{"id":697567,"date":"2026-06-11T11:02:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/697567\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:02:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T11:02:12","slug":"widows-bay-episode-9-recap-emergency-shelter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/697567\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Widow’s Bay’ Episode 9 Recap: “Emergency Shelter”"},"content":{"rendered":"

And what rough voice, her hour come round at last, chain-smokes towards Widow\u2019s Bay to be born? That\u2019s right, folks: It\u2019s Rosemary\u2019s time to shine. When Tom, Wyck, and Patricia are in desperate need of genealogical information to pin down the living descendants of cursed town founder Richard Warren, they turn to the woman who knows everything about everyone in Widow\u2019s Bay, and will tell it all to you at length. She\u2019ll be damned if she\u2019ll let something like a freak storm that sucks people into the sky Nope<\/a>\u2013style stop her from detailing every root, branch, and twig of the Warren family tree.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a big one coming, alright\u2014a supernatural nor\u2019easter that\u2019s like one big swirl of purple on the doppler radar. For weather like this, the town has a shelter beneath the town hall. Of course, the last thing Tom wants is to send a bunch of tourists into a concrete bunker underground to hide from bad weather. That doesn\u2019t happen in Martha\u2019s Vineyard!\u00a0<\/p>\n

Royally aggrieved by his plight, Tom tries and fails to tear up the calendar from Episode 1, with the wolves and the car wreck. Then he tears down the huge portrait of a town worthy and his wife from the wall, peeling a bunch of wall down with it before finally collapsing under the painting\u2019s weight in what\u2019s got to be Matthew Rhys\u2019s best bit of physical comedy on the show yet. It\u2019s enhanced by Rosemary, who is not strong and knows nothing about injuries, trying to lift the heavy frame off Tom herself. \u201cYou\u2019re pushing it down!\u201d he stammers through the pain.<\/p>\n

\"Dale Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n

But the damaged portrait contains a clue. In the cold open, we see young Frances Warren fall overboard from the rowboat piloted by Betty Gipin\u2019s character Sarah Warren, whose other rescued children are already falling victim to a disgusting-looking illness of some kind. Watching them float off into the fog never to be seen again, crying to her and then (maybe) screaming as they vanish, is one of the show\u2019s most haunting moments. It contains the same mix of supernatural menace and nature\u2019s vast indifference to humanity that made the original season of The Terror<\/a> so good.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Patricia notices that the woman in the painting, Frances Fisher, only has nine fingers \u2014 just like Frances Warren, the little girl, who lost one in an accident some time earlier. She was found floating on the sea by a whaling captain, who adopted her, raised her, and then (of course, and ew) married her. From there, nearly 300 years of descendants followed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Stephen Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n

But Rosemary is able to trace every branch of the Frances Warren Fisher family tree till it dies out, which she does at extraordinary length. \u201cWell, I guess I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m talking about and should just stop,\u201d she says passive-aggressively when Tom takes issue with one of the colorful idioms she deploys along the way. (\u201cThe family that swims together drowns together.\u201d) Honestly, the episode is mostly a showcase for actor Dale Dickey, who has a whale of a time as a woman in her glory. Whether she\u2019s crossing off name after name while repeating the phrase \u201cdead baby,\u201d or noting notables like \u201cSophia the Heretic\u201d or \u201cThe Ungrateful Hortence,\u201d or being asked by the group not to use slurs, she\u2019s marvelous.<\/p>\n

The Warren bloodline, it turns out, has one sole survivor: Ruth (K Callan), the elderly woman who works for the mayor\u2019s office\u2026and the one person unaccounted for in the shelter. Which leaves Tom and Wyck and Patricia with a moral dilemma: Do they kill her themselves to spare god knows how many others?\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Patricia, this is no dilemma at all. It\u2019s simply evil and insane to even contemplate the idea. But Wyck is a salty dog, and Tom just watched Todd the Shaman get sucked into some kind of wind portal in the sky, so he knows this storm has gone well beyond dangerous and into outright malevolence. In the end, he opts to do the job himself.<\/p>\n

\"Kate Photo: Apple TV<\/p>\n

In other news around town, Sheriff Bechir and his wife Chelle (Sipiwe Moyo) have to turn back when their ferry never shows up. The very pregnant Chelle feels contractions nearly the second they head into town hall to take shelter. Evan\u2019s still on good terms with his dad (and he\u2019s not the final descendant, as I\u2019d have bet money he was), but he doesn\u2019t know that the curse is still in place and there can be no raincheck on his canceled Red Sox game until that changes. Tom does a lengthy bit where he and the lighthouse keeper go back and forth trying to get a necessary part for the shelter\u2019s generator that really is like something that would happen to John Cleese on Fawlty Towers<\/a> if there were a very special supernatural storm episode of that show.<\/p>\n

The funny thing is that this isn\u2019t a super-funny episode of Widow\u2019s Bay, or a super scary one, or one that riffs on one or two very specific stories or subgenres. Sure, there are shades of Nope and The Lighthouse<\/a> here and there, and a twister straight out of The Wizard of Oz<\/a>, but there\u2019s no one central horror here \u2014 no sea hag<\/a>, no sunset cocktails<\/a> death ritual, no machete-wielding Boogeyman<\/a>. Other than Chris Fleming\u2019s untimely demise and the genuinely chilling cold open, this episode feels mostly like set-up for the finale. It\u2019s funny in places and creepy in others, but in both the horror and comedy categories, I\u2019m hoping it\u2019s just the calm before the storm.<\/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, Disney+, 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":"And what rough voice, her hour come round at last, chain-smokes towards Widow\u2019s Bay to be born? That\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[171021,88,96361,302081,270293,270294,56601,98402,92],"class_list":["post-697567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-dale-dickey","tag-entertainment","tag-jeff-hiller","tag-k-callan","tag-kate-oflynn","tag-katie-dippold","tag-matthew-rhys","tag-stephen-root","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697567","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=697567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}