Each week Joe and Terry discuss an episode of Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, alternating between our respective sites. This week, Tom (Matthew Rhys) hits the beach.
Miss an episode? 1-2
Spoilers follow for Episode 3, “The Inaugural Swim”: “It’s time for the ceremonial first swim. Lay out a towel as the mayor ‘tests the waters.’ Unrelated: Do not pick up hitchhikers.”
JOE
It’s apparently time for our monster of the week episode, Terry, which in the world of Widow’s Bay means our first “slight” episode.
This is fine, but I’m suddenly worried we may just get a batch of episodes like this, which rely heavily on a formula that the show is already leaning a little too aggressively into.
It goes something like this:
- Tom does something.
- The locals tell him a story that doubles as a warning.
- Tom ignores said warning, but half believes it, causing him to embarrass or question himself.
- The episode ends with Tom seemingly having an impossible experience that should prompt him to believe…but then by the next episode he’s reverted back to doubting Thomas.
Here it’s the story of the “Sea Hag” which is a combination water nymph & sexual temptress. Tom first encounters her as an old woman on a deserted road, then she stalks him at the titular swim, before sneaking into his house to attack him before Wyck bursts in to save his life in the bathtub in a soft-Psycho homage.
It’s entertaining enough, but it doesn’t tell us anything new about Tom (or any of the other characters), which doesn’t make much of this very memorable.
The most intriguing thing is the suggestion that Tom may actually get laid, though even that is pretty clearly not going to happen. Writer Neil Casey puts himself in an impossible situation because hot vacationer Marissa (Elizabeth Alderfer) is either the Sea Hag (Caryl Lynn) in disguise, which is what we’re clearly meant to believe, or she’s exactly what she claims to be and Tom is blowing his chance because the island’s lore is getting in his head.
The problem is that neither idea is particularly novel or interesting; they’re both kinda bland outcomes and “The Inaugural Swim” doesn’t have anything else going on. There’s no real B-plot and the Sea Hag legend doesn’t tell us something new about either Widow’s Bay or the residents.
So your enjoyment of the episode is entirely dependent on how much you like Tom freaking out, which is something that Matthew Rhys does impeccably well…but is also something we’ve already seen in two previous episodes.
So Terry, given what you said about episode 2, I’m curious how you found the comedy vs scares balance here? (I’ll confess I did enjoy the recurring joke about how jealous Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) is about Tom offering an “age appropriate” woman a ride)
Is any of the “Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) /teens acting out” storyline working for you? And are you excited by the cliffhanger tease about Bryce (Toby Huss) hearing the bell tolling and some kind of catastrophe happening at the sunset cocktail event?
TERRY
First thing I wrote down, Joe: “oh so we are going with a monster of the week sitcom vibe.” I’m very mixed on this one, but I think I’m slightly more favorable with it than you are. Last week, one of your prompts was how I felt about the two episode drop and I mentioned that I found it strange that Apple didn’t go with a three episode drop that ended in a cliffhanger.
And what do we have this episode? A perfectly nice little cliffhanger to keep us coming back. I think Apple should have left us with this episode as the premiere night. I think it’d be easier to be kind to this one when played back-to-back with the previous two. And it gives us a rather intriguing setup for episode 4.
I will echo your sentiment off the top: This episode was “fine.” Like the last episode, it felt very indebted to horror movies that came before and the homages are a little more on the nose. The first thing most people gravitate towards when they hear “aquatic horror” is Jaws and boy does “The Inaugural Swim” lean heavily into it. We have the oddly-drawn shark on the chalkboard at Tom’s town hall meeting, the red buoy ripped straight from the classic opening and culminating with the shark POV as the sea hag swims after him.
Hell, we even got a sea chanty that takes Quint’s “Spanish Ladies” rather ominous naval song and ups it with sex. I loved the line “For if you let her pierce your skin, betwixt her thighs your final sin.” Bow-legged women ain’t got nothing on her. Some will find it groan-worthy. Others will enjoy it. I’m sort of in the middle.
You mentioned the Psycho homage and I would push it one step further: it’s Psycho meets The Shining in regards to the hag character, the combination of Marissa’s sexiness contrasted with the sea hag’s oldness, much in the same way Jack Torrance gets seduced by a sexy woman only to discover it’s a creepy old woman. I actually enjoyed the playful nature the story makes us think that Marissa is secretly the hag and is using Tom’s isolation in order to, in the paraphrased but immortal words of Wyck (Stephen Root), kill him by sitting on his face.
“The Inaugural Swim” certainly leans more into its winky sensibility than “Lodging” did. And I think it’s a better episode for it, from a “monster of the week” lens. I preferred this tongue-in-cheek, wink-and-a-nudge over the haunted lodge.
You’re right, though, that this episode doesn’t offer anything deeper than a few tropes we’ve seen done dozens of times over the history of horror (and done better). But I think we might need to leave our expectations at the door with this one. At a certain point, I just sat back and enjoyed the actors being silly.
Speaking of silly, I did enjoy this episode’s fusion of humor and horror. The sequences with the hag were creepy in a funhouse sort of way. I loved the shot of Tom dragging himself down the hall while the sea hag does her best J-Horror crawl behind him. The wordplay was also very funny tonight. Whether it was Patricia grilling Tom over this mystery woman, Wyck’s sea shanty of sex or, my favorite, when Ruth (K Callan) mishears Marissa for MRSA while Tom freaks out about his cut arm, I found a smile plastered on my face from the humor perspective.
So I’m ultimately mixed, Joe. Did I enjoy myself? Yes. Did I wish the episode had more meat than Tom again getting bullied into a rendezvous with the Bay’s supernatural? Absolutely. Did I laugh out loud when Reverend Bryce stumbles upon Evan and his friends, Gil (Charles Van Flaherty) and PJ (Beck Nolan) smoking in a junkyard and simply proclaims, “there is evil here”, before stumbling away?
I have to admit I did.
All that to say that I will have my expectations in check when we go back to Gayly Dreadful for episode 4, “Beach Reads.”
Widow’s Bay airs Wednesdays on Apple TV
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