Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n
By this point she\u2019s already realized someone has snuck into her home while she went out to see to the car alarm he\u2019d set off in her bookmobile as a distraction. She can even hear his heavy breathing in the dark. So for several painstaking minutes, she walks as carefully and quietly as she can down the stairs and out the door, stopping along the way to pick up a taser with a near-dead battery. Then she\u2019s out on the street, looking around, calculating what to do next.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From the moment she returns home, the camera \u2014 which has already simulated the killer\u2019s point of view \u2014 is used to show her house as a warren of nooks and crannies, aiming the lens straight at corners to create a maze-like visual effect with rooms and halls that diverge from one another at those points. The street outside hums with suburban menace out of Halloween<\/a> or It Follows<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n And then BANG, there he is: The Boogeyman, a hulking maniac in an expressionless rubber mask, wielding a machete. I don\u2019t blame Patricia for being freaked out, that\u2019s for sure. It freaked me out, and I\u2019m sitting at home watching it in an Apple TV sitcom! For her, this is real, as it has been since he first broke into her home when she was a teenager but couldn\u2019t find her.\u00a0<\/p>\n Okay, so the menacing calls to her house were a lie. She admits this to the other women from her class later on, when she breaks into their book club meeting to hide. But the Boogeyman really did come to her house, and now he\u2019s back, and they\u2019ve got to call the police. When the ringleader of the mean girls mocks her instead, Patricia responds by knocking her out with the taser. \u201cShe\u2019s the fuckin\u2019 worst, I\u2019m sorry,\u201d says Patricia by way of a half-apology as she hustles out of there to find shelter elsewhere.<\/p>\n But the Boogeyman has already entered through the back door. Rather than massacring the book club (The Lovely Bones is an amazing choice), he throws himself out a second story window, then gets back up and starts chasing her once again. He similarly survives getting run over, living to kill the driver, and getting set on fire, living to kill the gas station employee who was nice enough to put him out with a fire extinguisher.\u00a0<\/p>\n The killer even gets a slice in on Sheriff Bechir (fortunately, it\u2019s just a flesh wound), leaving him unable to defend himself. He\u2019s about to get sliced and diced when Patricia blows the Boogeyman away with shotgun blasts. She keeps the gun trained on his corpse all the way to the morgue\u2019s crematorium, then points it at his ashes and bones, too. As Ali put it on Euphoria<\/a> earlier this week, \u201cJust in case.\u201d<\/p>\n This entire time, by the way, the killer\u2019s speed never rises above \u201cgoing for a walk with the cousins after Thanksgiving dinner\u201d: in classic slasher-movie style, he\u2019s still able to keep up with Patricia even as she runs full tilt. But even this is elevated from a mere bit by how good Kate O\u2019Flynn is at, for lack of a better phrase, running in character. Her screams mix fear and irritation, and by the end she\u2019s clearly physically run down. You can see from her outfit that Patricia\u2019s not the kind of person built to run for her life. On the other hand, boy oh boy is it awesome to see her cock a shotgun.<\/p>\n People can surprise you here in Widow\u2019s Bay. Take Wyck, the salty dog who turns out to be not such an insufferable coot after all. The smiling solidarity he shows Tom and Patricia over breakfast the morning after the debacle with town father Richard Warren is genuinely heartwarming \u2014 like, in a real way, a way that\u2019s earned, not because that\u2019s the reaction you\u2019re supposed to have.<\/p>\n On the flipside, the discovery that Wyck\u2019s old squeeze Gerrie the town historian has a perfectly nice husband, who even likes Wyck quite a bit. You can\u2019t even root for him to get the girl when the girl is perfectly happy with the boy she\u2019s got. You witness two perfectly nice people accidentally crush a man\u2019s dreams. It feels bad, man.<\/p>\n So does the way Evan Loftis grills his father Tom about the letters and photos he uncovered, proving his mother lived for some time after he was born. The letters, which a savagely embittered Evan makes Tom listen to as he reads them aloud, reveal that his mother was a thoroughly broken woman, only in touch with reality long enough to express her belief that she\u2019s already dead.<\/p>\n That is effectively how Tom describes her to Evan. She suffered a stroke from preeclampsia that transformed her personality, making her dangerous. She succumbed to a brain aneurysm a couple of years after Tom had her institutionalized. He never told Evan, he says, in part because revisiting it would make him sadder about it than he already is, and in part because Evan\u2019s mom, his real mom, wouldn\u2019t have wanted him to remember her that way at all.<\/p>\n But now that the curse is (allegedly) broken, things are gonna change. The two Loftis boys re-bond over sandwiches as they get psyched for an upcoming surprise trip to Boston to see the Red Sox play, purchased by Tom now that he feels it\u2019s safe for Evan to leave the island.\u00a0<\/p>\n All this business about Evan and his mom runs parallel to a side plot involving Sheriff Bechir and his very pregnant wife. It\u2019s urgent for Bechir to recover and get the hell to the mainland before their baby is born in Widow\u2019s Bay and suffers the same curse as all the other residents.<\/p>\n Because the curse is very much still operative, obviously. After discovering the Boogeyman\u2019s return, Wyck relays the bad news to a heartbroken and frightened Tom at the end of the episode, while the wind howls. If, as it seems, Evan Loftis is the last surviving descendent of Richard Warren through his mother\u2019s side, does anyone else see a Wicker Man in Widow\u2019s Bay\u2019s future?<\/p>\n I hope they go for it, frankly. I want a full-on Shirley Jackson \u201cThe Lottery\u201d situation. I want villagers with torches and pitchforks. I want some kind of horrible betrayal that will make me hate one of these adorable weirdos. I want more beautifully filmed nighttime exteriors, filled with rich patches of black in which even darker things lurk. I want my Widow\u2019s Bay.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tGet your guide to the best movies and shows streaming\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up for Decider Digest for news and recommendations for Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, and more!\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\tThank you for signing up!\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com<\/a>\u00a0on Bluesky and\u00a0theseantcollins<\/a>\u00a0on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and\u00a0elsewhere<\/a>. He is the author of\u00a0Pain Don\u2019t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s not beat around the bush here: How about that jump scare, huh? Or more accurately: Jesus Leweezus,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":683849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,270293,270294,56601,600,98402,92],"class_list":["post-683848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-kate-oflynn","tag-katie-dippold","tag-matthew-rhys","tag-recaps","tag-stephen-root","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/683849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n
Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n
Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n
Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n