Once again, one of the greatest assets of Widow's Bay is its production design. In a storm shelter under town hall, there are posters on the wall of the infirmary that give guidance on treating various kinds of bites - snake bits, dog bites, and human bites. There's also a poster for "How to... subdue someone," and yes, the ellipsis is part of it.
Widow's Bay is a horror-comedy, but it does not skimp on the first part of that, with a plot that you could actually use for a more straightforward horror series. It's just these touches, and the character notes, which lend it a bit of silliness and fun.
In particular, the degree to which the culture of the island has normalized the weird is reminiscent of Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast that I was a fanatical listener to in the mid 2010s.
As we come into the finale, a terrible storm has struck the island, threatening to wipe away everything. All the townsfolk and tourists are crowded into this cramped shelter, and things are looking bad: much of the rations set aside are moldy, and the power is going in and out. And our main trio has one option to end the horror, but at a terrible cost.
Which we'll talk about behind a spoiler cut.
Tom brings up the Trolley Problem to Ruth, the elderly secretary who works at town hall. He does so hoping that if she agrees that it's the right thing to do to pull the lever and condemn the one person for the sake of the many, that this will be unwitting permission for him to kill her. She is, after all, the last living descendent of Richard Warren, the colonial-era master of the town who made a dark deal with the evil presence that lurks below it after he was able to commune with it by eating strange mushrooms.
Warren's pact with the entity gave the island food to eat and enough prosperity to survive as a community, but at the cost of human sacrifices to sate the being's hunger. With all of his children seemingly dead as they fled the island - a consequence that seems to befall any born there who attempt to do so (though put a pin in that) - but his own body imperishable even after spending centuries buried, when Wyck and Tom sail Richard out beyond the range of the island (initially at his behest, and then against his violent defiance - turns out that survival instincts kick in pretty hard even if you're four hundred years old) Richard instantly is reduced to dusty bones, but the curse doesn't end, because one of his children did survive, falling out of the boat before she could cross the deadly threshold.
And it turns out that Ruth is the one Warren descendent still alive. If she dies, so the logic goes, the curse will end and the island will be free, and most importantly for Tom, he can take his Widow's Bay native son off the island.
The finale concerns itself largely with the agony of Tom, reluctant murderer, holding the lever that switches the track but struggling to actually pull it.
Actually, he does try to kill her - seeing a warning in her prescriptions not to mix certain meds, he grinds the pulls together and puts them in her chamomile and lavender tea. But it seems that the side effect of this mixture is actually just drowsiness - she drifts off, but only for a few minutes. When she wakes up, Ruth gives a confession: she had a child with a married man. And, to Tom's utter horror, she explains that that daughter was Lauren, his wife, making his son Evan the other remaining descendent of Richard Warren.
He was never going to escape the island: his life maintains the pact that keeps him there. And now, the Trolley Problem is cast into a sharper relief: would you sacrifice someone you love for the lives of many strangers? The answer for Tom is, obviously, no. Hell, I think that it was never about weighing the needs of one versus the many, but weighing this old lady's life against his teenage son's. But if the whole point of ending the curse, for Tom at least, was to give his son the freedom to leave this horror show, now there's no reason for him to kill Ruth.
By the end of the episode, Ruth is still alive, though she's wounded when police chief Bechir comes in and shoots her. He's on a time crunch: his baby is arriving soon, and he desperately wants to make sure that the curse doesn't trap them there. Tom keeps him from finishing the job by telling him that there's another Warren descendent, but that he doesn't know who they are.
And here, I think, we get some of the potential dramatic tension for the next season: Tom has slowly been convinced over the course of the season that he lives in a world with dark, supernatural elements, and that extreme measures might be required to deal with them. He goes from an antagonistic relationship with Wyck to an alliance, and Bechir now initiated into this supernatural world.
But the knowledge that he has now, that his son would be the key to ending this curse, now puts him on the opposite side of things. Bechir didn't struggle to shoot Ruth, even if he only winged her. Wyck, we can probably guess, wouldn't hesitate to kill Evan if he knew.
The horrors don't stop there.
The storm abruptly ends, and the reason is known only to Evan and his friends, because as they explore the tunnels below the shelter, they find the room in which the sacrifices are made to the dark entity. Chased out by an older authority figure (I couldn't remember if he was a cop or something,) the door gets closed and seems to magically lock, while Evan's friends run away and he desperately tries to get the door open. All we hear are screams as the guy trapped inside is seemingly devoured by the dark entity.
A sacrifice, accidentally or not, has been made.
But as Tom tosses a brooch linking his wife to Ruth into the ocean, we hear the church bell sound eight times - a call for eight sacrifices.
It's interesting to me that Ruth, frustrating Tom's efforts to quiet his own guilt, does not choose the utilitarian answer to the Trolley Problem. She says she wouldn't touch the lever, because ultimately, as bad as things are, that's just the world. Pulling the lever would be her choice, her choice to kill an innocent person.
It's an interesting position: personally, in a world where there's so much terrible stuff going on, I often feel guilty for not being more active. Is it moral cowardice to not pull the lever? Or is it simply an understanding of one's powerlessness?
It's interesting because it sort of runs counter to a moment in, of all things, Avatar the Last Airbender. In the show, Aang (the main character,) communes with his various past incarnations, seeking wisdom in how to deal with a monstrous villain without sacrificing his own innocence by killing him (yes, that show went hard for a kid's show). One of his prior incarnations asks if it's not the moral thing to do to sacrifice one's own spiritual purity if it is better for the world.
Ruth would say no: that whatever terrible things come, you shouldn't be a murderer even if you've got a very good reason to be.
Still, I think that if anything is to change in Widow's Bay, it's that denial is going to start breaking down. Dale, one of the people who works at town hall, finds an old set of film strips from what looks like the 60s or 70s addressing first those who are going to be sacrificed and those who are going to do the sacrificing. What seemed to be a kind of routine element of Widow's Bay civic life (even if only known by the town leadership) sort of got forgotten.
I'm curious to see where the story goes next season, assuming it's getting renewed (just checked: it will be! Also, Dale's going to be a series regular, apparently).
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