to neutralize Richard is to tie him up and bury him, but not before they get some answers.
About that cylinder: “It doesn’t want you to open it,” he says, then clarifies that “it” is “that which has kept us alive.” Also, “It’s not the devil. It is our God.”
There’s more: “You cannot rid yourself of me. It won’t allow it. This is my burden.” If they let him go, he’ll forgive everyone and will keep carrying the burden.
He begins to panic when the villagers move to dump him in a grave. “The pact must be honored! The pact which spared us in that first winter!” he yells. “It spoke to me through the mushrooms!”
Well, that sounds familiar. Warren says they must “sacrifice a life… life for life. Whatever I have undertaken, it has been for the welfare of our people. Fulfill the pact and the plague will stop! But if you do not, the terrors will not cease! They will only deepen!”
Warren begs the people not to punish his children for his mistakes. But as the pastor tells him, his children are currently on a boat leaving Widow’s Bay with Sarah. Warren knows what that means: as we’ve certainly seen, if you’re born on the island, you cannot leave.
His panicked wails fade as we see the boat rowing away with Sarah and the kids aboard. Then, we cut to the present day. Wyck’s in the graveyard with a shovel, carrying out his intent to see if Warren was buried with his curse-carrying necklace.
With that heaping serving of background, we dive right into “Seasickness.”
A haggard, shell-shocked Tom is still hunched over his toilet many hours later. Those mushrooms took him out of circulation longer than he thought. It’s dark again as he drives to the museum to meet Wyck and Patricia.
They’re both visibly shaken as they take Tom through their findings—Sarah’s journal page and the decision to dig up Richard’s grave. While he’s shocked by the latter, he is in no way prepared for the next detail. The Widow’s Bay town founder, who was buried back in 1702, is still alive. He’s upstairs, in fact, and he won’t engage with anyone except the current town leader.
“An evil power sustains me,” he explains to a gobsmacked Tom.
Linklater’s performance as the glowering 18th-century Warren was fantastically sinister. Linklater’s performance as the 300-plus-year-old living corpse Warren is still sinister, but it slathers macabre comedy on top.
As we see, the necklace contains a scrap of paper; he thought what was written on it would be his salvation. Nearly starving that first winter, he contemplated taking his own life—and then he spotted the mushrooms.
“I thanked God, but something else came to me,” Warren says. He’s still not sure what it was. “A demon? The island itself? But I was starving, and it was starving too. The covenant was offered for my settlement’s salvation, and I signed that pact with my own blood, feces, and semen.”
(At hearing this, Tom, who has just touched the paper in question, ever so carefully carefully wipes his hands.)
Tom tells him he thinks the “something else” spoke to him too and asks Warren what it wanted. The alarmingly vague answer: “It knows frightened men will do desperate things.”
Warren asks to see what remains of his children: the few objects preserved in the museum’s display cases. You can tell he did genuinely love them and is haunted by his inability to prevent their suffering. But he has no love lost for Sarah and angrily mangles the mannequin the museum uses to represent her.
(It’s unclear if he notices the kitschy Richard Warren merch on display. But how can we get one of those “Don’t Say I Didn’t ‘Warren’ You” t-shirts, Apple TV?)
“As long as there are men with my blood, you are bound to the covenant. But I am the last,” he tells Tom. Warren thinks if he sails “past the point where sailors fear”—the same line that Lauren, pregnant with Evan, tried and failed to cross—without “the hex” around his neck, he’ll finally be able to die. The curse will be lifted. Widow’s Bay will be free!
Wyck reluctantly agrees they can use his boat, but on one condition: Richard climbs back in his coffin and stays there. The plan is that Wyck will get them as close to what he calls “the dead zone” as possible, which Wyck cannot enter, and then Tom will bring Richard the rest of the way in the dinghy. What could go wrong?
First, there’s a rare moment of Tom-Wyck closeness. Wyck illustrates why it’s best not to trust a man who knows he’s about to die with a poignant story from his own teenage years. It was another “bad time on the island,” but he and his friends decided to go out fishing anyway. They were attacked and Wyck had to make the terrible decision to kick away the desperate, grasping hand of his best friend, Mark—brother of Gerrie, Wyck’s girlfriend at the time—as a tentacled beast began to drag him under.
That tendency for desperation is why Warren has to be contained. “Do not let him out!” Wyck stresses.
Too late. Tom’s already taken pity on the Lord Protector, and he’s sitting in the boat cabin, looking extra-ghoulish, gobbling canned Vienna sausages, singing sea chanteys, and suddenly realizing… he doesn’t want to die after all.
There’s an extended scuffle as the boat inches closer to the line. A harpoon gun is involved. Richard is suddenly much stronger than he appeared earlier. But finally, Wyck and Tom are able to wrestle him back into the coffin.
As the boat alarm beeps frantically, signaling proximity to the dead zone, Tom shoves a life preserver at Wyck and kicks him overboard, saving him just in time. The boat makes it there, though, and Warren poofs into a dusty pile of bones.
Tom whips the boat around, and though he can’t find Wyck, the old sailor manages to find his way back aboard. There’s a joyous reunion. They did it! Richard Warren is gone, and that means the curse will be lifted! They’re heroes! Right?
There are a few other things that happen in “Seasickness” that deserve a mention. One is that Patricia spills some of the supernatural truth about Widow’s Bay to Sheriff Clemons. We don’t hear exactly what she tells him, and he’s not sure he believes her—but he doesn’t care to stick around to find out. He’s ready to quit his job and leave the island ASAP.
Another is that off-island stoner girl Kelly goads Evan into rummaging through his dad’s private things, trying to find out what Tom’s been hiding. Evan is stunned to find photos of himself as a baby with his mom—proof that Tom’s been lying this whole time about Lauren “dying in childbirth.” We know more than Evan about that whole situation at this point, but that tough conversation is surely coming soon.
And finally, the creepy painting that the camera zeroes in on in the final seconds of “Seasickness”? It got a quick mention during Tom’s stay at the inn. Now it comes back around. It’s a small boat sailing away surrounded by fierce waves.
But who exactly is that small, terrified-looking figure shown in the foreground?
There are just three episodes to go of Widow’s Bay, which returns to its regular one-per-week rollout starting next Wednesday.
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