‘Widow’s Bay’: Dive in

Therese Odell

60 minutes ago

She was… She was age-appropriate.

What an odd way to describe someone who you’re just giving a ride.

Tom protests that this woman’s safety was his responsibility as the mayor, and so, yes, if a woman is stranded and needs help, he’s going to offer it. Patricia demands to know what the age cutoff is for his help, because he once saw that she had a flat tire and kept driving. And then there’s Ruth, who doesn’t even have a car and has to walk to work.

Pressured, Tom asks Ruth if he can give her a ride that evening, and she tells him no, proving his point, before adding that it’s the mornings that are hard.

Tom:

At his home, Tom practices flirting in the entry mirror before catching a glimpse of a photograph of his wife. That’s when Ethan appears, asking where his dad is going. When Tom tells him he’s going to the Barnabus to meet up with colleagues, Ethan is all: “COLLEAGUES,” ~wink~. Tom asks him if his son changed “Dickens Street” to “Dickhole Street,” and Ethan feigns horror: Someone did that? That’s TERRIBLE.

Tom heads to the Barnabus, but after a drink or two with no sign of Marissa or her friends, he heads home.

On his drive, he spies a woman in the street, again, and remembering the grief Patricia gave him in the meeting earlier, he pulls over to ask her if she needs help. The figure is decidedly NOT Marissa, but instead appears to be a scraggly-haired old woman in a filthy white gown, barefoot.

She staggers towards him, growling, and Tom, panicked, throws his truck into reverse to head in the opposite direction of whatever the fuck THAT was. He checks his rearview mirror to see if she’s still there, and doesn’t see her, because she, apparently, is right beside his door, where she reaches into his window and scratches his arm. As he speeds away, she watches him from the middle of the street.

Once at home, he calls Sheriff Bechir and gives him a description of his attacker: “OLD WOMAN, POSSIBLY DAMP, FASTER THAN OLD WOMAN SHOULD BE!” Tom suggests that she might be a homeless woman from the mainland who caught a ride on the ferry, and that Bechir should put up a perimeter around the island.

Island has a perimeter. It’s called the ocean.

Tom then heads to the doctor, who asks if he’s sure an animal didn’t do this to him.

No. W-Why? Does it look like an animal wound?

Not to me.

Then why would you… Oh, my…

Tom then confirms that he can still swim in the ocean with this wound, and the doctor scoffs that of course he can’t, which is not the answer Tom was looking for.

At Town Hall, folks ask Tom what happened to his arm, and he explains that he was scratched by an elderly woman.

Patricia:

Was she in her 40s?

Ruth then informs him that he just missed a visitor, a MRSA. Tom corrects her, “Marissa?” and Ruth confirms that it was her, and that she said she’d maybe see him at the swim.

In the privacy of his office, Rosemary swings by to warn him that it sounds like he was attacked by the Sea Hag. Tom warns her not to settle in, but that’s exactly what Rosemary does to explain that the story is the Sea Hag targets lonely sailors: she follows them home and scratches them to get their skin under her fingernails so she can track them down. She’s a trickster who waits to get you once you’re weak.

Tom:

At the Inaugural Swim set-up, Tom is informed by Dale that they have no way to get electricity to the beach, and that they are waiting for Garrett to hook them up to the marina via the converter. Tom checks Garrett’s location via binoculars, only to see the lighthouse keeper get on a bike, ride down a few feet, stop, and then turn around and head back to the lighthouse.

Tom:

Eventually, the microphone is set up … but it doesn’t work, and Tom is forced to scream his welcome at the gathered, and his announcement that the beach is officially open.

He then leaps into the ocean and swims out to a nearby buoy. Which: all good!

But that’s when he sees … something in the water, some … thing that resembles a head, some … thing that disappears, swimming towards him.

Tom:

The thing manages to grab his leg and scratch it, before Tom flounders onto shore in a complete panic, to confused sporadic applause, and Sheriff Bechir helping him out of the surf.

Later, Tom finds himself at Wyck’s house, of all places, looking for answers. There, Wyck sings to him a sea shanty all about the Sea Hag:

♪ Oh ♪

♪ Lads say farewell to Ensign Trag ♪

♪ He went to shore and met the Hag ♪

♪ With just one gash betrothed they be ♪

♪ She followed him on land and sea ♪

♪ For if you let her pierce your skin ♪

♪ Betwixt her thighs, your final sin ♪

Tom is confused: so, how does one die, exactly?

She crawls into your bed and sits on your face.

Tom:

As he turns to leave, Wyck grows concerned: Did the Sea Hag get Tom? If she did, Tom needs to lock himself in a trunk for 72 hours. The scratch will paralyze him, and by tonight he won’t be able to move. He needs to hide himself until the wound heals; otherwise she’ll track him down.

But Tom has a skeptical and leaves with a scoff.

Back at home, Tom is dressing his wound in the bathroom when he hears voices coming from Ethan’s bedroom. And in fact, Ethan is there with his friends PJ and Gale, plotting to go over to their friend Shawn’s house to play video games. When Tom reminds Ethan that his ass is grounded, Ethan agrees before telling him that some lady named Marissa called and said she’d be at the Driftwood around now if he’s free. And so maybe Ethan could go over to Shawn’s? Just to play a game? And have a sleepover? Tom, played like a fiddle, agrees and heads out to the Driftwood.

There, he finds Marissa being waited on by the hated Kathy, and Tom jokes that he would have just canceled had he known she was working that night. They chat about Tom’s dating life and how he doesn’t do much of it since his wife died from childbirth complications. There is some light flirting and banter between them when Tom suddenly remembers that Sunset Cocktails are happening at THAT MOMENT, and he needs to be there, lest Patricia murderize him. Marissa suggests they go somewhere more private instead, like maybe his house, but Tom balks, telling her that tonight’s just not the best night for that.

Meanwhile, a distressed Reverend Bryce is wandering the woods when he discovers what appears to be an abandoned well.

And Ethan is most decidedly not playing video games at Shawn’s, but instead hanging out with PJ and Gale and some mainland girls, trying to show off by shooting off fireworks into abandoned cars. Reverend Bryce stumbles out of the woods, and stares fixedly at the teens before announcing:

And then he wanders away.

As for Tom, he heads home where he’s greeted by a peeved message from Patricia on his answering machine, and a message from Wyck warning him again that the Sea Hag will find a way into his home if she hasn’t already.

Tom, seeming sleepy, does some dishes when he notices his wound is bleeding again. That’s when there’s a knock at the door. Tom, now deeply paranoid, stares at the door and hesitantly calls out, “Hello?”

From behind the closed door, Marissa announces it’s her: she’s taking a shot and had her friends drop her off.

Tom, skeptical, asks how she knew where his house was, and she explains that someone from his office told her.

Tom, remaining skeptical, notes that he’s never seen any of her friends that she’s with on this so-called bachelorette party, and she sighs that she’ll introduce him to them tomorrow. Isn’t he going to let her in?

Tom, alarmed, asks why she’s asking like that, and Marissa notes that she’s getting mixed signals and just wants to talk to him. But Tom refuses: he knows what she is.

After a long pause, Tom looks out the peephole … and there’s no one there.

… Because Marissa is walking back to a waiting cab, moaning about how humiliating that was.

Tom bars the door with a chair and grabs a baseball bat before collapsing exhausted into his recliner. He closes his eyes for just a moment when he hears something. There’s suddenly a woman in front of him, asking why he’s so groggy, and offering him a cup of tea. It’s his dead wife, who says she thought he’d gone to work already, and he explains that he hadn’t, while thanking her for the tea.

And then Tom is suddenly VERY AWAKE with the Sea Hag rising up between his legs. As he lies there, paralyzed, the Sea Hag begins climbing up into his lap, all the while cackling, making her way up to his head.

But Tom manages to gather enough strength to pull the lever on the recliner, flinging the Sea Hag over the top of it, and hurling his immobilized body onto the floor in one of the most perfect physical comedy moments of this entire series.

Seriously, I have seen people arguing that Widow’s Bay is not a comedy and … are we watching the same show?

Tom laboriously crawls into the bathroom, dragging his useless legs behind him, and climbs into the tub. But the Sea Hag is right behind him, and climbing into the tub with him, when there’s a voice behind her that just says:

“Hey.”

It’s Wyck, and he’s brought a shotgun. He shoots the Sea Hag, and she explodes into black sea muck, all over a hyperventilating Tom.

Tom asks Wyck why this is happening, and Wyck sighs that he doesn’t know; you just survive it.

Meanwhile, Tom receives another message on his answering machine, this time from Reverend Bryce, who tells Tom that he “heard it,” before adding, “I’m so sorry. God forgive me.”

The church bells are tolling again, nine times.

And from inside Wyck’s truck, a police scanner picks up a panicked Sheriff Bechir, calling for all available backup to Patricia’s cocktail party; he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on …

Alrighty, let’s begin with all the horror references in the episode, beginning with the very first minute of the episode. The episode begins with that history of the island video, which concludes with the narrator walking to the door to leave, finding it locked, and then just standing there in the corner.

Now, I think this was mostly played for awkward laughs, but it also reminded me of The Blair Witch Project‘s final shot.

In the town square, we have our first glimpse of the town founder, Richard Warren, but where is his head?

I have to admit, my first thought was The Simpsons‘ episode, “The Telltale Head,” in which Bart beheads the town founder’s statue to impress some older kids:

But the actual horror reference is probably The Headless Horseman, who, of course, is famous in this country through The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But the figure of a headless horseman is actually a common one in European folklore stretching back to the Middle Ages, often serving as a harbinger of death or doom.

Interestingly, Texas has its own headless horseman, “El Muerto,” dating back to the mid 1800s.

The truth behind the headless statue is partly that it helps establish the mood of a haunted island. But partly there’s a more practical reason for it: they hadn’t cast the original mayor when this episode was filmed.

From an interview with the brilliant director Hiro Murai:

Speaking of dread, you spent months immersed in the off-kilter world of Widow’s Bay. Looking back at it now, what sticks out as your most terrifying or most hilarious memory?

I guess this isn’t either of those things, but something I thought about recently is that there’s a statue of Widow’s Bay’s founding father, Richard Warren, in the port that people see when they arrive, and it’s a headless statue. The reason he’s headless is that we hadn’t cast Richard Warren yet, so we didn’t know what he was supposed to look like. I kept seeing the headless statue, and at a certain point, I was like, “Well, maybe it should be headless.” TV takes a lot of planning and exact execution, but also, it’s a living organism that sort of grows as you build it, so there’s a chaos element to it, right?

In the town hall scene, note the shark drawing on the chalkboard behind Tom:

It is a direct reference to Jaws:

Speaking of Jaws, the entire swimming sequence was another Jaws allusion: from the music, to Tom being pursued by something terrifying in the water that he couldn’t quite see, to his hanging on to the buoy:

Which brings us to the Sea Hag herself.

My first impression on watching this episode is that they were making a reference to the classic haunt in cultures all around the world: the “White Lady” or the “Lady in White.” Very often these figures are seen, particularly here in the States, as women standing on the side of the road, looking for a ride. When the driver picks them up, the figure will give an address, and once the driver arrives at said address, he discovers the car is empty, and the hitchhiker nowhere to be seen. The driver then learns from the people at the address that the woman he gave a ride to had died in some horrible, untimely way many years before. White Ladies are not always associated with hitchhikers, but it was my first thought when Tom first spied the sea hag in the road.

That said, our Sea Hag does bear a resemblance to a couple of other figures in horror pop culture. She’s drippy and wet with stringy, dirty hair, not unlike Samara from The Ring:

And of course, in The Ring, Samara was killed by being thrown down a well, the well that she is seen emerging from in the haunted video.

And what does Reverend Bryce find out in the woods? An old well.

But who she most resembles, both in her appearance and her behavior, is the woman in the bathtub in room 237 in The Shining: they are both drowned hags attempting to seduce, possibly to death, a much younger and disgusted man.

Finally, I would be remiss to not mention that if you look up the term “sea hag,” you’re going to be directed to a Popeye character, Sea Hag, who is the last witch on Earth who also happens to be a pirate, and one of Popeye’s nemeses. She can alter her appearance, becoming the lovely “Rose of the Sea.” Upon meeting Popeye, she fell in love with him, but discovers that he has a girlfriend, Olive Oyl, whom she tries to get rid of. She also tries to kill Popeye on multiple occasions, furious that he will not have a romantic relationship with her. I don’t know if she inspired any part of Widow’s Bay‘s character; I suspect they are both just examples of this particular archetype which I am VERY EXCITED to talk about.

But before we get to that, I want to discuss some of the most obvious symbols sprinkled throughout the episode, beginning with one that was featured in the previous episode, but that I neglected to discuss because I had already rambled on far too long by that point: Mirrors. In “Lodging,” Tom’s reflection is captured several times in mirrors in the hotel room. And in this episode, Tom is repeatedly seen in mirrors: the hallway mirror and the bathroom mirror, specifically.

Mirrors are symbols of truth, wisdom, and enlightenment; but they also represent an illusory truth, an indirect truth, as an image in the mirror is not the thing itself, but a flipped, reversed, negative reflection of the truth. Mirrors have been used to perform magical rites, for divination, and as a portal between two worlds, this world and the next. Thus, the mirror is a very rich symbol, and I think we can read it as it is being used here with Tom specifically in these two episodes; that Tom is being forced to face the truth about this supernatural world that has spilled over into his life, and he can no longer deny that he has passed through the looking-glass.

There is also the first real plunge into the great beyond that surrounds the island and keeps it isolated and magical: the ocean. The sea is a primordial symbol; it is the source of creation: we literally slithered out of its depths some eons ago. But while it is a feminine symbol, it is not a warm, motherly one. It is vast, it is unknowable, it is terrifying. It represents the unconscious mind and all of the monsters within.

And then there’s the well, which we only see very briefly in this episode, and even then it is obscured in darkness. Wells are a fascinating symbol, representing a conduit between the heavens, Earth, and the underworld, but also as a triple symbol of water, air, and earth. They plumb the depths beneath us, and contain the unknown: thus we use them literally as a metaphor for attained wisdom, the “wells of knowledge.” But most importantly, they are sacred as givers and providers of water and thus life. Relatedly, as many other symbols of passageways like caves and tunnels, they represent the vaginal passage, the womb, the mother. In fact, in Hebrew, the word for “well” also translates to “woman” or “bride.”

As for now, we know little about this well. It will show up later in the series, and we can discuss it more in depth at that time. But I did find it curious that the show chose to introduce the well in this episode that is consumed with an abject terror of female sexuality.

Which brings me to our Sea Hag. The word “hag” is interchangeable with an “ugly or evil-looking” old woman and a witch who can perform magic of some kind. Sometimes both! And I’m not going to spend a thousand words explaining to you what a witch is, because we all know what a witch is.

But I will tell you a couple of things about witches and hags in folklore that are relevant to this episode.

First, there is a specific kind of hag, known as the “Night Hag,” who is found in stories from around the world, from the Nordic countries to Fiji to Turkey and the United States up to Newfoundland and Albania. She is a form of succubus that sits on the chests or at the foot of the bed of sleeping people, paralyzing them. In Scandinavia, they were known as “mares,” and by the 18th century, Samuel Johnson had added the term “nightmare” to his Dictionary of the English Language to describe what we now know as “sleep paralysis.” While Tom is never asleep in this episode, he does experience a type of paralysis brought on by his encounter with the Sea Hag.

And then there’s shape-shifting. Witches have long been accused of being shape-shifters, commonly turning into animals like hares or cats to evade capture or do harm. But in the British Isles and other parts of Northern Europe, there are similar shapeshifting creatures, specifically the Selkies and the Kelpies, who are not witches, per se, but water-bound creatures who naturally take the forms of seals and horses, respectively, who can turn themselves into beautiful women (and sometimes men). Both creatures turn into humans for seduction purposes, but interestingly, Selkies can be tricked into marrying humans by someone who steals their animal skin and hides it from them.

As for the Kelpies, the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction
An’ nighted trav’llers are allur’d
To their destruction.

Which doesn’t NOT remind me of Wyke’s sea shanty about the Sea Hag.

Both of these creatures are related to the dangerous sirens of ancient Greece and the more romanticized mermaid, as seductresses, but those are not exactly shapeshifters.

And then there are the Finfolk. The Finfolk are from the Orkney Islands in Scotland, and they are shapeshifters who live in the sea who show up on the Orkney Islands in the spring and summer to abduct residents, fishermen, and unsuspecting youths, forcing them into lifelong servitude as spouses.

And here’s what I find interesting: all of these monstrous creatures from the sea that I’ve described that bear some resemblance to our Sea Hag, they aren’t witches. They’re shapeshifters. They disguise their true form to lure humans into their seductive traps. They’re malevolent tricksters.

And “trickster,” that word specifically comes up when Rosemary tells Tom about the Sea Hag lore. It is Rosemary who calls her a “trickster.” It is an interesting choice of word, because tricksters are specific things: they are clever, boundary-crossing creatures, often depicted as animals (foxes, rabbits, coyotes, and ravens, in particular), who play tricks to upset society, question authority, and establish new social orders. Here, that doesn’t exactly apply to our Sea Hag: she’s not playing tricks; she’s just terrorizing Tom and threatening to kill him in a very sexually explicit way.

But here’s what is interesting to me: as noted above, tricksters are often shape-shifters, as are witches. Witches and tricksters are not the same things, but they do overlap on a Venn diagram in a couple of places: both as beings who live outside of society and threaten it, and as shape-shifters. And this creates the great anxiety in Tom in the episode: he begins to fear, without any evidence at all, that the attractive “age-appropriate” woman he had been flirting with earlier might just be a shape-shifting sea hag trying to trick him into letting her into his home. In Tom’s mind, Marissa is just another form of the Sea Hag, the same way Rose of the Sea is another form of Popeye’s friend the Sea Hag, and the beautiful naked woman Jack finds in the bathtub in Room 237 in The Shining is actually the hideous, old desiccated corpse lumbering towards him.

I could probably write a Ph.D. thesis on witches, shape-shifting, and men whose sexual fear of women translates into them having anxiety about being tricked into sleeping with a woman they find too old or otherwise distasteful, or just anxiety about women’s sexual power at all. I mean, just consider how the Sea Hag supposedly kills her victims. You get the idea. Feminist nonsense, blah blah blah.

But here’s the thing about the Sea Hag: SHE NEVER SHAPE-SHIFTS. She is the same creature on the road as she is in the ocean as she is in Tom’s house. Tom’s terror of Marissa is completely sprung from his own imagination thanks to the warnings from Wyck (“If she’s not inside yet, she’s gonna find a way.”) and Rosemary (“She scratches you, and she gets some of your skin under her fingernails so she can track you down like a bloodhound. She’s a trickster.”) It’s Tom’s own apprehension about moving on from his dead wife and opening himself up to a new relationship, perhaps helped with Patricia’s nagging about “age appropriateness,” that leads Tom to spiral away from Marissa and directly into the Sea Hag’s talons.

Speaking of the Sea Hag’s talons, the last point I’m going to make is about the wounds she inflicts on Tom. Going back to the witchiness of this character, what she is doing is performing a type of blood magic on Tom. By accessing someone’s blood, so the practice believes, one has accessed that person’s life force: it is a direct connection to their body. And by having that connection to their body, through magic, you can then control that body. You can manipulate them, you can suppress them. Which, clearly, is what the Sea Hag is doing to Tom.

But for my own personal focus, what I find interesting about the wounds is that being physically harmed, putting skin in the game, if you will, is a crucial part of the Hero’s Journey. Being harmed during one’s adventure, it makes it real; it leaves a scar; it changes you. It is fundamental, it is undeniable, it is real. The hero has crossed the threshold and entered into the unknown. The known world will never be the same for him again.

With “Lodging,” Tom was given enough outs to dismiss his own experiences with the haunts. It was a dream, it was a hallucination induced by mold, maybe he had too much to drink. But here, there are physical wounds on his body left by this woman, by this Sea Hag who paralyzed him and terrorized him. The scratches on his arms and legs, they are physical evidence that he has, indeed, entered the unknown, and even this Doubting Thomas can no longer deny that he is now on his journey.

Widow’s Bay streams on Apple TV.

She was… She was age-appropriate.

What an odd way to describe someone who you’re just giving a ride.

Island has a perimeter. It’s called the ocean.

No. W-Why? Does it look like an animal wound?

Not to me.

Then why would you… Oh, my…

Was she in her 40s?

She crawls into your bed and sits on your face.

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