Note: This article contains spoilers from “Widow’s Bay” Episode 8.
“Widow’s Bay” remains impossible to pin down.
Across its first seven episodes, the Apple TV original has assumed the shapes of multiple different horror subgenres — environment, supernatural, folk and colonial, just to name a few. In its eighth and latest episode, titled “Your Baggage,” the series goes full slasher.
Basking in the afterglow of their successful journey to kill immortal Widow’s Bay founder Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) in last week’s “Seasickness” and, in doing so, rid the island of the curse he bound it to, “Widow’s Bay” Episode 8 follows Tom (Matthew Rhys), Wyck (Stephen Root) and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) as they each attempt to reset their previous lives. Wyck tries to reconnect with museum curator Gerrie (Nancy Lenehan), Tom makes plans to take his son Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) to travel to the mainland for a Red Sox game and Patricia starts sorting through her closet.
Their bittersweet celebrations are violently interrupted when the masked, local serial killer known as the Boogeyman (Airon Armstrong) breaks out of his sealed, backroad home and sneaks into Patricia’s to finish the job he started decades prior. Wyck discovers the Boogeyman’s return before anyone else and races over to try to warn Patricia. Fortunately, while the Boogeyman successfully manages to slink his way into Patricia’s pitch-black bedroom, she listens to her own gut when it warns her to run.
She grabs her rechargeable taser and makes her getaway in her pajamas, kicking off a long chase across Widow’s Bay in which Patricia is stalked Michael Myers-style by the silent, slow-moving-and-yet-always-close Boogeyman. At least one unsuspecting paramedic is killed and Sheriff Bechir Clemmons (Kevin Carroll) is wounded by the resurrected killer from Patricia’s past in an episode that “Widow’s Bay” creator Katie Dippold told TheWrap was originally envisioned — like last week’s “Our History” — as a flashback experiment.
“Originally, we talked about that episode as just doing it as a flashback of when Patricia was a teenager and showing what happened,” Dippold divulged. “But then we were like, ‘Well, we have this amazing actress who’s so funny. It’d be so much more fun to watch this 40-year-old woman running through the streets.’”
“Fun” is the right word to describe “Your Baggage,” written by Emma Ketchum and directed by “Friendship” filmmaker Andrew DeYoung, who also directed the “Widow’s Bay” mushroom trip installment “What to Expect on Your Trip.”
There are long stretches of “Your Baggage” that are as terrifying as any slasher movie in recent memory, and then moments, like when O’Flynn’s Patricia trips on her own taser’s cable, that are surreal and blackly, gut-bustingly funny. That cocktail of screwball humor and blood-curdling horror has been an integral part of “Widow’s Bay” since the very beginning, and it is one that the show’s creative team thought about a lot when they were putting “Your Baggage” together.
“A lot of this season was following that gut feeling of, ‘Do we want to be scared right now, or do we want to have fun?,’ and constantly balancing that,” Dippold explained. “For Episode 8, I wanted people to be scared when she’s in her house and you know he’s coming. But then, once you’re off to the races, Kate O’Flynn is just so funny. The idea of her sprinting through the streets with this man slowly following her just really made us laugh.”
Patricia finds no help from anyone throughout her Boogeyman chase, including Sheriff Clemmons and her former high school tormentor-friends, one of whom (Lauren Bittner’s Kris) she eventually just tasers out of frustration. Despite that, Patricia comes out on top, partly burning the Boogeyman alive and then hitting him with two deadly shotgun blasts.
In the montage that follows — set to Enya’s “Caribbean Blue” — Patricia keeps her shotgun aimed at the motionless Boogeyman all the way through his paramedic ride and right up to the moment when his body is sealed and cremated. Dippold described the episode’s ending as a “triumph” for O’Flynn’s neurotic protagonist.
“It was important. We wanted her to have that triumph at the end because she’s someone who starts in a real victim mode,” Dippold told TheWrap. “She has a real victim complex, but there is nowhere for her to go for help in Episode 8, so she finally has to do it herself.”
Unfortunately, while the events of “Your Baggage” affirm Patricia’s growing strength and belief in herself, it undoes the same for both Wyck and Tom. The Boogeyman’s return means the curse on Widow’s Bay has not actually lifted, a realization that leaves both men reeling in the face of seemingly unconquerable evil. “Your Baggage,” consequently, concludes with Wyck interrupting Tom’s joyous reconciliation with Evan to inform him that the curse is still alive and well.
“It’s not over,” Wyck wearily tells Tom, as the wind outside picks up speed, thunder sounds and unseen storm clouds start to gather in the night sky.
“Loftis thinks the curse is over. He’s celebrating with his son and it seems like the start of a new chapter,” Dippold said of the episode’s concluding moments, noting, “But it’s never over.”
New episodes of “Widow’s Bay” premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
