** Major Widow’s Bay finale spoilers follow **
Widow’s Bay sunsetted its bonkers summer season with a special stormy goodbye to its guests, who presumably booked their hols after Martha’s Vineyard had already been snapped up.
The tenth and final episode was titled We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time! I did, but Kenny and Ruth probably did not. And neither will eight others, if those tolling church bells are anything to go by.
The Apple TV show has been a sleeper summer hit, with word-of-mouth buzz that, increasingly, feels like a relic of a bygone TV-watching age.
But that’s the whole point of Widow’s Bay: it’s like stepping back in time. There’s no phone service. Tom Loftis (a towering Matthew Rhys performance) has an actual Rolodex on his desk. The Lovely Bones is still a popular choice at book clubs.
The finale proved the island is even more antiquated than all that. For instance, they didn’t do away with human sacrifice as many years ago as the rest of us did. As a result, the show gifted us the most uncanny training video since Severance’s animated Keanu Reeves cameo.
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Widow’s Bay season two has already been confirmed. Good thing too, since showrunner Katie Dippold and her crack team of creatives/production design geniuses (still not over the Teeth game and/or Patricia’s grimoire) have some loose ends to tie up. So let’s break down that tour de force finale.
RIP Ruth (?)
The penultimate episode set up the finale as a trolley problem over whether or not to kill the sweet, doddering Ruth.
A telltale brooch and Rosemary’s genealogy identified her as the sole surviving descendant of Frances Warren. If she kicks the bucket, so too does the curse on Widow’s Bay.
Because Tom’s chant of ‘cancer, cancer, cancer’ doesn’t manifest the desired results in her medical files, he tries first a pill combination and then a pillow to get the job done. But ultimately, there’s no point.
After a trip down memory lane through all the guys (and girls) who made a pass at her, Ruth tells Tom the thing she’s never told another soul. She had a child with a married man (‘Pullout method just doesn’t work!’). That daughter went on to marry Tom.
So if you’re one of the ravenous Widow’s Bay fans on Reddit who predicted Tom’s son Evan would be a Warren descendant, take a bow.
The only way he will be able to leave the island is in a coffin, or on his way into one. Tom realises he’ll never go to college/a Red Sox game after all.
But an unknowing Bashir walks in and shoots Ruth to save his child. I gasped.
Ruth is still alive when we last see her, but things don’t look good. If she does live, she might have found a taste for telling people about Evan’s ancestry.
The shelter and that creepy training video
Surely if your storm shelter has a radioactive symbol by the door, don’t go in, right? That will be the homespun wisdom I’ll take from this episode, alongside ‘Never enter a room that contains a creepy torture chair’.
While Tom is debating whether to kill Ruth before being usurped, back at the shelter, the proverbial is hitting the fan. Patricia and Wyck are trying their damndest to keep a handle on it all, even with food and water supplies that are long past their best-by dates.
It’s not just unruly tourists. Everything about the shelter screams ‘Bad things have happened here! And will again!’ Rosemary was once instructed never to enter. Patricia finds a note that reads, ‘If you can read this, I’m already dead.’
It’s dire stuff. And we haven’t even got to what Dale finds.
While pursuing the shelter backrooms for some light entertainment to weather the storm, he flicks on a vintage film reel. On it is an instructional video for human sacrifices of yore, as well as the ‘facilitators’ sending them down to their deaths.
We’re told that after a ‘very fair, very rigorous selection process’ the so-called offerings were chosen and had to ‘accept their fate and take pride’. Evidently Widow’s Bay was once upon a time even worse; if you were deemed ‘wanting in some way,’ the town hall was liable to toss you into the shelter to be consumed by whatever in God’s name is beneath that cellar hatch.
‘Your sacrifice will save countless members of our community from suffering,’ says the smiley yuppie on the video. Then they show harrowing images of half-naked offerings with sacks over their heads, being led to their demise.
Next is the key detail. The island has ‘made its needs known’ via the tolling church bell. ‘One soul for each bell toll.’
The tolling bells
We first heard the bells toll at the start of the show’s second episode, Lodgings. The late Reverend Bryce went to check on them and found both bells still locked up, covered in cobwebs.
The bells are something of a dinner bell for the island, and we now know they’re also of numerical importance.
PJ presumably had no idea about any of that when he shut Kenny in the creepy cellar. He’s always doing bad things at the worst possible time, such as sneaking into the underground network of tunnels to smoke a joint with Evan and that one mainland girl (who I’m starting to question might be a sinister siren of sorts, because how is she still holidaying on Widow’s Bay?).
Anyway, town hall cog Kenny is the island’s first victim we’ve seen. He gets stuck behind the self-locking door. Then: ‘Something’s happening!’ Before: ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ Whatever it is isn’t good. When Evan goes back in afterwards, the doors to its domain are slightly ajar.
Those bells toll again as the season ends with Tom throwing Ruth’s brooch in the sea (surely that means she’s dead?).
They ring out eight times, which makes sense given that when we last heard them, it was nine.
So when we return to Widow’s Bay (hopefully soon), the island won’t yet have transformed into Martha’s Vineyard. It’s still hungry!
Bashir and his newborn
We never see Bashir’s very sweet wife give birth, but we can only assume the baby is coming or has come. Their newborn is likely about to be consigned to the same fate as Evan: island entrapment.
But Bashir now knows there is a descendant who could lift the curse on his own child. That is shaping up to be the central quandary of season two, besides the question of which eight suckers are heading into the basement next.
Bashir has shown he’s willing to take matters into his own hands (justice for Ruth) and presumably, won’t see any consequences for it, since the rule of law seems conspicuously absent thus far.
Evan and Tom versus Bashir – who will take it? Or who should take it? We’re back to the trolley problems.
Widow’s Bay is available to stream on Apple TV.