Widow’s Bay
“Beach Reads”
May 13, 2026
ALRIGHT. SO. While Tom was managing his love life and being menaced by a sea hag, Patricia was left to her own devices to handle the Sunset Cocktails event which, somehow, ended with Sheriff Bechir in a panic, radioing for all available fire and rescue to head to Patricia’s cocktail party, because he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on …
So how did we get here?
Four days earlier, Patricia is manning her book mobile, The Pattiwagon (perfect, no notes), stocked with plenty of sci-fi and horror, including Stephen King and Isaac Asimov, while she watches, with some jealousy, as a group of adult female friends laughs and chats at the cafe nearby.
With a sigh, Patricia shelves the newest books in her donation box, including a copy of The Shining and a self-help book: Your Turn: Out with the Old and In with the You …
… by author Lucy Fours.
And just to make it real clear what’s going on here, a fly lands on the book as Patricia inspects it, before shelving it for some lucky reader to find.
That evening, Patricia puts herself out there and goes to an old classmate’s house for a girls’ wine night, where, upon arrival, it becomes very clear very quickly that she was only invited out of polite obligation: it was never expected that she’d actually attend.
And bless her heart, Patricia tries: but the wine she brought is wrong, and her anecdote about her father’s snoring is wrong, and the glass she tries to grab for herself is wrong. It’s all wrong.
The only woman who is nice to her is Shelby, some newcomer who just moved here from Portsmouth. Shelby has some questions for Patricia about the girls that Patricia and the rest must have gone to school with, the ones who died … and Patricia, she has plenty to say about all that: after all, she was almost one of them.
Patricia goes on to tell Shelby how it started, with the phone calls and the heavy breathing. And then one night, when she was alone, The Boogeyman came to her house … but before Patricia can finish her story, one of her former classmates bumps her, spilling Patricia’s wine all over herself.
Patricia retreats to the bathroom, giving the other ladies a chance to whisper-gossip to each other that it was proven Patricia never received those calls, and that for the past 25 years, she’s been clinging to that story. Just pathetic. Certifiably crazy. When she emerges from the bathroom, having heard all this, they ask her to take a picture of them, excluding her once again.
Signal received, Patricia excuses herself from the party and sad walks home.
Once there, Patricia’s attention is drawn to the Pattiwagon, where, once she enters, she discovers Your Turn: Out with the Old and In with the You waiting for her on the floor.
Patricia decides to bring it inside with her for a little bedtime reading, and puts it on her nightstand, placing her tea atop it …
… while she takes off her robe …
… before climbing into bed:
Patricia doesn’t notice the cup having been moved by … something, however, and instead picks up the self-help book for some bedtime reading. And right off the bat, this book is playing some psychological games with Patricia, granting only two lines for the answer to the question, “What do you love about yourself?” versus most of the page to answer, “What don’t you love about yourself?”
(Patricia doesn’t love that she cares too much about what other people think, by the way.)
This is followed by a line drawing of a naked woman, and the prompt to circle her worst features.
The book goes on to prey even further on Patricia’s insecurities:
“Feeling like you could die tomorrow and no one would notice?
Well, that could be.
But the right party can change that.”
It goes on to promise that one great party could change her life: all she has to be is an elegant and effortless hostess, and the book will show her how.
The next day, Patricia comes to work with A PLAN for Sunset Cocktails: Dale is going to need to get a turntable, because he’s going to be DJing, despite never having done that before. As for Patricia, she creates an Evite and invites literally everyone on the island.
Obsessed with her plans … and the book … Patricia is up all night making lists, tearing pages out, furiously writing notes and plans and suggestions for conversation starters and recipes for punch …
And tips on giving “the perfect toast”:
“Before the party, spend some time writing down fun facts about your guests, so that you can use these to spur topics of conversation. Dan likes to take strolls by the moonlight. Cynthia always wears a locket that her grandmother gave her when she was seven and she says will haunt her if she removes it. Robert says he sold his soul to the devil to play the guitar like a master. Amanda likes to paint dead animals still life oil painting. Matthew is afraid of the dark and has to sleep with a nightlight. You know, interesting personal tidbits that make people special but also might prompt an exchange about other’s interests, superstitions, or fears. Don’t forget to play matchmaker, both for yourself and the other single people that attend. Now is the time to connect with one another, and when there is enough alcohol, people let down their guards and become more uninhibited, which is where the real fun happens.”
The next day, Patricia is at the Salty Whale decorating for the big event when her mean girl nemeses come in for lunch, only to be irritated at the sight of Patricia. She takes the opportunity to invite them to Sunset Cocktails, reminding them that she is the chair of the event, and therefore it’s her party. The lead Mean Girl sneers that she and everyone else are going to be attending Bill Rooney’s birthday at the Elks Lodge, before turning and leading the women out of the restaurant.
Patricia retreats to a picnic table with her book, which assures her that the party is going to be a success, because it’s “your turn.”
Then, panicked, Patricia returns to the office just as Dale is complaining to Rosemary that Patricia has created an 800-song playlist for the party. Patricia demands the RSVP list, only to be handed a blank page: no one has responded. Furious, Patricia instructs Dale and/or Rosemary to tell the Elks Lodge that they are not allowed to have more than 30 non-members at a time, and that Bill’s birthday party is canceled unless they want their liquor license pulled.
Patricia then retreats to check her Evite page. Invited: 156. Yes: 3.
And no amount of refreshing the page changes that.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Bechir is dealing with Mayor Tom and his claim that there’s a lunatic old lady wandering the island. Towards that end, he is scrolling through the CCTV footage from around the island, where he comes across some … disturbing footage:
In the wise words of Sheriff Bechir:
And then it’s party time. Rosemary enters the kitchen of the Salty Whale to find Patricia, donning a dainty tiara for some reason, frantically chopping ingredients. Rosemary expresses her concern that Patricia is “putting too much into this thing,” adding that she didn’t understand half the things on her shopping list, and gently suggests that Patricia consider a different headpiece.
BUT PATRICIA DOESN’T NEED ROSEMARY’S NEGATIVITY RIGHT NOW. JUST BE SUPPORTIVE.
Rosemary, chastened, rolls her eyes that she can’t do anything right today, before taking her leave.
Out in the dining room, Dale is repeatedly checking the sound system to Patricia’s irritation that the event began 15 minutes earlier.
A tourist couple happens to wander into the empty restaurant, but before they can make their escape, Patricia has dragged them further inside to talk to some of the locals.
Patricia heads back to the kitchen to collect the deviled eggs, and finds the book, urging her that it’s the “perfect time to serve the punch.” Instead, Patricia calls and leaves the huffy message on Tom’s answering machine, demanding to know where he is.
Patricia returns to the party just as more people arrive and Dale has put on “This Is How We Do It,” prompting Patricia to get the dance party started …
… only to have the party interrupted by a Spotify ad.
But no worries! More guests arrive, including the bachelorette party; crab cakes are passed; and a handsome bearded man is a little flirty with our Patricia.
The Mean Girls, who are also there presumably because Bill’s party has been shut down, sneer about what Patricia has on her head, prompting Patricia to finally stand up for herself, demanding to know why Kris, leader of the Mean Girls, is so mean to her.
Kris sighs that Patricia is playing the victim again, to which Patricia insists that she doesn’t care if they don’t believe her; the Boogeyman came to her house, and she hid from him under her bed.
Kris then hisses at her that Patricia is SOOOO CLEVER, and that she’s sure none of the girls who were murdered thought to hide from the Boogeyman, like Samantha who hid in a dryer only to be baked to death, or Jen who hid under her pool cover, but he was already there waiting for her: turns out they should have just hidden under their beds like Patricia. Kris reminds her that her friends died, and that Patricia is so pathetic and starved for attention that she has to make it all about herself.
Patricia retreats in tears to the kitchen where the book has become … emphatic.
And so … Patricia serves the punch. LET’S DANCE!
And the party is a success — so much so that a noise complaint is called into the police, and Sheriff Bechir volunteers to look into it.
Dance party dance party dance party Patricia in the center of the dance party she is the star everyone is having a great time dance party dance party
Patricia is everything dance party dance party
wait what was that
dance party dance party
And then it’s time for Patricia’s big moment: the toast. She takes the mic, and with the encouragement from the crowd, reads from the book:
“As I look around this room at friends old and new… I feel grateful. For there is always time to change the course of history. And tonight, tomorrow starts today.”
The crowd cheers, and someone suggests they all head down to the bonfire. And Patricia, she agrees, just as soon as she goes in the back and grabs some more punch.
It’s there that she finds a white-wine-sipping Rosemary who is looking on disapprovingly. Patricia demands to know what her problem is, and Rosemary explains that she didn’t understand a word of Patricia’s speech. Rosemary knows Patricia asked her to be supportive, but she has her qualms.
And that’s when Sheriff Bechir enters the kitchen, explaining that he had a noise complaint, only to look up at Patricia, upon which his demeanor immediately changes:
“Patricia. What, uh… What the fuck are you doing?”
And as the church bells toll in the background, that’s when we get a look at Patricia’s cutting board …
And in the most amazing reveal perhaps in the entire series, Patricia turns to the mirror behind her and sees … a nightmare:
Rosemary sighs that she tried to tell her …
If you try to say to me with a straight face that this show isn’t a comedy, we’re going to have words.
Suddenly, Patricia sees her party for what it is: some sort of dark witch spell, what with talismans and evil detritus scattered everywhere, and her self-help book reveals itself to be a grimoire filled with horrors:
Panicked, Patricia runs out to the beachside bonfire, which is in full demonic ritual conflagration, and finds all the bewitched party-goers walking gape-mouthed into the water per the drawing above. She and Sheriff Bechir try, but fail to stop the entranced, leading Bechir to make that call for all Fire and Rescue to come to Patricia’s party, per the end of the previous episode.
But Patricia, she knows what must be done: the grimoire must be destroyed. She tries to throw it into the fire, but it seems to be almost attached to her hand. Instead, she holds the book in the fire, and after a long while, it finally begins to melt. Some sort of spirit is sucked upwards into the night sky, the bonfire collapses, and the partygoers collectively awaken, confused as to why they are thigh-deep in this inlet.
Patricia, defeated, exhausted, begins the walk home when Wyck and Mayor Tom pull up beside her, having just survived their own nonsense. They ask her what happened at the party, and all she can muster is, “It went wrong.”
Indeed.
But they’ll deal with that later; they need her help, and urge her to get into the truck. The three head to the church: Reverend Bryce called Tom, and he sounded scared; he knows … something.
But upon arriving at the church’s ransacked office, there’s no sign of Bryce … until the office door closes and reveals he’s hung himself upon it.
So let’s talk about the horror references in this episode, and begin with the most obvious one, which coincidentally is having its own Zeitgeist moment thanks to Mike Flanagan’s Carrie series. Stephen King’s first novel is all about social alienation, bullying, being the weird girl no one likes, that weird girl having a brief moment when she feels like she’s the belle of the ball, only to have it be snatched away from her, and that weird girl turning around and using supernatural powers to exact revenge on her bullies.
But instead of Carrie’s inherent powers of telekinesis, Patricia’s powers are acquired through witchcraft, from this evil book. There are a few movies about evil books we should discuss, namely the Evil Dead movies in which the evil is released into the world after someone reads from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, also known as “The Book of the Dead.”
The Necronomicon, of course, is the invention of the great horror author H.P. Lovecraft; a grimoire that was said to contain spells that could summon “The Old Ones.” Lovecraft included references to the Necronomicon in several of his stories and novellas, and other authors referenced the book in their own stories with Lovecraft’s permission, as he thought it helped create “a background of evil verisimilitude.” In fact, through the years, many people have believed it to be a real book, with booksellers and libraries around the world receiving requests for it all the time.
The other movie about an evil book that comes to mind is The Babadook, in which a child’s book seems to summon an evil force that possesses his mother. Again, we have the idea that a magic book can change someone, that the contents of the written word can possess someone. Also, we have to include it here because:
Then there is The Shining: not only is Stephen King’s book in the box beside Your Turn:
But Patricia, once under the influence of Your Turn, becomes fixated and obsessed, as shown in her manic writing, similar to Jack Torrance’s madness in the hotel:
Another movie reference in this episode is to the 1973 British folk horror movie, The Wicker Man. In the film, a police sergeant goes to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. The inhabitants of the island, to his great disgust, are engaging in pagan rituals, teaching their children all kinds of weird sex magic, and seem completely unbothered that a young girl has gone missing. The sergeant eventually meets the island’s leader (played by the wonderful Christopher Lee), who explains that in the previous century, his grandfather saved what had been a struggling island by growing a particular kind of fruit tree on the island. He encouraged the locals to believe the success of the trees was due to the old gods, to reject Christianity, and embrace paganism. The sergeant eventually finds the young girl, but she’s not in danger at all: SPOILER ALERT FOR A 53-YEAR-OLD MOVIE: he was deliberately lured to the island to serve as a sacrifice to the islanders’ gods. And to that end, they imprison him and a bunch of animals in a giant figure made out of wicker, and set it ablaze.
The movie, which I just watched for the first time about a month ago, is pretty much the ur folk horror movie: it influenced everything from Midsommar to The Witch, and shows like The Third Day, The Red King, and, I’m assuming, the recently released Yaga. As for this episode, The Wicker Man is referenced visually in a couple of different ways:
In the terrifying animal masks the islanders wear:
And the bonfire that would have possibly been used for a ritual sacrifice had Patricia not intervened in the last moment:
The final movie reference that is worth noting would be The Blair Witch Project, as Patricia’s decorations for her party resemble the terrifying stick figures the Blair Witch trio found in the woods:
As for the symbolism in this episode, we have to start with the book, which is the primary motivator of the episode. Books, obviously, represent knowledge, wisdom, information. But they also represent personal transformation: once one has read the contents of a book, any book, they are changed, they know something new, their perspective of the world has, perhaps, been altered.
Thus, it’s perfect that the book in question in this episode, the book that we learn by the end of the episode is a source of evil and corruption, is a self-help book: it literally is meant to change a person.
What’s interesting is that Patricia is not actually transformed into an evil person: she is able to overcome the spell that the book has cast upon her. However, she is transformed in the sense that, like Tom, she has been initiated into the realities of the supernatural horrors of the island: she now knows undeniably that they are real.
Also similar to Tom, she is symbolically brought into this new knowledge/reality via mirrors. Importantly, we see Patricia in a mirror right before she begins reading the book:
And then later, she comes to the horrific realization of what is actually happening when she looks into another mirror:
As we’ve discussed, mirrors represent self-knowledge and a reflected truth (which may not always be accurate). They also serve as a portal, a passageway into another realm, another reality. Patricia enters this new world once she brings that book inside her home, and it is only when she sees herself in the mirror again that she is able to break the spell that has taken hold of her.
And just to foreshadow that this book is evil, the show gives us a couple of symbols, one that I think is specific to this episode, and the other, which will play a much larger role in the lore of the island and its evil.
Aside from the book author’s name, the other hint we have that this book is … not virtuous is that a fly keeps buzzing around it.
Flies are obviously drawn to rot, decay, and death. They are associated with pestilence, and over time have become a symbol of evil, of moral corruption, with the Lord of Flies — Lucifer (Lucy Four) — himself. But I also like the much more direct idea that what we can’t see at this moment is that the book itself is this somehow organic, rotted mess that the flies are attracted to.
Speaking of, the other thing that suggests that the book is not what it seems is the growth of black mold in its crease:
Mold and mildew represent decay, stagnation, neglect, a problem spreading and growing undetected beneath the surface. Buildings infested with toxic molds sometimes need to be quarantined, or even destroyed, lest the rot and poisons from the spores spread and infect other structures. Toxic molds can cause any number of physical symptoms, including congestion, difficulty breathing, brain fog, fatigue, and body pains. They can also cause many neurological afflictions, from headaches to hallucinations, even psychosis.
The black mold was previously seen in the Inn, under the wallpaper, and was blamed for the “visions” that Tom experienced while there. Is it possible that the mold is endemic to the island, that the mold might actually be the manifestation of the island’s evil? That the mold is the way the island controls, manipulates, and terrifies its residents?
I want to discuss Patricia’s tiara/iconic headdress. So, Patricia thinks she’s wearing a tiara when the party begins, only to discover she’s wearing this horrific fox-headed, behorned headdress in reality. This is clearly serving two purposes: most importantly, to demonstrate to the viewer just how far apart her imagination under the spell and reality are, but also to make that clever nod to Carrie, that she believes she’s the Prom Queen, only to discover it was all a terrible lie.
But let’s quickly touch on the meaning of crowns and headdresses. Crowns and headdresses obviously are signifiers of royalty, leadership, and victory. From the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols: “It sets the seal of transcendence upon the character of any accomplishment … It marries, in the person crowned, what is above and wht is below, but in so doing, marks the bounds which in any other person divide the celestial from the terrestrial, the human from the divine … finally, the very material, be it vegetable or mineral, from which the crown is made defines by the fact that it is dedicated to this or that god or goddess, the nature of the heroic deed accomplished and that of the prize awarded by assimilation with Ares (Mars), Apollo, Dionysus, or whichever.”
Patricia’s tiara/headdress separates Patricia from the crowd; it’s her party, she’s the hostess, she’s in control, she has transcended. What is fascinating to me is that this crown, it transforms (at least in perception) from mineral to vegetal, suggesting that Patricia comes to understand that while she believed she was just being the hostess with the mostess, she has actually aligned herself with something much more elemental and evil, some dark god.
And we know this because of what the headdress is made of: a fox’s head, antlers, twigs, feathers, materials from the earth, from the woods themselves. Almost as if Patricia tapped into some previously untapped woods witch part of herself. Is it possible they didn’t burn all the witches on Widow’s Bay back in the day?
As for the bonfire at the end of the episode, fire is obviously a very powerful and cardinal symbol. It’s one of the four elements (water, earth, air, fire), and it is both a symbol of creation and destruction. Fire represents the hearth, of home, of warmth, light, protection, and sustenance. But it is also an element of consumption and holds the potential of terror, and as such has long been a sign of divine power: it giveth, it taketh away. As such, fire is often used in rituals of all faiths, serving as a purifying agent.
What I find interesting in both the use of a bonfire here and in the inspiration from The Wicker Man (and now that I’m thinking about it, Carrie also ends in a conflagration) is a sort of cheeky, if unintentional, reversal: whereas historically, witches were executed on bonfires, here the witches are the ones who lit the pyres. But for both groups, the witch burners and the witches, the intention behind the bonfire is the same: it is to bring the community together to make a ritualistic sacrifice so as to purify the whole group. For the witch burners, they were removing by fire an impurity — the witch — from the community in the name of their god; and for the pagans in The Wicker Man (and possibly here in Widow’s Bay), a sacrifice is made to the old gods to secure a bounty for the village. In both instances, they are human sacrifices consumed by purifying flames.
But obviously, the sacrifice falls short in Widow’s Bay.
For now.
Widow’s Bay streams on Apple TV.