Widow’s Bay discussion club

27 May, 2026

spoilers abound!

So this was a lot.

episode 6, “Our History”

By episode 5’s end, it is obliquely suggested that, when our own hopes and fears are in charge of us, we might constantly be making pacts or covenants, however inadvertently, with something unseen—negotiating a treaty with not a benevolent god, but with a lesser, sicker, ravenous one¹.

And sure enough, episode 6 expands on the danger the town mayor might’ve found himself in. Extreme spoilers follow. (If the following two paragraphs are properly invisible on your screen, you’ll have to highlight the text to read.)

On his way to being buried alive, the town’s founder, Richard Warren, offers a panicked, plot-dense confession to church parishioners. Not only the town's patriarch—a reluctant prison warden of a sort—Warren is keeping the island’s hunger at bay by selflessly feeding it with his own blood. To his addled mind, he is the necessary protector of the people. Sorry, he is “Lord Island Protector.” That’s an interesting combination of words, one that you could semantically parse a few ways.

Anyway! This episode made me ill. This is an inverted family pyramid scheme with just one guy getting devoured at the bottom, rather than the typical trickle-up pyramid we might imagine, where wealth consolidates at the top for the benefit of only a few. Either way the resources flow, it’s still parasitic, rather than symbiotic. And when just one guy is getting fed off (literally bled out!), there’s often another person one more rung down the ladder: the supportive, long-suffering spouse. Because everyone’s gotta feed off of someone in this MLM hell, right? Can’t make a meal on love.

This horrific image—of one man’s sacrifice to pay off the karmic or spiritual debt of many—touches on the popular historical debate over whether early Christianity was a cannibalistic death cult, as the Romans fearfully characterized it, what with the group’s seeming fixation on martyrdom, on Christ's sacrifice as the ultimate ‘lamb’, on the exhortation to “eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood” (the actual first Thanksgiving, perhaps). Some theologians understandably get real hopped up when you mention this. I don’t have much to say about any of it except that I have a visceral aversion to pyramid-shaped religious sects. I do like a potluck, though.

This episode is relentless—Ti West maybe not my first-draft pick to direct this bleak, Netflix Fear Street-coded episode, although I totally get it—and yet Betty Gilpin does her damndest, choosing her moments to do her whole thing. (“Ha,” I said aloud appreciatively, unable to muster a real haw-haw.) The episode is not chuckle-filled, despite being blessed with this cast, who are capable of walking a wire between pathos, grimdark, and slapstick, yet seemingly were never allowed to. It’s really the first time I’ve been this disappointed.

Perhaps this is why Apple made the unusual choice to release two episodes simultaneously. This episode left me, well, starved. Oh my god! What if I’m the island², and nothing is ever good enough for me!

episode 7, “Seasickness”

Starving. As the next episode opened, I realized I am starved, and I wrote and deleted an embarrassing note about starving—prompted by the sight of an adult human in a t-shirt that fits. Well, I’m a simple creature. And that’s really the fundamental theme of the first 13ish minutes: desperation, starvation.

Surely everyone is starved for something. I’m constantly on the ropes trying to forgive myself for my baser instincts of stay alive! while struggling to avoid the pitfalls of fear, pain, scarcity, lack. And I mean, that’s what is being tested right now: how much stress you can take, your window of distress tolerance, your endurance. I feel very low today.

Anyway, the man with whom Mayor Tom now speaks is noticeably bloodless and a bit desiccated—but still alive though!!!! God, you guys, sometimes it’s tough to decide which character I relate most to.

The desiccated man speaks: It knows frightened men will do desperate things.

Welp, that’s everything in a nutshell, right? Not just Widow’s Bay, but everything³.

Desperation makes us behave outside of our own highest selves, and fear makes us erratic. I feel like I’ve tackled most of my fears by now—many of them I’d never had the chance to outgrow, like ghosts, or heights, or pitch-black darkness—but I’m still afraid of math, paperwork, email, confrontation, failure, and the consequences of my own actions.

rib tips

• carry a big stick: Late in the game, once Betty Gilpin is finally wielding a very, very big stick, you’re like, “Ah! I recognize her now. I was confused by the bonnet before.”
• would you have listened to me if I looked like this? I already mentioned it to my friend Chuck, but Matthew Rhys really, really reminds me of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent, my favorite jittery bureaucrat-out-of-water. Perhaps Rhys makes the exact same faces as a Graham Annable character which, for a human being, ought to be impossible.
• relational trauma: “Are you mad at something I said?” Help.
• evil’s ally: I pointed this out to Caro in between episodes 6 and 7, but the stalwart Wyck is the ideal vessel for evil, because he’s already telegraphed how much he wants to protect the townspeople, and he’s been clear on what he thinks ‘strength’ or ‘leadership’ means. From the beginning he has been evangelizing, in a way, these old folktales. In episode 7 his worst trait emerges: he resists any change, because he doesn’t actually believe change is possible.
• out at sea: Ah, I love anything that looks like Dredge. No land! Only boat!
• Richard Warren in the coffin, lmaooooo: Hamish Linklater is the funniest man in the world. I know he prefers the stage, but they should put him in video games.
• it was either him or me: Wyck’s story—about kicking his own best friend into the maw of a kraken—articulates a grief and a terror that I think we can all relate to.
• “and good luck to you all”: It isn’t that the sheriff disbelieves; rather, he’s opting out. I’m not sure the Matrix, or a living nightmare, is a thing you can just walk out of. But if it is, the sheriff is all set.
• safety first: It took a man falling overboard for me to finally notice Mayor Tom, that dork, has been the only person in a life vest this whole time, hahahahaha.

…and voice memos

“The analysis is not very deep,” Caro was lamenting, of the Widow’s Bay subreddit, “and that’s fine. But not everyone has Jenn Frank! And I have Jenn Frank. And I can have deep analysis with my friend, Jenn Frank. And so… that’s why I’m calling.” LOL.

• pitiable patriarchy: Caro was surprised by the pivot to Richard Warren as, not a ‘big bad’, but just kind of frenzied and neurotic and sad and, ultimately, Mayor Tom-like. “By this metric,” I exclaimed in a voice memo, “Richard Warren is thee perfect Jesus. This is a trap that any patriarch falls into, this sort of piteous position of being thee guy that everyone else is sort of feeding off of, right? This whole show is about toxic masculinity, and it goes all the way down into the tainted soil we all inhabit, which is… Protestant work ethic!” If you aren’t productive, if you aren’t perpetually suffering for a cause, you ain’t worth shit.
• distress tolerance: In the same breath I went on to talk about artificial scarcity, which has long been studied, since before we were born, by behavioral scientists: how people act under stress and duress, how crowds’ behavior can be modified and controlled. Through this lens, the island is yet another laboratory stress test.
• grand designs: Caro made the very real mistake of mentioning The Shining to me. I synopsized my writing on the topic: that the novel The Shining alludes to Bluebeard in multiple passages; that Jack Torrance is a classical rendition of Bluebeard in that he’s a tortured artist, an auteur (“the grandiosity, the grand designs of men!” I exclaimed); that the setting for every Stephen King novel is cursed, colonized land, “we are cursed because we’re the colonizers”; that people argue over whether it were deliberate on Kubrick’s part to allude to this setting in the film version; that the setting isn’t fictitious, it’s the setting of almost all American horror because it’s just where we live, so I’m perpetually mystified that people argue over this because at a certain point they are arguing about, not authorial intent, but reality.
• the fucking moon: I left a voice memo about psychological bifurcation—“we all have an unconscious that is pulling our strings and until we become aware of it, we live in its thrall”—along with some dilly-dallying about the subterranean mushroom kingdom which “is the origin of the poison,” and then a few words about the watery deep: “What is collective? What is subconscious? What is this deep well that we all draw from?” Then I started talking about the Moon card in Tarot, wherein the feral wolf and the domesticated, working dog are separated by the watery deep; reflections and their distortions; a simulation pierced by the ancient, primordial truth.
• better the devil you know: Caro observed that they typically prefer a “rational explanation” for horror—“the ghost of a serial killer,” they suggested. I was elated. This seems to come from the ‘80s slasher, I agreed—“What is scarier than a man?” I joked, of Black Christmas—and this idea that it’s the unsettled angry ghost of just some dude is “an explanation that satisfies,” I said. At least it did in the 1980s.
• generational: To that, I suggested a sort of architectural split between Ring and The Grudge. In the Grudge movies, the generational rage (the curse is the “grudge”) is handed down, spreading virally from person to person. But there is a specific, historical origin point, an actual inciting instance of a family annihilation, so the hauntings are always familial archetypes always wearing those same faces: the same grief-filled, groaning Mother, or the same neglected, attention-starved Child in a funny little bowl cut, and if you’re really unfortunate, the hostile, raging, wild-eyed Father. And then there’s the Family Cat, “who goes meow meow meow,” I said, “a harbinger of further evils to come.”
• the deep end: Compare to Ring, where it’s much clearer that this psychic mother and her daughter, who each has her own individualized grief and resentments, are both tapped into an ancient wellspring, something deep and dark and very powerful. Gore Verbinski’s U.S. adaptation—which is inferior in many ways but which deftly moves the action from an isolated Japanese seaside town to Washington State’s Puget Sound—also deploys a lot of horse-girl imagery. These women are harnessed by something very ancient, are bridled and ridden by it.
• memetics: Which brings me to this. My horror tastes, shaped by Ring and Alien and Junji Ito—all of which are informed by Lovecraft—veer toward the ancient and inexplicable. At this point I invoked Richard Dawkins, who is so committed to atheism that he’s had to resort to the semi-mystical concept of the meme. Ideas, stories, want to stay alive. They are viral. They might not be sentient or sapient, exactly, but they do have a certain biological imperative for self-reproduction. And we let them, so they are the cordyceps controlling our brains.
• the wild west: Caro thanked me for taking the horror conversation “outside of Western canon.” Funny thing about that, I said: Japanese horror is already strongly influenced by Western canon. Because of animism, yōkai and nature spirits were once considered neutral entities—“kind of like… just goin’ outside,” I said, of neutral forces’ capacity to absolutely kill you—and ‘demonization’ is a thoroughly Western invention, reordering and recategorizing the world and its experiences.
• rules of play: One thing forum-goers are wondering about is, Widow’s Bay is a fishing community. So what boundary, asked Caro, can the fishermen not pass? Is this line of demarcation denoted by the buoy?
• quarantine: “This is why I keep recommending the video game Dredge as a sort of companion piece,” I answered them. “In Dredge, there is a distinct boundary in the deep ocean that you, the fisherman, are not to violate. And this boundary is maintained by a Leviathan, a massive sea serpent who swallows you up the moment you pass this boundary. And I [philosophically] struggled with this for a long time because, on the subreddit, the consensus view is that the Leviathan is—since we tend to look at things in a binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, although it’s just a neutral fact of the environment, right—the Leviathan is a sort of guardian. And typically players think of the Leviathan as quote-unquote good because, once you have more information, you’re able to appreciate that the Leviathan is keeping the contagion IN!” You’re not cursed, I went on to say; the Leviathan is just enforcing the containment of disease. “And I think this is an important note when trying to adjust our allegiances,” I continued, “when it comes to Widow’s Bay, where it is a good thing that people cannot leave the island without doing something first, right? It is a good thing that they are trapped on the island! They are plague-carriers!” I snorted. “They are isolated for a reason! They cannot leave for a reason!”
• King defense: Caro’s fear is for Tom. We fucking love Tom. Caro is fearful that Tom will be forced into making the exact same choice as Richard Warren before him—the sort of anticipatory grief that is synonymous with dread. “This is where I will go to bat for Stephen King,” I said to them, “who is a great thinker but a very sloppy writer without an editor. His wrath for Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining comes down to this: If Jack Torrance does not cycle-break the generational curse by the end, what is the fucking point. And I agree with you that it would be disheartening and demoralizing, at this particular fascist moment, if there’s genuinely nothing Mayor Tom can do to break this horrific cycle. I believe that it’s just not that kind of show! I believe that it will hew more closely to Stephen King’s version of events—which is to say,” and I swallowed hard, “that whether Tom lives or dies, something, there is something he will be able to do to… maybe nuke the island from orbit? I don’t know! There must be something Tom can do so that he isn’t just repeating Warren’s actions. Because Warren… is not trustworthy. He’s unreliable. He’s a man between a rock and a hard place, but I think he has never fully investigated his options. And maybe this is the real difference between Tom Loftis and Richard Warren, is, Tom Loftis is a man who—neurotic, frantic—does like to investigate his options before proceeding! And I think that’s a really palpable difference between the two men. And it is why Tom Loftis is going to be a better community leader than Richard Warren ever was. Richard Warren deliberately tamped down information, sent his wife out of the room, and wouldn’t let her know anything! Tom Loftis’s redemption is going to be when he finally tells his son a little bit about what’s going on! I’m just say—it’s not that kind of show where the horror continues…! There’s got to be some sort of stand that he takes. And this is why I agree with you, I hope there are multiple seasons. Because maybe that stand isn’t automatically apparent, right? Like I’m sure it’s planned by the writers, but for encroaching dread to be effective, it has to be unclear what the avenue of fighting back is, for a time. Right?” Like, he’s the only guy who can do this.
• Caro’s response is perfect, but it feels weird to reproduce it wholesale here. Nevertheless, they comment on this idea of a corrupting force having its own biological imperative—pausing to absently note, while groaning, that there is already mold on a brand new loaf of bread, the microwave audibly humming in the background—wondering how long it will take the island folk to wake up, acknowledge their new reality, and gradually come to some sort of collective action.

Hopelessness, cosmic dread, is just a single scary stop on the way to the solution, is what I think I’m saying here. Lovecraft always sucked shit because he’s anti-anti-authority: because he got overwhelmed and called the whole thing pointless, saw the words “Abandon all hope” and ignored the fact that it’s just what one gate says.

Caro and I agree that we are desperate to hear a new story. We are both cautiously optimistic about the showrunner’s intentions, about Tom’s plight and his prospective arc. “We all need to deal with this together,” Caro says. Still talking about Widow’s Bay, obviously, and just that, only that.