Summer has only just begun, but one of our favourite destinations is now closed for the year. The season finale of Widow’s Bay is here, and though we know that season 2 is greenlit, it’s still a colossal bummer that we have to leave so soon. Thankfully, the finale is a helluva time with lots to chew over, namely the emotional turmoil of Tom and his mission to break the island’s curse once and for all. “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!” (God, I will miss these ironic titles) keeps the supernatural scares to a minimum to let a more real horror—the murder of a sweet grandma (foreshadowing!)—toxify the air.
Reliably hysterical but sadder and more touching than I anticipated, the season finale of Widow’s Bay is simply this darling show at its best. Matthew Rhys cements a serious potential Emmys run here with a heartfelt and tortured monologue, while creator and showrunner Katie Dippold and director Hiro Murai seem locked into their respective styles of tonally fluid, glossy television. I admit my eyes still glaze over whenever we veer into the nitty-gritty corners of all the hauntings. But I am fixated on the show’s exploration of the human condition: our ambitions, convictions, and the points of no return we set for ourselves, and how easily we’re willing to move them.
Here’s everything that happened in the season 1 finale of Widow’s Bay.
The bulk of “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!” wisely zeroes in on the plot that matters most: Tom (Matthew Rhys) and the existential dilemma of offing sweet Ruth (Katherine Callan). Not simply the frail geezer Tom thought she’d be, Ruth is, to our delight/horror, quite spry. She’s not training for HYROX, but she’s got a spring in her step, and her ability to help her neighbours means people depend on her. And story club! She writes stories! What somnambulant senior do you know who can still write stories, for fun?!
The real sadness of Ruth is the vivid life she’s led, a life Tom has to consider ending tonight. Though she’s unmarried with no kids (that we know of, for now—foreshadowing!), she’s a woman full of insight and wisdom and definitely a few good stories. I imagine if Tom had more patience and less urgency, and was generally less himself in this moment, he’d be interested in knowing more about Ruth and the unholy number of times men and nuns have made a pass at her. Or that time her old boyfriend turned into an animal. (????)
Ruth has convictions, too. When Tom presents her with the trolley problem—which, while we’re here, speaks to the legacy of The Good Place, right?—Ruth rejects the dilemma outright. She tells him she wouldn’t pull the lever, because life had decided to kill all the others. If she were to pull the lever, well, then it becomes her choice. “And I could never do that,” she tells him, much to Tom’s bewilderment. She recites to him a Tennessee Williams quote that is comically overwritten on a piece of cross-stitching, and skips over what I think are the most important parts Tom would need to hear the most. For your convenience, it’s reproduced below, with the parts Ruth couldn’t read in bold:
The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you. We are saved by love—love for each other, and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share. Being a parent, a writer; being a painter, being a friend; we live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it all the time is love.
I admit I don’t know how Tom could beat an ancient curse with the power of love. But, you know, it’s a nice sentiment Tom could have probably learned from. Still, Ruth knows what Tom needs to hear, which is the truth. “Life is a house of horrors,” as she puts it. When Tom learns that Ruth is always worried about him, she splashes him with ice-cold water. “You want this to be Martha’s Vineyard. It’s never gonna be. There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line. Even if there was, it would just be taken away from you, because that’s just life. In all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just have to accept it.” Chilling how that very moment makes Tom resolve to poison her with her own medicine cabinet.
Later on in the episode, as Ruth slowly succumbs to Tom’s deadly tea, we glimpse more vulnerability from Tom as he says aloud all that he’s been holding inside: “I knew, and I still brought tourists here. Because I knew I wanted more for him. And myself. And now I’ve put all these people in danger.” But as Tom tries to finish the job, he’s thrown one last truth bomb of thermonuclear proportions.
As the Internet correctly guessed, Ruth is not the last living Warren descendant. A delirious Ruth reveals that an affair she had in her 40s with a married man left her pregnant, and that she gave up the child to him and watched their daughter grow up from afar. “And I got to watch her fall in love with you, Tom,” Ruth says with joy in her heart—and absolute fear in Tom’s eyes. What was it that Ruth said? That’s right. Life is a house of horrors. But in true Katie Dippold fashion, there’s still room for a punchline. Katherine Callan’s excellent line delivery of “Pull-out method just doesn’t work!” is going to stay with me for the rest of the summer. (Widow’s Bay also ties up that other bit of foreshadowing with the “secret mommy” in Lauren’s letters. Again, the Internet hasn’t been more right on a fan theory since Jon Snow’s parentage.)
As the storm rages on Widow’s Bay, the underground shelter is ground zero for all other plot threads to converge. Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) and Wyck (Stephen Root) struggle to keep order and calm among the restless populace, while Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick)—who kinda has nothing left to do now that his own arc has wrapped up—has a most minor subplot in trying to find a place to smoke a bud with his buds. But that story dovetails into the surreal monstrosities that dwell in the bunkers, though the true nature of it is locked away for the now-confirmed season 2 to pick back up.
The meatier subplot here is Sheriff Bechir Clemmons (Kevin Carroll) trying to get his pregnant wife off the island. Now that the sheriff knows about the curse of Widow’s Bay, he’s desperate to do anything to make sure she doesn’t deliver on its soil. But the ticking clock leads him (and us) back to Tom and Ruth, where the sheriff horrifically shoots Ruth...
...Fortunately, he barely missed, with the bullet grazing her in the ear. Suddenly, the storm comes to a halt, leaving Widow’s Bay free from the curse’s wrath. For now. And yes, the curse is still in place while Evan lives. It’s going to be another long year.
Okay, so, really important: It’s pretty obvious now how the curse works.
In this episode, Dale, the mayor’s office employee played by Jeff Hiller, stumbles upon an old archive of reels that basically spell out the curse over Widow’s Bay. Naturally, he’s horrified by all of it. Brushing aside the lingering question of how some Widow’s Bay citizens got together, made a whole-ass tutorial video on how to feed the monsters, and then everyone forgot all about it, there’s the matter of eight lives needing to be sacrificed. “One soul for each bell toll,” we’re told.
But sacrificed to what? All we know is that “It” feeds on fear.
It’s clear that “It” is the monstrous entity that is kept deep in the bunker. After It feasts on Kenny the custodian, who got locked in by accident by the bored teenagers, the nine church bells ring again for the first time since episode 2—this time, with eight gongs.
So, Tom will have two challenges in season 2: Feed “It” another eight souls to stave off the curse’s horrors, or kill his own son to end the curse for good. How dark. Maybe we oughta enjoy being out of Widow’s Bay for a long while. Hey, New York City is really nice right now.
