Every ‘Widow’s Bay’ Season 2 Question Currently Haunting Us
Warning: spoilers for the whole first season of Widow’s Bay
Widow’s Bay, the Apple TV horror-comedy that has become one of the spring’s buzziest new shows, has just wrapped up its first season…but not with a bow. Now that we know the series has been renewed, it’s a good time to consider the questions we’d most like to see answered when the show returns for future seasons.
Why is the island popping off now?
Robert Clark/Courtesy of Apple TV
Widow’s Bay is the name of both a fictional island off the coast of Massachusetts and the town that was founded on it centuries ago. It’s established in the series premiere that the place has been supernaturally cursed. Midway through the season—in the departure episode, “Our History,” set in 1702—we learn how and, sort of, why: when the first group of settlers were starving in a harsh winter, Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater), the island’s first “Reeve Prime and Lord Island Protector,” signed a pact for their salvation in his “own blood, feces, and semen.”
As a consequence, anyone born on Widow’s Bay is doomed to remain there. How? In an earlier episode, current mayor and non-native Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) flashes back to the moment Lauren (Meredith Casey), his pregnant native wife, lost her vision on the ferry to the mainland, the first phase of what he has understood to be a stroke from preeclampsia; afterward, she has a mental breakdown from which she never recovers, requiring full-time in-patient care before eventually dying from an aneurysm. (I…swear this show is a comedy?) More generally, though, everyone who knows about the curse seems to agree that the penalty for attempting to leave the island is immediate death.
But that’s just the ambient noise of the curse: in the series premiere, following an earthquake only some characters appear to experience, the curse enters a more active phase that old salt Wyck (Stephen Root) calls The Terror, known in an 1846 outbreak as “the fog that stole souls.” Further supernatural eruptions occur: nine tolls from a chained-up church bell; a rampaging sea hag; a grimoire-assisted near mass-suicide. Why has the curse’s dormancy ended now? Does the island’s terror, as in the IT series, operate on a predictable cycle?
How soon will this Terror end?
Courtesy of Apple TV
