Summary
Widow’s Bay gets more explicit with its horror in “The Inaugural Swim”, stripping the show of some ambiguity but not losing its sense of place (or, more importantly, its sense of humour).
It’s probably a testament to the quality of Widow’s Bay that it’s able to make a horror concept as familiar as the creepy old hag feel frightening. But the Sea Hag, which becomes the primary, temporary antagonist of Episode 3, “The Inaugural Swim”, gave me the willies, although I think part of that is probably because her preferred method of dispatching her victims is to sit on their face. I like a good night out as much as anyone, but let’s not get carried away.
And the Sea Hag shows up at the worst time for Tom, who has finally gotten his way after suffering through a supernatural night in the hotel. Widow’s Bay is open for business. It’s the summer, and tourists are flocking to the place. To celebrate the season, Tom’s about to take part in the traditional inaugural swim, a way to prove to the newcomers that the waters are safe from the town’s many, many urban legends. If the mayor can go for a dip, so can everyone.
By the time Tom gets in the sea, he has already encountered the Sea Hag, who accosts him on a lonely road at night and scratches his arm. Tom thinks little of it, getting the wound bandaged up and going into work with a blithe “I got scratched by an elderly woman” by way of explanation. (There’s a superb gag here when Patricia, still smarting from Tom having said in the first episode that the bogeyman wouldn’t be interested in her at her age, asks, “Was she in her forties?”). But the fact that the Sea Hag already got her claws into Tom means that she’s able to pursue him into the water during the swim, during which she also scratches his leg in a very Jaws-coded sequence.
This is the Sea Hag’s thing, apparently. Through Rosemary and then Wyck, who embellishes the story with a sea shanty for good measure, Tom – and thus the audience – gets a brief primer on the Sea Hag’s backstory. She would target lonely sailors and follow them home, scratching them to be able to track them using their skin under her nails. Wyck’s advice is for Tom to spend 72 hours in a chest, locked from the inside, until the wound heals. Naturally, he’s disinclined to follow this advice, but Wyck’s prognostication comes true. Tom becomes impossibly tired and has a hallucination of his dead wife before the Hag accosts him and attempts to fatally mount him.
This is a pretty major moment in Widow’s Bay Episode 3. It’s a very well-done sequence, sure, but it’s also the first time that something happening to Tom is witnessed by someone else, since Wyck arrives in the nick of time to shoot the hag dead, leaving behind a splattering of black goo. Now, granted, Wyck isn’t exactly even keel, but in every instance of Tom’s dalliances with the supernatural thus far – including his chats with William and the Hag chasing him through the sea – it looked to others like he was entirely alone. Either Tom and Wyck are privy to some aspect of the island that everyone else isn’t, or the evils are becoming bolder.
Notably, the Sea Hag debacle also gets in the way of Tom’s love life. Early in the episode, he picks up a woman named Marissa, who is supposedly in town for a bachelorette party, even though none of her friends ever seem to turn up. She and Tom get on, but perhaps too well, too quickly. She basically invites herself to Tom’s house, and when he gently rebuffs her, she turns up anyway. Tom thinks she’s Sea Hag in disguise, and I do wonder if he might be right, since something is definitely off about Marissa and her story. We’ll have to see if that comes up again in subsequent episodes.
Through Tom’s interactions with Marissa, we learn that his wife died from complications during childbirth and that he has raised Evan alone. This goes some way towards explaining why that dynamic is such a mess. Evan lies to Tom about what he’s doing multiple times this episode, and it’s so obvious that he’s lying that it’s genuinely hilarious that Tom doesn’t realise it. He seems determined to get himself into trouble, and indeed, he seems to have done so when Reverend Bryce shows up where he and his friends are hanging out (Tom thinks, hilariously, that they’re having a sleepover) and declares that something evil is present. At the end of the episode, Bryce calls Tom with a sinister apology, with the church bells – apparently inaccessible – ringing noisily in the background.
Similarly, Sheriff Clemons also sends out an alert about something going on at Patricia’s cocktail party. Whatever’s happening in Widow’s Bay, it seems to be getting worse, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop any time soon.
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