Last week, “Beach Reads” elevated Widow’s Bay yet again, giving us a witchy party from hell that pinballed between triumphant glee and agonizing embarassment. (Mostly the latter.) But the Apple TV show, one of the brightest surprises on streaming right now, hit yet another new high with “What to Expect on Your Trip.”
The episode shifts the focus back to Mayor Tom Loftis as he navigates an unwanted, disorienting, frequently terrifying emotional journey—assisted by magic mushrooms so potent you’ll need to go to a cursed island to find them.
We open on a patch of black mushrooms in the snow. A figure appears in the background—we can’t tell who it is, but based on the hair and clothing, it isn’t a character we know—and falls to the ground, moaning, before crawling to the plants and gobbling them up.
In Widow’s Bay, it’s the morning after Tom’s sea hag attack, Patricia’s cocktail disaster, and the discovery of Reverend Bryce’s suicide in the church. At the town hall, Tom orders Dale to issue a 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew, community fireworks be damned.
Tom has also confined Evan to his office, both for safety reasons and because he’s tired of the kid disobeying him. But it’ll be a challenge to hold him there, especially with the easily distracted Ruth keeping an eye on him. Bad vibes are percolating between father and son.
At that moment, though, Tom has to head to the nearby church. There’s a memorial for Bryce underway, and Patricia and Wyck are searching his cluttered office. They aren’t finding much, though Tom notices Bryce carved “My eye is open” onto his desk; he also finds a pile of black mushrooms. As Tom picks up the phone to check on Evan, he notices on the log that Bryce tried to reach him the night before… and had made repeated calls to another number, too.
They dial it, and Patricia’s able to get an address and an “appointment” out of the guy who picks up. When they arrive, they meet Todd, a former classmate of Patricia’s who calls her “Patty.” He’s not a drug dealer, he insists; he’s “a shaman.” (He is clearly a drug dealer and is played by comedian Chris Fleming, a delightful bit of guest star casting.)
When Tom shows him the mushrooms, the shaman knows immediately what they are. “That is a brutal fucking ride,” he exclaims. “That shit is gonna take you where you gotta go regardless of if you wanna go there.”
Known as “Truesight,” it only grows on the island, and its effects are akin to getting “LASIK for your third eye. Blasts that thing open. Pow!”
Todd then regales everyone with a worrisome story about another friend who did the mushrooms and emerged a dubiously changed man. But even after what happened to Bryce, Wyck’s undeterred. He says he’ll try them, hoping to gain cosmic insight and save Widow’s Bay.
Sounds like a plan, except Todd thinks Tom is Wyck and puts the mixture in Tom’s tea, which the mayor unknowingly chugs down to the last drop.
By the time everyone realizes what’s happened, a hysterical Tom must accept the fact that he’s about to take the trip of his life—amid a town in crisis and his relationship with Evan nearing a breaking point. “Don’t squander this,” Wyck urges him just the same. If the mushrooms hold any answers, it’s up to Tom to find them.
Tom may be in a tizzy, but Widow’s Bay viewers are blessed, because Tom high on mushrooms makes for extreme hilarity. We already loved everything about Matthew Rhys’ performance as Tom. But he really shows off his flair for comedy in “What to Expect on Your Trip” as Tom attempts to go about his regular civic business, interacting with co-workers and Sheriff Clemons, and facing down a room full of local business owners who are furious about the curfew.
Most of these folks have no idea that Tom is barely clinging to reality as he surfs through blackouts, freak-outs, and auditory hallucinations. He wakes up in different locations having no idea how he got there or what he’s in the middle of doing. Adding even more panic, Evan is AWOL, having long since slipped out of Tom’s office.
We know where he is, though. He’s with his stoner friends and the tourist girls, who act unimpressed by the local legend of the Boogeyman. We’ve heard it in context with Patricia, but here we get even more details. The story goes that the killer wouldn’t die, in a very Halloween sort of way, and the townspeople opted to seal him up inside his house, where he remains to this day.
While this is happening, Wyck drops by the museum to show Gerrie a strange scrap of paper he found in Bryce’s office. As part of their friendly conversation, we learn they were once childhood sweethearts.
Patricia and Tom (leashed because he keeps flailing around) also head to the museum, and Gerrie, Wyck, and Patricia realize it’s a page ripped from the diary of Sarah Warren, an important figure in Widow’s Bay history. She was the second wife of the town’s founder, and she had some not-so-nice things to say about him in what was apparently her final entry. He was violent, for one thing, and seemed fixated on the “cursed” item he wore around his neck, a small cylinder that he’s seen wearing in a museum portrait.
“I’m wondering if he could’ve been buried with it,” Wyck wonders. But this mystery takes a back seat for now, since Tom is over here bleating out unhelpful interjections and demanding to know where Evan is.
The next time Tom comes to, Rosemary is driving him home, though she insists on making a quick stop. Flash forward, and we see the aftermath of the chaos Tom has caused there. (His loafer, abandoned in the puddle of milk!)
Speaking of Evan, he’s up to no good as usual. It’s dark, so we are well past the town’s new curfew. The kids—who’ve been smoking weed all day—dare Evan to go into the Boogeyman’s house. He agrees and gets as far as opening the front door. But to his relief, he’s stopped by the arrival of Sheriff Clemons, who orders him away from “the creepy house.”
Clemons lets him off with a light scolding, but Evan’s super-fun day comes crashing down when he gets home and Tom—still spiraling—screams at him in front of his friends. It’s embarrassing for everyone. The argument continues into the Loftis home, as Evan calls his dad a “shitty mayor” and asks why they never leave the island. “It was important to your mother that you be raised here” is Tom’s bullshit-sounding explanation.
“And never go anywhere?” Evan protests. It does seem awfully restrictive, or it would under normal circumstances. The angry teen warns his dad that one day he’s going to leave Widow’s Bay and never, ever return.
Tom trudges upstairs as his very not-super-fun day winds down, but there’s one last gut punch waiting for him. As Tom barfs up the mushroom-tainted contents of his stomach, he has a flashback to the last happy moments he had with Lauren. His wife, Evan’s mom.
She’s very pregnant. This is worrisome because as Tom told his date in “The Inaugural Swim,” his wife died from childbirth complications. Tom and Lauren are on the ferry leaving Widow’s Bay when everything changes in an instant.
“I can’t see anything!” she screams. The boat quickly turns around, and she gives birth back on the island.
Tom watches himself relive this nightmare. The doctor tells Tom the baby is perfectly fine. But what about Lauren? She is not perfectly fine: sitting up in bed, completely motionless, eyes vacant, head tipped at an odd angle.
Tom weeps at this awful memory, and we can understand why he’s been so reluctant to acknowledge that Widow’s Bay has a supernatural wrongness about it. It’s touched him so deeply and personally; he just hasn’t been able to face that truth. In this moment, he utters a desperate plea to God to protect Evan. “I’ll do anything,” he whispers.
And something hears his plea. Probably not God, though? Whatever it is, it lets out a deeply sinister rumble, seemingly enticed by the prospect of a bargain. Is it the mushrooms talking? Or could it be the evil that envelops Widow’s Bay answering back?
New episodes of Widow’s Bay arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
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