What Lurks Beneath Widow’s Bay?

Spoilers ahead for Widow’s Bay through the season-one finale, “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time!”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a mysterious island where inexplicable things keep happening, the inhabitants can’t leave, and the secrets to what it all means may be deep underground. No, Widow’s Bay is not Lost — scratch the surface of Apple TV’s surprise hit and you’ll find something much funnier, spookier, and more idiosyncratic than the long-running ABC series. But just as Damon Lindelof et al. trained viewers to fit together the puzzle pieces scattered across multiple seasons, Widow’s Bay invites us to try to make sense of its overarching mythology, namely the nature and origin of the curse that wreaks havoc on the lives of the island’s inhabitants.

Of course, Widow’s Bay is much more than a problem to be solved. The show is, at heart, a comedy, a mystery-box show by way of Parks and Recreation, a series creator Katie Dippold also wrote for. It’s also a loving homage to Dippold’s genre influences, most notably the works of Stephen King and John Carpenter. We’ll probably never get answers to why the inn has troubling board games like Daddy’s Home and Teeth, for example — at least, not beyond the simple explanation that the island is cursed and it’s funny. But after the lore-dump-heavy season finale, it’s only natural to reflect on the big-picture mysteries we’re one step closer to understanding, as well as the lingering questions hanging over the recently announced second season. So let’s break it all down.

That catastrophic storm ended very abruptly! How did that happen?
Kenny (Michael Malvesti) the Custodian, we thank you for your service. Or perhaps we should be thanking PJ (Beck Nolan), who locks Kenny in the room with the creepy chair and inadvertently feeds him to whatever is lurking beyond the cellar door. In the finale, we get confirmation that it’s human sacrifices that keep the island chill, and Kenny’s death appears to be the final body Widow’s Bay needs to literally calm the storm. The earthquake in the series premiere was the beginning of a new cycle, as Wyck (Stephen Root) warned a skeptical Tom (Matthew Rhys). Kenny dying seems to fulfill the covenant, ending that cycle and putting the island back into sleep mode.

Do we have details about that covenant?
Well, yes and no. We don’t get to see the actual text of the covenant that Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) wears in a locket around his neck. (Tom swiftly puts it down when Warren reveals it was signed with blood, feces, and semen. Fair enough!) But the flashback episode and the season finale give us the gist of it: Warren made some sort of pact with the island, feeding it bodies in exchange for everyone else’s survival. “Life for life,” he says. As he further warns in a panic while being buried alive (again, fair), “Fulfill the pact and the plague will stop, but if you don’t, if you do not, the terrors will not cease! They will only deepen!” Everyone who came after Warren has been bound to the same covenant, even though the vast majority of Widow’s Bay residents are unaware. For his part, the Lord Protector was granted immortality, a mixed blessing to be sure.

Was Warren the only one who made a deal with the island?
That we don’t know for sure. We know that the covenant started with him, and that it will end with his bloodline (more on that in a bit). But surely in addition to terrorizing the locals for centuries while Warren was hanging out in a coffin, the island looked toward other solutions for its bloodlust. Could the Michael Myers–inspired Boogeyman have made his own pact with Widow’s Bay? That would explain why he’s so stab-happy and, more important, why he couldn’t be killed. And we know that the island was communicating with Reverend Bryce (Toby Huss), asking him to do something so unpleasant that Bryce chose to hang himself instead.

It feels like we’re skirting around a big issue here: What exactly is the island?
This is the question, and the one we’re probably furthest from answering. Though Warren initially thought he was talking to God while high on hallucinogenic Truesight mushrooms, he admits in episode seven that he was “tricked by a devil.” He’s frustratingly evasive when pressed on what actually spoke to him, however, suggesting “a demon” or “the island itself.” (Is there a difference?) When Tom accidentally downs Truesight tea, he also sees it — whatever it is. We know that the island communicates with people through ’shrooms (Bryce was also imbibing when he heard something in the well) and through the church bells.

The finale gives us more insight into the possible demon, which seems to operate by the rules of Stephen King’s It. That is, periods of dormancy until it wakes up, does a lot of scary shit, and then goes back to sleep after a certain number of people are killed. Like It/Pennywise, the island feeds on fear, because it “likes the taste,” as explained by a man in one of the instructional films that Dale (Jeff Hiller) stumbles upon in the storm shelter.

Speaking of the shelter, what’s behind the cellar door?
Something not very nice, presumably! While the island doesn’t seem to need to eat people directly, there is a hungry entity of some sort that lives beyond the cellar door in the creepy chair room. We can assume it snatched Kenny, since the door is ajar when Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) goes back inside. But we don’t yet know if whatever lives beneath Widow’s Bay is the island’s corporeal form, a creature in its employ, or a secret third thing.

Can we circle back on the church bells?
Absolutely. The man in the filmstrip that Dale watches explains, “The island will make its needs known. One soul for each bell toll.” He also notes that the bad times won’t end until the covenant is “honored fully,” meaning the island has received all its requested sacrifices.

When the church bells first ring at the beginning of episode two, there are nine tolls, which should correspond to nine deaths. Let’s look at the body count: Shep (Tom Kemp) in episode one (though the bells hadn’t rung yet); Reverend Bryce in episode three; Richard Warren in episode seven; the Boogeyman and the paramedic in episode eight; Todd the Shaman (Chris Fleming) in episode nine; and Kenny in episode ten. That’s only seven souls, but if you throw in the Sea Hag from episode three (do Sea Hags have souls?) and the gas-station attendant in episode eight (he got tossed pretty far), you do get to nine. Ruth (K Callan) also might have succumbed to her injuries, but she’s alive when the storm stops. So was the island sufficiently fed by the end of the finale? Maybe! 

But then what do the bells mean at the very end?
There’s the rub. Tom and Evan hear eight bell tolls at the close of the finale, suggesting that Widow’s Bay would like another eight souls. (Okay, greedy.) That could mean the covenant wasn’t fully fulfilled — maybe sacrificing Kenny the old-school way was just pleasing enough to call off the storm — or it could mean the start of a new cycle. We don’t know much about how long the island typically keeps things quiet between feeding periods, but given the violent history of Widow’s Bay, I’m going to guess “not very.” It’s also possible that the sacrifices are just designed to stave off mass-casualty events like island-destroying storms and homicidal zombie plagues, and that the standard-issue bad shit keeps happening regardless. Whatever the case may be, the final bells are a reminder that the curse has not been lifted.

So if more sacrifices have to happen … who’s taking the lead on that?
Look, Tom’s not the greatest mayor, but I don’t think he’s going to revert the town to a Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”–style situation. Yes, in the instructional film Dale watches, we learn that ritual sacrifice was, at some point, part of Widow’s Bay’s whole deal. The sacrifices (or “offerings,” a gentle euphemism) were chosen by — well, that we don’t know, but given the infrastructure in place, there were certainly several higher-ups involved, and likely some average citizens, too, since the whole thing has the vibe of the videos they screen for you at jury duty. “You’ve been carefully selected by a committee of your peers in a very fair, very rigorous selection process,” the host explains. “Maybe you’ve committed a crime or owe a debt to society or have been found wanting in some way.”

Because of Tom’s outsider status, it feels like a safe bet that he truly did not know that folks had their heads covered and then got strapped into a chair under Widow’s Bay to be delivered to whatever lives beneath the town. (Should be in the mayoral welcome packet, but nevertheless.) Dale is also genuinely horrified by what he finds, and Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) would never go along with such a thing. But I’m not convinced we’re dealing with distant history here. Yes, the filmstrips look old, but that’s par for the course in Widow’s Bay, where all tech is frozen a few decades in the past. 

Was Tom’s wife an offering?
This is not so much a lingering question as it is a theory I’d like to bring up: Could Lauren Loftis (Meredith Casey) have been a sacrifice to the island? The letters that Evan reads from her time in the institution appear to be the ramblings of someone deeply unwell, but there’s some truth to them. Lauren’s reference to a “secret mommy” turns out to have referred to Ruth. In another letter to Evan, Lauren repeats that she’s already dead. That phrasing pops up again in the finale, when Patricia finds a note hidden in the storm-shelter blankets: “If you can read this, I’m already dead.”

Is it possible that Lauren, whose preeclampsia-induced stroke had rendered her unable to care for herself, was “found wanting in some way”? If she was an offering, that would give Tom a more personal stake in finding out who was pulling the strings — and give us a hint into how recently these sacrifices were taking place. 

Setting aside the ritual sacrifice, is there any way to actually break the curse?
Well, there’s one way that we know of, and Tom is never going to do it. As Ruth’s secret grandchild, Evan is the last of the Warren bloodline, assuming Rosemary’s (Dale Dickey) genealogy research was accurate, and his death would end the curse for good. Tom will almost certainly be spending next season looking for an alternative option, perhaps by taking on the island itself. If the island does have a physical form that lives past the cellar door, does that mean it can be killed? This is something Tom might want to find out before Bechir (Kevin Carroll), who was willing to shoot Ruth to save his child from the horrors of Widow’s Bay, learns the truth about Evan.

While we’re here, what is in Tom’s basement?
I don’t know! When Tom returns home and finds that Evan has gone through his stuff, he is very concerned that his son might have been in the basement. “What the hell is in the basement?” Evan asks. Good question!