Summary
Widow’s Bay hands the reins over to Betty Gilpin in “Our History”, a dark flashback chapter explaining some of the town’s origins but still leaving plenty of mystery on the table.
If I’m being totally honest, I can’t say that Episode 5 of Widow’s Bay, which is almost entirely a flashback to 1702 and a nascent version of the titular island, tells us a great deal more about what’s going on than we knew already. The town is cursed. The key to that curse seems to be contained in a cylinder worn around the neck of its founding father, Richard Warren. None of this is news. But it is pretty nice to see it first-hand, especially because Betty Gilpin arrives playing Richard’s wife, Sarah, and basically walks off with the show.
Gilpin really is wonderful in this episode. There isn’t as much humour as usual, somewhat unavoidably, but the little bit there is absolutely kills, and likewise the horror… also kills, though a bit more literally. Every episode has cycled through different types of scares, from classic haunted house territory to a creature feature to drugged-up psychedelia, not just once but twice, as recently as last week. “Our History” fits snugly into period folk-horror territory, and it works incredibly well on every level, from the costume design to the lighting and the slightly exaggerated modes of speech.
Sarah, having resigned herself to the life of a spinster, arrived on the island solely to marry Richard, though the reality failed to live up to the romantic ideals that had been presented to her before the crossing. The town is in the grip of a plague that causes violent mania, and most of the locals believe that Richard is intimately connected to it. He already has five weird children, wrote his own death-focused misogynistic wedding vows, and disappears on the night of their nuptials to slip into a kind of ritualistic white-eyed trance. It isn’t exactly romantic.
Richard is played by Hamish Linklater, delighting in another villain turn after his work on Gen V, and he’s clearly having a lot of fun with the role. Fun isn’t at the top of the agenda for Sarah, mind, who quickly realises that something is deeply amiss even before Richard batters his houseguest to death with his own cane. Ezra Lowery, the victim, had petitioned Richard to commune with the island in an effort to stop the plague, since everyone believes he formed some kind of covenant with whatever evil lurks beneath it that is bound to the cylinder he keeps around his neck. The accusation alone is enough to turn Richard murderous.
Sarah’s only ally seems to be Pastor Collins, who believes that the Devil himself has chosen Richard as his vessel. As a motivator, he mentions that Richard has been linked to a number of disappearances, including that of his previous wife. He tells Sarah to leave the door unlatched when she goes to bed so that someone can enter and “do what needs to be done”, and she does; in one of the better jokes of the episode, Sarah quickly points a finger across the bed at her sleeping husband when a hooded assassin almost stabs her in the darkness by mistake.
A few stab wounds aren’t enough to stop Richard in his tracks, though. Widow’s Bay Episode 5 is deliberately unclear about the full extent of Richard’s “powers”, but he seems to be impervious to sharp objects, since, despite getting stabbed multiple times, he’s still able to get up and kill his assassin. This puts Sarah in an even more precarious position, since Richard insists she can no longer leave the house. Her only opportunity for escape comes by descending into the weird chamber beneath the property, where Richard tossed Ezra’s bloodstained cane, which leads to a warren of tunnels. One path leads to a lone chair sitting atop some bloodstained stone, which I think we got a glimpse of at the end of the premiere? Another path leads to a ladder that allows Sarah to climb out through a well and race back to Pastor Collins and a committee of loyalists. This is also — though I grant you it doesn’t sound it — a very funny scene.
Pastor Collins has secured Sarah a berth on a merchant vessel. All he wants in exchange is for Sarah to poison Richard with a tincture that’ll supposedly render him harmless. She’s reluctant at first, but she doesn’t have a great deal of choice, since that night Richard insists on reading her journal, which is pretty explicit about her thoughts and feelings regarding him, none of which are good. To try and prevent him from getting to the tastier pages, and to convince him to drink the dosed brandy, Sarah tries to seduce Richard, which is going quite well until he gives her a sip of the liquor and she has to spit it back out in a panic. Tipped off, Richard starts to strangle her, but she’s saved by one of the children, who smacks Richard across the back of the bonce with a log on the grounds that he killed the boy’s mother.
Sarah takes the kids and legs it to the jetty, from which the merchant vessel has already departed without them. If they’re quick at getting into a rowboat, they can potentially catch up. But Sarah is set upon by Abigail, the physician’s wife, who is now deeply sick with the violent zombie plague that I’d totally forgotten about. When she charges at Sarah, she thwacks her with one of the oars and bundles into the boat with the children.
Richard, meanwhile, wakes up with his hands bound, surrounded by Collins and his committee, who plan to bury him alive. According to Richard’s ranting, whatever pact he formed was to get them through their first winter; it must be honored through sacrifice, lest the terrors will only get worse. He’s particularly dismayed to learn that Sarah has absconded with the kids, since apparently the island “won’t let them leave”. We see no proof of that, though. Richard is buried. At the very end of “Our History”, we cut back to the present day, where Wyck is in the process of digging him up. Based on what we’ve seen, isn’t there a better-than-average probability that he’ll still be alive in there?
