Widow’s Bay 109 & 110: a chilling conclusion

24 Jun, 2026

One of the recent answers on Jeopardy! was Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. No one got it. Well, I did, but I wasn’t competing.

I barely remember reading this book in high school, except that I was deeply moved by it. I do remember the ending, because the main character, distraught, walks straight into the ocean, and now I’m always out here thinking about walking directly into the ocean, too. (What I didn’t understand as a teen—a poor understanding of geography on my part—was that the protagonist walks into the same ‘ocean’ at the end of my own childhood street block, the Gulf of Mexico. So as a teen I would’ve been flinging myself into the same sea from a slightly different vantage, from a slightly different arc of the shore’s curve.)

Anyway, I bring it up because this book’s ending is downright Lovecraftian. Its protagonist Edna, fully faced with the dread of her predicament—the snaking tendrils of Victorian societal expectations that keep her trapped where she is—gets it, understands everything perfectly well, and thusly marches herself into the Gulf of Mexico to drown. Which, by the way, is hard to do, unless you march far enough to get caught by an undertow or a riptide or a Portuguese Man-of-War, because there’s a lot of salt and otherwise you’d float away like a little human raft for a while.

Lovecraft’s protagonists, too, had a tendency to snap under the full cosmological weight of everything, and that sucks. That’s a weak mind and a weak will. That’s yielding to fascism.

This is obviously all to preface talking about Widow’s Bay episode 109 and, its season finale, episode 110.

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Everything you thought would happen, happened.

These recaps/analyses have become unreadably long, because the TV show ties up my entire bearblog very tidily. That’s nice. Oh, god, I’m so tired.

I once told Kris Straub I had an idea for a ‘unified theory of horror’ and boy was I wrong; Kate Dippold did.

episode 109: scapegoat

The episode opens with a flashback to Richard Warren’s children in a boat, dying, blood pouring directly out of their faces. It’s grisly rather than gory, but I writhed in my seat as I imagined the pressure in their heads building up, their blood vessels exploding and/or their brains turning inside-out. I used to really hate eye injuries and jaw injuries, but I’ve gone all-in on just hating this instead. Thanks!

Little Frances Warren has fallen out of the boat just shy of the place-where-you-die threshold. The child is also wearing the amber-colored brooch (or maybe she was gripping her doll and the doll was wearing it?), which some fans have speculated might grant its wearer some degree of protection from the island’s horrors.

My next note for this episode is “JFC Tom Loftis’s wardrobe has deteriorated to a hooded sweatshirt. That’s just one step away from gray sweatpants.”

I’ve often remarked that the most sinister type of man is the type who loves a messy, messy woman; what it says about me, then, that I like seeing a properly-dressed person descend into a sloppy, rumpled wardrobe, I do not know. And when a prescription contacts-wearer has to put on their eyeglasses—maybe slightly mussed or tousled hair, too.

What if I just feel like everyone deserves a cute Meg Ryan moment, including Matthew Rhys? But Jenn, Widow’s Bay is a horror show. Well, You’ve Got Mail is also a horror show. The point is, people are very endearing when they’re vulnerable and unguarded, and you probably shouldn’t trust anyone else who feels that way. Still, if you come toward me in your coziest jim-jams, my toes are gonna get all wiggly and I’m gonna pop popcorn and put on my fluffiest socks in kind. (The TikTok youths call it “bedrot”; for over a decade I’ve called it “rafting,” when you bring every tablet and handheld onto the couch, or into bed, because you won’t be leaving your cozy nest for hours. You’re going on a long adventure! You need your phone and snacks!)

The point is, Tom is dressed down, which is supposed to signal that he’s coming unglued. Patricia has discovered what frame-by-frame fanatics noticed a while ago: that Frances Warren is the woman in the painting, her missing finger always missing in plain sight. Tom, utterly defeated, finally calls for the sounding of the siren. Ooh, we are in Lovecraftian waters now.

Wyck convinces Sheriff Bechir Clemmons to not attempt to sail away from the island in gale-force winds with his pregnant wife onboard. I appreciated this, and I made a note of it: because it’s not even that bad! It’s not even that bad to be born on the island! Venturing into a storm would mean certain doom; being born on the island is plain bad luck, but it’s literally not the worst thing ever. You can make a little life there! I say this as someone who is currently stranded in life, who grew up in a small town¹ (and left, of course, believing leaving was the only way to ‘reach my potential’).

Here I made a bizarre note to myself about the power grid constantly going down in Hawaii. I think I was trying to say something about community and infrastructure versus relative isolationism but in paradise. Who is to say which is better²! I don’t know!

Then there was Shaman Todd’s spectacularly funny death (?) scene. You just know comedian Chris Fleming requested to be killed off (?) in a bombastically stupid way. Apple really spent some money on this, too! In short, Mayor Tom fails to safely and efficiently escort Shaman Todd into the basement storm shelter. “I was actually thinking, as people piled into the storm shelter,” I wrote in a note to myself, “how cozy I always found tornado/hurricane days at elementary school³. Well, so much for that.” As schoolchildren we never saw Chris Fleming get sucked up into a cyclone or waterspout. That might’ve had an effect on my nostalgia.

Meanwhile, Rosemary has done it: the hobbyist genealogist has determined who the final descendant of Richard Warren is. (The logic here is that killing the descendant will end the curse, per Richard’s claims.) Mayor Tom and Co. file into an empty conference room to review Rosemary’s work.

Before Rosemary can launch into her presentation, Patricia is already protesting. “Patricia is 100% right,” I wrote in my notes,

no one should be entertaining even listening to who the ‘last descendant’ is. Patricia knows what it’s like to be an outsider, scapegoated, mobbed, pursued. She knows exactly where this line of inquiry leads. That said, it’s nice to see Dale Dickey get to do anything in this show⁴ (well, besides “qualms”).

Rosemary talks the group through the Warren family tree. Finally she relays the horrible conclusion: Ruth, a dish in her day, never married, never had children and, therefore, is the final living descendant of Richard Warren. (The inordinate emphasis on Ruth’s dishiness maybe telegraphs the real truth a little too well.) Rosemary is sent out of the room for the next part.

Well, Ruth clearly has to be killed.

Patricia continues to be horrified. In the scene that ensues, she and Wyck function as the angel and devil on Tom’s shoulders.

Wyck makes abundantly apparent his own willingness to do whatever must be done, even if it means shooting a puppy, you know? Which is insane. It’s this shit. I’m so over this shit. Wyck has already criticized Loftis’s leadership skills—emasculating him, really, because Wyck is the friendly, well-intentioned mask of toxic masculinity—but this is the same Wyck who kicked his best friend into the mouth of a kraken when he genuinely had the option of, I don’t know, not doing that. He wouldn’t know an actual sacrificial act if it reached out a tentacle and grabbed him by the dick. Just pure human selfishness. There’s no collectivism, no accountability, just obfuscated self-preservation and endless energy for debate—not even skilled debate, just the sheer endurance for filibustering, for monopolizing the floor, sucking the air out of the room, refusing to allow a single voice of dissent. What’s good for the Wyck is good for the gander. You feel me? I love Stephen Root, and I love Wyck, but I’d never put this man in charge of decision-making. He could be in charge of Kathy maybe.

Patricia: “Oh, my God. It’s barbaric. Do you hear him? You’re actually considering this? What would that make you? What’s that say about us? About this place?” Patricia is right, and Wyck should be tased. Patricia should tase Wyck.

Wyck reasons that another justifiable reason to slay Ruth is because she “never had kids.” Patricia, single and childless, reacts appropriately: “Thank God I’m not a descendant or I guess my throat would already be slit⁵!” (Tom: “It’s not about you!”)

At this point, I saw red⁶. “When dudes are going insane in times of crisis,” I typed to myself in a note, “they take it out on grounded, stable voices that provide much-needed friction like ‘can we pump the brakes here.’ Men will literally team up against” such a voice. Any display of empathy, or pointing to any sort of moral compass, results in a complete dogpile, a silencing. In short, dudes go feral in a crisis. Not all men, etc.

This episode strikes on something important about the psychology of the collective: scapegoating is the sacrifice of one individual in favor of community ‘health’. But, just like the stay of the Widow’s Bay curse itself, scapegoating never ‘lasts’. It's only a temporary emotional reprieve from interpersonal stress⁷, a Band-Aid, duct tape, a quick fix.

Later I descended on my friend Rachel. “It would be such a betrayal to the audience if Tom actually tries anything malevolent,” I said to her breathlessly from the doorway, “but if he does try it, I do think Patricia is obviously a descendant of a murdered witch, and she’d be well within her rights to burn down the whole town. If Patricia spends season 2 on her villain arc like, ‘I’m sorry, Tom, but I have to destroy you now,’ that would be so justified and so fair.”

episode 110: I’ll burn it down myself

I’d ordered a pizza and turned all my lights low and orange. In total I ate four slices of thin-crust pizza—one slice too many—and, walking the dog afterward, it suddenly occurred to me that this was why they say to not go swimming right after eating. I was on the verge of puking.

Perhaps the pizza had influenced my feelings about the season finale. Every fresh revelation had exhausted me. “It’s enough slices,” I exclaimed to Caro. In any case, I was nauseated during the episode, and I was still nauseated the next day and basically all week long.

The episode opens with Mayor Tom heading straight to Ruth’s house and letting himself in. Internet fans were all alight and atingle at what he might find there: a woman communing with the island’s darkness directly, as Richard Warren creepily did? A monster, mayhap??

Instead, Tom finds and apprehends an elderly woman who is suspiciously spry, suspiciously unbothered, but also, a woman who is grateful for every day she gets to spend alive, who expresses her gratitude by living the ever-loving shit out of it: the very picture of joie de vivre.

Meanwhile, back at the storm shelter, Sheriff Clemmons tries to get comfy in a private room while the hometown doctor, on his feet nearby, examines the sheriff’s wife Chelle. (I realize Chelle is probably a nickname, short for something like Rochelle, but I can only think of the protagonist from Portal and Portal 2, running the haunted house’s matriarchal gauntlet. It will be interesting if this Chelle eventually gets up on her feet to do more.)

As Clemmons tries to get himself settled, his eyes are drawn to the emergency step-by-step posters on the wall. Up until now sight gags have been quick and unnerving—Tom scanning the uncanny objects in a room, mirror images that go unnoticed by Patricia, et al—but this time, the paranoid burn is long and slow. Also, the doctor is humming the theme to Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera under his breath. (“Humming Phantom to a pregnant lady goes nuts,” I wrote in a private note to myself.)

Now Tom is in Ruth’s kitchen; of course I paused in order to read the calendar on Ruth’s fridge along with Tom. In gorgeous cursive: “Goat yoga.” “Aqua aerobics.” “Lunch with Candice noon.” “Lunch w/ Barbra 1:00pm⁸.” There’s also, iirc, a gardening/book club.

And “Dead head the daisies”: I just learned this gardening term from a one-question-a-day Jeopardy calendar! To deadhead is to cull the dead blossoms from flowers, to keep all the other blossoms healthy and nourished and resourced⁹, or at least, pretty. Very insidious. (I typed this entire note-to-self before the storm shelter’s big secret was revealed, obviously.)

I also wrote this note-to-self: the tiny handwriting on her calendar does call into question Ruth’s seeming inability to read her own handwriting while at the office. Now that the episode has aired, I know some people are wondering if Richard Warren’s death somehow contributed to Ruth’s overall vivacity, including improved eyesight. Maybe?? Is she unkillable?? Or maybe Ruth is just skilled at living her own life and less skilled at working in an office. Like, the majority of her energy seems to be poured into her friends and the overlapping communities she tends to. (We empower whatever we give our attention to and, if we choose well, they empower us back.)

I don’t think Richard’s blood-and-semen everlasting-life hell-on-earth vampire pact can jump hosts—but it is funny that a self-fulfilled, energetic old lady makes us all go “That’s suspicious! Maybe she’s a witch! Maybe she’s already dead!” Fuck us all.

Here’s my next note-to-self: “Tom better not touch a hair on the head of that sweet little lady, not even if she tries to murder him or eat his face.” You have legs, Tom. You can leave that nice lady alone, even if it does turn out she’s supernaturally energetic.

Next I made a note about that bad teen PJ, who is onscreen coaxing Tom’s son Evan and Evan’s Mainland Hottie away from the safety of the group, tempting the gang with a fat blunt in need of blazing. Mainland Hottie enthusiastically agrees, and she leads the boys down into the basement herself¹⁰.

I didn’t take any notes on this plot development, but resource scarcity¹¹ is threatening to make the townspeople turn on one another¹². The tension in the storm shelter is reaching a frantic pitch; Dale scurries away to scavenge for any not-moldering supplies.

Dale finds his way into what he initially supposes must be a supply closet. “NOT the big red button lmaoooooo,” I wrote in a note-to-self. This is all feeling very Lost, even though I only watched the first season. (I also got mugged at gunpoint during the series finale. I am not explaining this, but that experience has starved me of any desire to ever sit down and watch the show.)

This is when Dale finds the two reels, one labeled “FOR THEM” and the other labeled “FOR YOU.” (“Wuh-oh, reel-to-reel plot,” I wrote to myself. “AHA OH NO LOL.”)

What is on each reel is exactly what you’d assumed would be on each reel. Dale learns that the tolls of the church bell dictate how many lives are required to quell the horrors. (This is obviously what the local priest had also learned, and he attempted to destroy this information before choosing death.)

Instead of experiencing what I’ve referred to as “the horror of discovery” (Alien and Ringu narratively parallel each other beat-for-beat), this feels more like “oh how I hate being right.” It’s the moment that anticipatory dread shifts into sad regular dread: the kind of shit that reinforces OCD and catastrophic magical thinking. Therefore I had a lot of trouble laughing¹³. “Hahhh,” I might’ve said aloud appreciatively, but no real knee-slappers here.

Back at Ruth’s, Ruth mentions she worked for a previous mayor, “Howard the Coward.” If we connect the dots, here, we realize that the mayor’s job has always been to feed the island, that Howard refused to continue the ritual, and that his refusal to placate the ravenous machine manifested the Clown Killer. Another refusal, presumably, led to the island being terrorized by the Boogeyman in the very early 2000s.

Here are the rest of my notes, unedited:

I paused on the shot of Ruth’s “Minute Minder”-brand timer to check whether the remaining runtime (34:40) lined up with the timer, but the timer has about 21 minutes on it left. (Soothing lavender & chamomile requires 27 minutes to steep, as you’ll recall.)

Ruth’s cross-stitch quote is Tennessee Williams.

Tom appeals to Ruth’s sense of collective responsibility by posing the Trolley Problem to her: trying to get her to justify, with her own mouth, his own plot to sacrifice her. This is very annoying. Why does the burden of collective responsibility always seem to fall to one person, rather than, oho, I dunno, the collective? Fuck off with that shit.

Ruth won’t even entertain the Trolley Problem, obviously. She’d never interfere with a runaway train, she insists. As soon as you interfere, you’ve made a choice, and it’s not your choice to make¹⁴.

Life is a house of horrors, she exclaims to Tom. The fact that this man still tries to poison her…! I’m so done with this guy.

Sure, it’s likely that mixing her medications was never really going to kill Ruth—it seems like one pill might only exaggerate the effects of the other, inducing stupor and some wooziness, effectively Ambien combined with a glass of wine, which some people might call a fun night in—and sure, this pill-mixing is important to the plot, and sure, Ruth is healthy as a horse.

But people are justifying insane things to themselves lately, and I’m not loving the narrative parallels. Financial desperation—artificial resource scarcity—is making people sick. Alpine divorce is stealing the limelight from a poisoning trend¹⁵ that is well beyond worrisome now.

Anyway. To conceal his little crime, Tom pockets the brooch that was handed down from Frances Warren/Fisher to Ruth Whatshernuggets (Livingstone, maybe?). It’s important for plot, but I felt like puking. The last of my notes:

Of course Tom would only open up to someone if he thought they were dying. I know the type. (Also, although he obviously wasn’t going to be successful in his ruse, I feel like the character Tom Loftis is pretty damned now. I guess they need to “investigate every option” to the audience’s satisfaction, but I’m not into it.)

Aaaand that’s where my notes stop, because I just could not with the rest of this episode. Horf.

Ruth’s breathing slows and her head nods, so Tom takes this opportunity to confess his reasons—for killing her—to what he truly believes to be a dying person. This is the most I’ve ever liked Tom, actually, as he admits he’s selfishly endangered every tourist on the island in order to give his son a better life, and yeah, probably to improve Tom’s own dating prospects, too. This rare glimpse of honesty¹⁶ from Tom was refreshing. Too bad it came at Ruth’s expense.

Back at the shelter, a now thoroughly paranoid Sheriff Clemmons has demanded that Patricia tell him everything. It’s a lot, obviously. Later we see Clemmons assuring his wife he’ll be right back, he just needs to run a quick storm errand.

A heavily medicated Ruth now reveals all, while noting that it’s weird she’s chosen only just now to just blab the truth, looooool. The full gravity of Tom’s burden, the deal he might be forced to cut with the island, and the realization that he’s made a big mistake by attempting to murder his only real connection to his dead wife (who is his son’s only other living relative)…! Yeah. I mean, I get it. Tom is having some big emotions now, and my compassion is really running on empty. Part of the issue, perhaps, is that we’ve understood the stakes for a while, while thickheaded Tom has not.

And I get it, we’re supposed to continue rooting for this idiot, even though he’s the last person to have a clear understanding of this machine we’re all, all of us, trapped in, and everything hinges on his next choice, this doofus with all the info and all the agency, who obviously is not really being asked to sacrifice his Only Son, because any god who would demand that is a mad god, an insatiable provincial god who is power-tripping.

Just as Tom Loftis has reckoned with the full weight of these 9.75 episodes, has resolved to save Ruth’s life—which is quite literally the least, the least he can do—Clemmons bursts in and shoots the woman. Obviously¹⁷. (“You always lie!” Clemmons shouts, turning the gun on Loftis now. It’s a valid criticism, actually, one previously articulated by Loftis’s son Evan.)

Back at the storm shelter, Dale bursts into the holding room, now burdened with the horror of reel-to-reel knowledge. Frantic, Dale finally screams, “This place is a death trap! Run!” It’s nice to see the card deck’s command to “run” finally coming full circle.

Obviously this is very much like yelling fire in a crowded theater, and the people of Widow’s Bay panic immediately.

Meanwhile, the janitor has found the missing kids. He commands them to return upstairs. PJ, that son of a bitch, shuts the janitor into the room—the room with the bloodletting chair and the double-doors to some sort of vault—and the teens make a break for it. Evan pauses to try to let the janitor out, but the room’s doors have sealed themselves shut; this is how Evan becomes the sole witness to the island’s first official nom-nom death.

Again: it’s enough slices. I can appreciate it was never a sure thing Widow’s Bay would get a second season. To be honest, I thought Apple TV+ was just fucking around, stringing us along. Nope, now it’s apparent that the writers really weren’t sure they’d ever get another shot at this, and they unloaded their barrels.

Anyway! The storm promptly dissipates, ending a tense standoff between Loftis and Clemmons, who are left wondering what the hell just happened. Blessedly, Ruth is twitching, but her fate is unclear. In the storm shelter, everyone recovers their senses and wits (unable to leave the building, the collective impulse was to take cover and/or to stop, drop, and roll).

The episode concludes at dawn, with Mayor Tom flinging the brooch into the bay: a stupid choice, since he might need to dredge it up later, or maybe it’ll just float back to shore again, but anyway, it’s a choice I can sort of appreciate, because I’ve flung all sorts of weird shit into the dumpster, which is kind of like an ocean. Tom’s act of self-absolution might also imply that Ruth passed away, which I’m not loving. (Ruth’s actor is 90 years old, so the writers might be preparing all sorts of contingency plans. I’m not trying to be glib. In fact, I wonder if TV deadens your nerves to this kind of morbid logic. Or, you know, people have to compartmentalize. It’s… fine.)

The bell begins tolling. Eight! Eight dongs¹⁸. Now Tom is hopping into his car and sharing a knowing smile with his son. I guess he’s made a choice, and… with the final shot of their car rolling down the road, and the music, I was reminded of the dread-inducing conclusion of Ring¹⁹. Nothing so brutal, so dangerous to others, as a parent’s love for their son, right?

the aftermath

Caro caught up and watched the episode while I walked the dog. For a while Caro live-messaged me with their reactions to various plot points. At some point, though, their messages abruptly fell off.

Their next update was hilarious. They’d started accidentally messaging their work chat, thinking they were still in the same messaging window with me, spoiling the shit out of the season finale for their coworkers—which made us both laugh and laugh later.

Still, I was… not in a good place. Physically I felt seasick. Mentally, not super, either. “I don’t actually know how I feel about it actually—they just kind of did one of everything,” I messaged my friend.

I continued downthread. “I kept saying ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of show’ but I guess it IS that kind of show, maybe deeply cynical? Like ‘your peace comes at a great cost’ and ‘this is how it feels to know how the sausage is made’ and I just, icky icky icky, I am physiologically rejecting its whole premise now,” I was messaging them.

I was careful to note that I was feeling the icky weight of thin-crust Pizza Hut pizza, so maybe it was that. Maybe I was physically bogged down by meats and cheeses. But I already know how the sausage is made, I reckoned with it throughout my 20s—granted, without once looking inside of myself, seeing every problem as purely external, just like a man would do—and the show’s decision to mine this further, the ‘stakes’ and the ‘options’, seems like a total failure of imagination. Is this making sense? If this is how the sausage is made, just stop eating sausages.

“I think the show wants us to feel deeply cynical at first,” Caro warned, “but I think Ruth’s whole speech is life life can be horrifying and we have to admit that, versus pretend the horror isn’t there.” Caro returned to Ruth’s points a lot. Obviously I take Ruth’s stance—so what does it mean that they likely killed her?

Caro continued: “I don’t think it’s saying your peace comes at great cost—I think it is saying peace might not be possible for everyone and actually admitting that is important. ‘It can’t be Martha’s Vineyard, Tom.’”

“I mean I’m all in on Ruth’s thing,” I replied, “real life is a house of horrors, but I just think that’s too pat and that isn’t all there is.”

In retrospect, Jen Chaney at Vulture probably says it way better:

At the same time, that [Tennessee Williams] quote and Ruth’s attitude also implies that nothing can be done to extinguish the fire in the perpetually burning building. […] “There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line,” Ruth continues. “Even if there was, it would just be taken away from you because that's just life, in all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just have to accept it.” If I know Mayor Tom Loftis—and after ten episodes, I think I do—he does not, cannot, and will not subscribe to that point of view.

Yeah, that’s probably how I feel. I love radical acceptance, and I’m all for accepting what you can’t change²⁰. But Ruth’s monologuing brushes up against philosophical absurdism, maybe a swerve toward life-affirming, loving nihilism. My life path whatever chart thingie says that I’m doomed to feel this way in my life’s final quarter, actually, but let’s not drag my dread of clocks and timers into this.

Now I was admitting to Caro that I felt like throwing up: going on a long, brisk walk too soon after eating pizza, hork. It was a hot, hot day—“too hot to think,” I suggested. I was also a little swollen and achy—bad hips, bad knees on the walk, and now my fingers were hurting—and my physical discomfort, I suggested, “is kind of getting mixed into how I felt about the episode???

“I do think it was too many slices,” I continued, “with Dale watching the For Them/For You videos, and the Lord of the Flies downstairs, and what the subterranean labyrinth is actually for, and Ruth getting murdered twice, I kept thinking ‘oh they’re really doing this,’ and I thought it so many times… it’s maybe too many slices. It’s enough slices.”

In a voice memo, I wondered aloud what each of the main characters was left knowing, or believing—which piece of the puzzle each character had, which part of the elephant they’re left groping—and then I began to spiral.

“Presumably Tom is all-in on feeding the island now,” I said, “and that means that Wyck’s way has won, which, again, I’m so uncomfortable with,” I said. “Because Wyck has always championed simply giving the island what it wants. And…! See this is why I find it very… the ending is very scuzzy to me. Obviously it just buys them time”—to negotiate with terrorists²¹, I mean—“and it’s untenable in the scheme of things. Even though it’s how the island has always operated. I just—oh!!! I find it…! I find it a very scuzzy, cynical ending²², that’s all. Uh. This spiraled. This wasn’t supposed to spiral like this. Sorry.”

Caro pushed back on this. The ending wasn’t scuzzy—or maybe it was, they conceded, but that’s the horror, “the horror of Man. The horror of colonialism, which I hope we get into next season.”

With the clarity of hindsight, I was probably grappling with an unacknowledged betrayal wound, having pinned too many of my hopes onto a fictional dad I do not know personally. And wasn’t this fictional character also caught in a sort of structural double-bind where, no matter his next move on his info-gathering quest, I was not gonna like it. Well fuck me as per usual.

“It’s about integrity, right?” I sighed to Caro—taking a side trip to talk about the 1960s and the ‘stress tests’ certain institutes studied, seeing how much psychological duress people can endure before they snap, and whether these reactions can be controlled, which is perhaps the foundation of modern behavioral science—“and you’re right, season 2 is where you can really investigate the Heart of Darkness,” I continued chirpily. “But also, the Heart of Darkness, maybe, sometimes, sometimes, isn’t that interesting to me—isn’t as interesting to me. Because I know what people are capable of. I don’t like knowing. I just, I’m already cynical enough, and at this moment in time I want my optimism stoked a little bit. I don’t need my opinion of my fellow human to deteriorate any more than it already has.”

My pal Cara skeeted about the finale the next day, and then messaged me with the link to her skeet. Hmm. Maybe my friends could tell I didn’t feel great since the finale had come and gone without me so much as commenting on it. Anyway, Cara was holding out hope:

My non-spoiler theory about Widow's Bay is that because Tom is surrounded by a community that he cares about and talks openly to, and earns some loyalty from, that he will succeed in breaking historic cycles. Which, incidentally, etc

Maybe! Or maybe we really do live in Hell²³! And, since Hell is where we are, maybe we insist on casting other people in our lives in horrific double-binds, forcing them into cycles of bleeding out slowly, dying slowly, a slow sacrifice, all to teach us horrific lessons about ourselves²⁴. Sometimes our loved ones might simply toss their hands up in grief, saying “this is clearly a hamster wheel, I can’t break your cycle for you, and I refuse to be your lesson or your consequences,” and we force them to walk away from us, just so we can go, “aha! I knew it! I always knew you’d fail me!” and check our phone contacts and try it out again on someone else.

The point is, Cara’s skeet may have been intended to make me (and others?) feel better, but it’s hard to feel optimistic these days. I need a glimmer.

a new dawn

Anyway. Before the finale I’d already made a note to spend Wednesday catching up with everyone I’d failed to keep up with since the end of May, but I fell asleep on Wednesday. On Thursday Caro sent me a link to a Reddit thread spawned by Stephen King’s shit-stirring tweet. I admitted I’d crashed out and fallen asleep.

An unexpected email from an old boyfriend prompted me, on Friday, to finally look at my inbox. I replied to him, to another man, to him again. I shuffled the Pocket Archetypes deck for a minute; the cards Anima Mundi and The Village spilled out. I contemplated this, since they’re both about interconnectedness, with The Village functioning as a smaller, often imperfect, sometimes-awful version of the bigger thing.

I put the deck away again and I reopened my email. For over two weeks I’d failed to listen to an acquaintance’s rough draft of a song, “Pizza Angel.”

Years ago, when this acquaintance had been in the financial lurch, I’d ordered a pizza to their door. No strings attached, obviously. “Pay it forward when you can,” I encouraged them. They’d teasingly referred to me as their Pizza Angel ever since. (In late 2024, when I was physically stranded and my Internet wasn’t working, I’d committed a desperate act: I’d asked this acquaintance to please be my pizza angel.)

Now they’d written a song, and they’d sent me the lyrics. I listened to it. My eyes welled up. I’d spent weeks, maybe months, maybe years, trying to understand where my own life had gone wrong²⁵. Now I was listening to a song about a sort of pizza chain letter—“you don’t have to earn it, you don’t have to justify / every reason you’ve been struggling”—and how far a chain of merciful acts had managed to travel over the past 14 years.

The next day I printed out the lyrics, and I walked out to the living room with a pair of headphones. I asked my best friend if she remembered sending me pizzas when I was really struggling to feed myself. (Ironically, my writing career had been at its peak.) She didn’t, of course. Of course she doesn’t even remember doing this for me. I laughed.

“Well, after that, I did the same for a relative stranger,” I explained, “and I want you to hear just how far a generous act can travel.” I handed her the headphones and the printout.

Maybe we're all just carrying
Pieces of each other's weight
Trading tiny acts of mercy
Across time zones and across states

“I like it!” she said. “I mean I actually like it. I actually really like this song,” she said, amazed.

“An infinite chain reaction,” I whispered to her.

twenty-five damn footnotes