Summary
Widow’s Bay delivers another brilliant fusion of comedy and horror in “What to Expect on Your Trip”, beginning at its funniest yet and ending with some of the most potentially dramatic turns thus far.
It’s a shame more people aren’t talking about Widow’s Bay, since it’s shaping up to be one of Apple TV’s finest original offerings. At the very least, it’s one of the better fusions of comedy and horror I’ve seen in ages. For another, as was proved in an adventurous previous episode, it’s not scared to mess around with form, either. Episode 5, “What to Expect on Your Trip”, combines these elements into perhaps the best half-hour yet, though I’ll grant you that at this point, given how distinct each episode feels, it’s difficult to say that for certain.
At the root of things are mushrooms. Like From, which devoted a good chunk of a recent episode to a psychedelic trip, Widow’s Bay gets a ton of mileage out of the idea of Tom ingesting a bunch of mushrooms designed to open his third eye to its maximum possible diameter. The whole thing’s hilariously farcical until it becomes anything but. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, though.
Initially, we’re picking up from where we left off. On account of Reverend Bryce’s suicide and various other weird things that have been occurring lately, not least his experiences with the Sea Hag, Tom has implemented a curfew from 7 pm to 7 am, much to the consternation of the townsfolk, who want to go out and watch the fireworks (wasn’t it them trying to convince Tom the place was haunted?). He’s also forced to leave Evan, whose recalcitrance is starting to get on my nerves, in his office, while he attends Bryce’s memorial service and pokes around his charred rectory with Patricia and Wyck.
The office isn’t exactly a treasure trove of clues, but it does yield three big ones. One is a burned page of writing, which we’ll get to later; another is a handkerchief full of the mushrooms that we saw someone hungrily eating in the cold open, and the third is a number that Bryce was calling repeatedly before he died. Tom redials and makes a mess of things, so Patricia has another go, managing to book “an appointment” in the next 15 minutes.
The guy Reverend Bryce was calling is Todd O’Connor, with whom Patricia went to high school. He’s a drug dealer who calls himself a shaman and recognises the fungus as a local variety known as “Truesight,” which has a reputation for the inducement of major trips. Todd had a friend named Brian who took it and saw something that he never talked about, losing a bunch of motor skills in the process. In by far the funniest gag of Widow’s Bay Episode 5, Todd describes how Brian would repeatedly draw the same “ancient, vaguely religious iconography”, and hands Tom an example of it that is clearly the outline of Brian’s hand that he has drawn around in biro.
Anyway, Wyck decides to buy a tincture containing the mushroom in the hopes of finding out what’s really going on. After a brief bit of deliberation, Patricia sticks her head in the door and confirms that Wyck will indeed take the mushroom. However, Todd thinks that Tom is Wyck, so he doses his drink with the tincture without telling him. Just like that, Tom is due for a 12-hour psychedelic experience just as Kurt is gathering a meeting to overturn the curfew, and Evan is nowhere to be found.
The remainder of “What to Expect on Your Trip” comprises Tom’s spiritual journey, guided by Wyck and Patricia on Todd’s “mindfulness bed”, which is just a dirty mattress shared, for some, by a giant lizard. On account of this, it’s difficult to tell what’s real and what isn’t, what order scenes are occurring in, or how much of what we learn we should believe. That’s all part of the fun. It builds to some funny moments, but also some pretty alarming implications if you’re looking out for them.
Naturally, Tom hallucinates various weirdnesses stemming from his different problems with Evan and the town, but every time he gets settled into one sequence, he seems to drop off and wake up in another. He can’t keep track of where he is, why his loafer is in a pool of spilled milk in a gas station, or why nobody’s listening to him. Often, he can’t speak at all, meaning that Matthew Rhys has to do a lot of heavy lifting with his facial expressions alone.
While Tom is tripping, Wyck takes the piece of paper from the rectory to Gerrie at the Historical Society, who is able to rejuvenate the text enough that she can read the contents, which describe the heart of the island’s curse residing in a cylinder around the neck of the writer’s husband. Later, it’s confirmed that the page was torn from the personal writings of Sarah Westcott Warren, the wife of Widow’s Bay’s founding father, Richard Warren. Wyck thinks he might have been buried with the cylinder, which, from the portraiture, it seems he did indeed wear around his neck.
Meanwhile, Evan is out with his friends, particularly his idiot pal PJ, smoking weed outside the house of the so-called Boogeyman, who was apparently buried in the basement when he proved impossible to kill. PJ dares Evan to go in, despite the fact that apparently anyone who does so doesn’t come out again, and he’s willing to until Sheriff Bechir calls him away. The Boogeyman is definitely connected to everyone going on in a pretty intimate way, but we don’t yet know how.
When Evan gets home, he and Tom bicker once again. But Tom is still tripping. When the fireworks start in earnest, he finally begins to vomit, and while doing so, he sees his dead wife, Laura. Despite earlier claiming that she died of “complications from childbirth”, that doesn’t seem to be entirely true. She definitely became sick in some manner while pregnant, and safely delivered Evan, but at that point, she was still alive in what seems to be some kind of trance-like coma. What happened to her after that? What is Tom hiding? Why is he imploring God to help him and protect his son? Something isn’t adding up here, and I’m starting to be reminded, rather uncomfortably, of Silent Hill 2 (the plot of which informs the terrible Return to Silent Hill).
Widow’s Bay Episode 5 ends with Tom being spoken to by some hidden entity from the darkened bedroom, and while we don’t get to see it, he clearly does. Whatever evil is lurking at the heart of the island, it increasingly seems like Tom himself is intimately connected to it.
