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Widow\u2019s Bay<\/a><\/p>\n Our History<\/p>\n \n Season 1<\/p>\n Episode 6\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 4 stars<\/p>\n ****\n <\/p>\n \n Finally, we meet the \u201cgreat\u201d Richard Warren and his devoted and not-at-all-terrified wife, Sarah. The very beginning of last week\u2019s episode of Widow\u2019s Bay<\/a> showed a brief scene of a man with very long hair discovering the mushrooms, called truesight, that grow solely out of the soil on this isolated island. It was unclear how that moment related to what followed or who exactly he was. But this week\u2019s episode, \u201cOur History,\u201d a flashback to 1702 and Sarah Westcott Warren\u2019s arrival in Widow\u2019s Bay, provides some clarity. It seems obvious now that the man with the long hair at the beginning of \u201cWhat to Expect on Your Trip\u201d is Richard Warren, portrayed by Hamish Linklater, and that what we witnessed was his arrival on the island and his discovery of the funnest fungi in fungi history. (Just kidding, those mushrooms are not fun at all.)<\/p>\n This sixth episode of the season confirms that some key things hinted at in the fifth episode<\/a> are true. Richard Warren was not the great guy everyone claims, and was, in fact, a murderer who killed his first wife and seems poised to do the same to Sarah. We actually see Sarah voice her fears in her diary, jotting down her thoughts on a page that Wyck will recover decades later. (Brief diary summary: My husband definitely bludgeons people to death, but he\u2019s standing right here, so I should clarify and say that what I just wrote is actually me starting to work out a tight five for my new stand-up act. In conclusion, my husband absolutely did not use a dude named Ezra\u2019s own cane to beat the bloody life out of him, jk jk jk jk jk.)<\/p>\n The origin story of Widow\u2019s Bay does indeed appear to have been written like the early seasons of Saturday Night Live: by someone using very hard drugs. That someone is Richard Warren, who tells the townsfolk before they bury him alive that if they break the pact he made with the island, they are doomed. (Between this and Euphoria<\/a>, hell of a week for people being buried alive on television.) \u201cThe pact must be honored,\u201d Richard insists. \u201cThe pact which spared us in that first winter. It spoke to me through the mushrooms.\u201d He adds, \u201cFulfill the pact and the plague will stop. If you do not, the terrors will not cease.\u201d<\/p>\n It seems fair to assume that whatever spoke to Richard is the same entity that Tom saw while he was riding his own truesight wave. But just because the mushrooms make Richard believe in the pact does not mean that the pact is real. Like, if someone takes an edible and starts watching Dude, Where\u2019s My Car?, they may become completely convinced that the 2000 movie starring Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott is the best comedy of all time. But that does not mean this is true. It just means they got high off their ass and came to a misguided conclusion. Maybe Richard Warren did the same thing.<\/p>\n We, the viewers, still don\u2019t know for sure exactly what\u2019s causing the island\u2019s calamities. But \u201cOur History\u201d does an excellent job of connecting some important dots and furthering our understanding of how the island\u2019s past and present are connected. This episode has many fewer laughs than the previous ones. But it\u2019s still incredibly compelling and extremely unsettling, which makes sense since Ti West, director of the X trilogy, directed this episode.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not easy for a show to take a detour with a flashback, stand-alone episode and still hold the audience\u2019s interest, but Widow\u2019s Bay makes it look easy. The writing in this episode is not just solid, it\u2019s sometimes gorgeous. When Ezra Lowery describes the symptoms that befell the plague-stricken Widow\u2019s Bay resident Cornelius Evans \u2014 \u201cHis eyes were yellow with spoiled moons\u201d \u2014 the prose sounds damn close to poetry. Shout-out to Alberto Rold\u00e1n, the credited writer of \u201cOur History,\u201d who has previously worked on Mrs. Davis<\/a> and Gaslit<\/a>, two shows that star Betty Gilpin.<\/p>\n Which brings us to another massive asset in this episode\u2019s favor: Betty fucking Gilpin. The first scene introduces her as Sarah Westcott Warren, and as soon as it did, I actually yelled her name in appreciation. As she does in much of her work, but maybe especially in Mrs. Davis (watch it if you haven\u2019t!<\/a>), Gilpin does an exceptional job of playing the emotional authenticity in every moment \u2014 her panicky gasps and pillow-muffled screams are believable on a visceral level \u2014 while highlighting the comedic subtext, without sacrificing that authenticity. The way she spits out the poisoned liquor that Richard offers her, for example, is hilarious but still genuinely terrifying. Not every actor can do this sort of thing. Betty Gilpin does it like it\u2019s second nature.<\/p>\n Poor Sarah arrives in Widow\u2019s Bay specifically to wed Richard Warren, a man she has never met but is marrying anyway because Sarah is almost 40, and in the 1700s, a (barely) middle-age woman has to take what she can get. The buzz about the guy initially is pretty good. \u201c\u2019Fore he arrived, it was a place with nothing but barren dirt,\u201d says the carriage driver who escorts Sarah into town. (He fails to mention all the teeth that were also apparently in that dirt.) \u201cBut today, blossoms on the trees, food for every hungry mouth, mild winters.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe controls the weather, does he?\u201d Sarah jokes. But the real joke is that people on the island think that he probably can control the weather. \u201cThey say that you\u2019re in communion with this island,\u201d Ezra Lowery tells Richard, portrayed hauntingly by Linklater, before Richard brains him to death. \u201cThat you whisper to it. You tame it. You turn it to your will. That you are the only reason we survived the first years.\u201d Pastor Collins later confirms to Sarah that everyone in Widow\u2019s Bay is suspicious of Richard and fears \u201cthat the devil himself has chosen your husband, for what cause I cannot tell.\u201d<\/p>\n Certainly, there is evidence that something dark-arts-ish is going on. The balls of hair left outside of doorways where someone has been killed have a Blair Witch flavor. More importantly, it\u2019s pretty weird that Richard cannot be killed. When the Pastor essentially sends a hitman to take him out, Richard is stabbed repeatedly, but it\u2019s the failed killer who dies while Richard is covered in blood, but somehow perfectly fine. That can\u2019t be explained away by a few shots of mushroom tea, although I absolutely think mushrooms are what Richard keeps in his necklace. (That\u2019s not a covenant in there, dummies, it\u2019s the \u2019shrooms!)<\/p>\n It is fair, if not common sense, to assume that the island requires human sacrifice. Again, Richard says, \u201cFulfill the pact and the plague will stop.\u201d It seems like Richard believes that if he can kill enough people, the island will stop killing them with disease. He\u2019s also certain that Sarah and his children will die for attempting to escape Widow\u2019s Bay, something they seem to somewhat succeed at accomplishing near the end of the episode, if success qualifies as getting in a boat without getting eaten by Contagious Zombie Abigail. (Based on the painting of the boat at the inn, which Tom noticed in episode two<\/a>, that voyage probably does not go well.) \u201cThe island won\u2019t let them leave,\u201d Richard shouts from inside his coffin. \u201cPlease. You\u2019ll kill them all.\u201d I mean, the place is called Widow\u2019s Bay, so.<\/p>\n In the next episode, which conveniently also dropped today, we should find out how much of Richard\u2019s prophecy is valid. That\u2019s because in the last scene of this one, we return to the present, where we find Wyck digging up Richard\u2019s grave and beginning to exhume his body. If the island\u2019s original protector was right all those years ago, he should still be alive inside that box.<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Courtesy of Apple\n <\/p>\n