Note: This article contains spoilers from “Widow’s Bay” Season 1, Episode 4.
“Widow’s Bay” has been on the air for three weeks, and the Apple TV series has already delivered one of the best episodes of television that viewers will likely see this year.
The episode in question, this week’s “Beach Reads,” is an unexpected detour that temporarily pauses the momentum built by last week’s “Inaugural Swim.” Written by Mackenzie Dohr and directed by “Severance” and “Down Cemetery Road” veteran Sam Donovan, the episode follows Patricia (Kate O’Flynn), the introverted, outcast assistant of Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys), as she meticulously, anxiously plans a cocktail party.
Charged from top to bottom with dread-inducing, infectious social anxiety, viewers watch Patricia as she is ridiculed and ostracized by former high school friends, who have never believed that she actually survived an attack as a teenager from the infamous Widow’s Bay serial killer known as “The Boogeyman.” Early in the episode, Patricia discovers a strange self-help book in her bookmobile and begins following its instructions, all of which revolve around throwing an extravagant party and being the perfect hostess.
But there is something not quite right with the book, and viewers discover in the episode’s frenzied climax, along with Patricia, that it is actually a witch’s spell book. There were clues all along — namely, Patricia’s sudden, unnerving obsession with its instructions and the blink-and-you’ll-miss them shots (perfectly executed by Donovan and co.) of her party’s guests not actually dancing with her but standing frozen with their mouths hanging open.
Despite those increasingly ominous clues, nothing could prepare a first-time viewer for the mic drop climactic moment of “Beach Reads.” After Patricia gives her spotlight toast at the party, she walks back into the venue’s kitchen, where she guzzles down more of the event’s “punch” and is approached by Widow’s Bay sheriff Bechir (Kevin Carroll), who stares at her in horror and pointedly asks, “Patricia … what the f—k are you doing?”
Cue a sudden cut to Patricia’s carving board, which is covered in dead, dissected rodents, witchy ingredients and a punch bowl filled with animal blood, and the reveal that Patricia has not been wearing a tiara at the party but a headpiece made out of antlers, teeth and rodent fur.
It is a chilling, surreal moment, one of the most memorable that any television show is likely to offer this year. And according to “Widow’s Bay” creator Katie Dippold, it all started with a pitch about a self-help book.
“One of the writers had this idea of a self-help book that goes wrong, and it started a conversation about, ‘What are Patricia’s fears?’” Dippold told TheWrap. “One thing I always think about with Patricia is the thing that is scarier to her than the idea of dying is the idea of dying and no one caring about it. That brought in the one thing we always try to do when we’re using these horror tropes, which is tell a story about a character who is feeling very real, human emotions.”
“The conversation became, ‘What if she had a party?’ And we got really into the stress of throwing a party and not knowing if anyone’s going to show up,” Dippold explained. “I have experienced that myself. Everyone in the room had experienced that or something similar, and so we just went from there and really tried, as much as possible, to stick to that. Even though the book is scary, there’s nothing scarier to Patricia in that episode than no one coming to her thing.”
That intense social fear not only makes watching the opening 25 minutes of “Beach Reads” an entirely different kind of horror experience, but it also leaves viewers unprepared for the nightmarish truth lurking beneath its plot. As a result, the episode works as both a bait-and-switch horror short story and as an unflinching exploration of the pain and desperation that drives one of “Widow’s Bay’s” best characters.
When asked about “Beach Reads,” O’Flynn had just one word for the episode: thrilling. “It’s an actor’s dream. I loved every minute of it,” she told TheWrap, noting that Donovan helped her immerse herself in Patricia’s spell book story. “We were both Patricia on set. We’d be like, ‘Do you think that’s Patricia?’ ‘Yeah, I think that’s Patricia,’ and that’s how we did it. It was a complete thrill.”
As for her … crowning moment in the episode’s climax?
“Hilarious,” O’Flynn said with a laugh. “I remember reading that in the script and guffawing, finding that so funny, and there was a lot of talk around the headpiece, how it should look. There were lots of variations of it. ‘Should we go with the teeth? Should we not go with the teeth? How big are the antlers?’ The final one was quite heavy, but it was brilliant.”
Dippold told TheWrap that “Beach Reads” felt all along like one of the biggest risks of the show’s first season.
“That was one of the riskier episodes to do. I did not know how that was going to go over,” the showrunner admitted. “It’s a real departure, you know? You’ve just started watching this show and suddenly you’re following this character you don’t know much about. But it just felt exciting to us in the writer’s room.”
It’s a risk that paid off.
While “Beach Reads” is, for the most part, a standalone adventure, it does notably conclude with Patricia saving all of her hypnotized guests from a bonfire beachside drowning and then reuniting with a confused and scared Tom and Wyck (Stephen Root). In the car with them, O’Flynn’s Patricia even seems to find the belonging and empathy she’d been searching for all along.
In the episode’s closing moments, the three go to the local church to check on Reverend Bryce (Toby Huss), whose ominous apology on Tom’s answering machine capped off, along with Sheriff Bechir’s panicked radio call about Patricia’s cocktail party. At the church, Tom, Patricia and Wyck discover the reverend’s study in disarray and the man himself hanging dead from its door.
Put that another way: Things are only getting worse for the residents of Widow’s Bay, and there is no denying anymore for Patricia, Tom or Wyck that the island’s long-fabled, supernatural dangers are indeed very, very real.
New episodes of “Widow’s Bay” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
