[Widow's Bay Recap w/ Joe Lipsett] It's the Penultimate Episode and "Emergency Shelter" is One Big Tease

Each week Joe and Terry discuss an episode of Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, alternating between our respective sites. 

Miss an episode? 1-2, 3, 4, 5, 6-7, 8

Spoilers follow for Episode 9, “Emergency Shelter”: Please seek shelter should a centuries-old storm rage toward the island and plunge us into darkness. Enjoy a card game.

JOE

Terry, it’s the penultimate episode (of S01?) and writer Bobak Esfarjani has decided the best way to set up the events of the finale is to teeeeeease us.

I’ll be curious to see if other folks find the comedy in this episode successful? I’ll confess that I found all of the miscommunication stuff extremely aggravating and not just because I wanted the show to get on with it, which is clearly what Esfarjani intends, but even more so because all of the attempts at jokes were plain annoying!

“Emergency Shelter” picks up the morning after the events of “Your Baggage” as Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) tries to convince Tom (Matthew Rhys) that he needs to activate the siren and save the lives of both the locals and the many tourists he’s lured to the island. There’s a massive storm approaching and, as the old-timer that Patricia closes the door on notes, the clouds resemble the cataclysmic storm of 1783, which means (more) people are going to die.

So Tom sounds the alarm. Which means everyone has to parade into unwelcoming underground bunkers with limited power because the storm keeps frying the electrical grid. It could never be so simple, though, so classic disaster narrative shenanigans follow:

> We need a starter replacement to keep the power on for longer than 30 minutes, but Tom keeps missing Garrett (Fred Robbins) the lighthouse keeper. 
> He gets pinned under a heavy painting. 
> And Rosemarie (Dale Dickey) delivers the longest, more tangent-filled genealogy report ever en route to identifying the sole living descendant of Richard Warren (ie: the person keeping the curse alive). 

It’s the last one that really broke me. There’s a moment when Rosemarie pauses to light a cigarette, so Tom asks Patricia to turn on a fan, but Rosemarie immediately snaps “I can’t hear.” It’s meant to be funny, just like all of her asides about Tom wanting her to hurry up…but it’s not funny. It’s just annoying. 

This is a 31 minute episode, and I love Dale Dickey, and I don’t wanna keep sounding like a goddamn grouch in these reviews, but I seriously wanted to fast forward half a dozen times, Terry! IT’S JUST NOT FUNNY.

Thankfully there are at least two bright spots I can highlight: 

1) There's a genuine moment of unexpected awe when the Shaman (Chris Fleming) from episode five arrives, drops his stash in front of the building, fails to heed Tom’s urgent request to get inside, and is promptly sucked up into a twister. (Why is Tom fine when he’s standing a mere five feet away? Best not to think about that and just move on) 

2) The score from David Fleming. You noted his work in the last episode and this episode offers another stand-out example of how music contributes tension and builds atmosphere. There’s some really strong, unnerving piano when Tom is driving to and from the lighthouse and, the whole ticking, water dripping-esque percussion over the closing credits is particularly memorable. Really impressive stuff.

But enough complaining, Terry: what did you make of the penultimate episode? Do you believe Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick) when he told Tom he wouldn’t do anything foolish? Are you convinced that Sheriff Bechir (Kevin Caroll) and his 40+ year old wife Chelle (Sipiwe Moyo) are about to become parents to another “stuck on the island” baby? And were you surprised by the cliffhanger that the mystery Warren descendant is Tom’s absent minded assistant Ruth (K Callan), who is - naturally - not at the shelter, but rather at home?

TERRY

I guess I get to be the yin to your yang, Joe, because I really enjoyed this episode and the jokes actually worked on me. All of the moments you highlighted were moments I jotted down as really enjoying, haha. I loved Patricia closing the door on Mr. Old Timer who’s taken the job of The Harbinger from Wyck for one lovely moment. I loved the call back with Garrett from “The Inaugural Swim” where, again, he has been called to help with the power and we watch his painstaking journey to his bike and back to the lighthouse. 

If I had any complaints about this gag it’s that I don’t know exactly how Garrett made it to the town hall without being seen by Tom. That aside, it feels like a full circle moment of Tom needing power – then it was for the speakers he wanted set up on the beach, now it’s for a generator – and the ensuing chaos that creates. 

The painting gag, too, worked for me, but to a lesser extent. Tom has had an anger issue throughout the season when things don’t go his way. So his inability to rip apart a calendar followed by him kicking the desk and then finding the one big thing he hopes he can destroy worked for me. But then when I realized it was solely to showcase the fact that Frances (Lenora Severance) was the only living descendant of Richard Warren by cross-referencing the painted woman’s missing finger, I was a bit deflated. It turned what, to me, was an entertaining aside into a plot point. 

All this to say that I don’t necessarily disagree with you…but I also disagree with you. I do wonder what it would have looked like if this were one big episode with the storm building leading directly to the climax instead of to a cliffhanger. But I was firmly on board with the way the episode played out, to include the classic overhead projector family tree.

For me, it was the small things that brought some new context to the previous episodes and their supernatural moments. Rosemary draws a connection between Richard’s family line and a number of the hauntings, from the genesis of The Inaugural Swim (“family that swims together, drowns together”) to “Ugly Hortence” Fitzgerald who, it turns out, is a Warren, while dropping a couple other little bonmots like Sophia “The Heretic” and the children who were murdered by their father. Each of these are either plot points from previous episodes or add some mystery surrounding their past that could be used in upcoming episodes, should this go past a single season. 

As for the revelation about Ruth, I have to admit that I clocked that she would be a descendant the moment they said, a bit earlier, that she was at home combined with Rosemary explaining that there’s only one descendant left. So that lost a bit of the magic for me, given the exceptionally thorough lineage discussion. 

A couple asides to answer your questions. I wish that Bechir had more to do in the preceding episodes in order to build out the tension of will Chelle or won’t Chelle. I genuinely loved the moment in “Your Baggage” where he basically tells Patricia he doesn’t want to be a part of the Scooby Gang and wants to stay as blissfully unaware of the zany exploits Tom and Co have gotten themselves involved with. That moment felt like a smart zig to the traditional plot points where everyone seems to want to be involved in events that could end their lives. It felt refreshing to have the police officer – who’s supposed to be a protector – decide he wasn’t made for that supernatural life. 

I bring this up to say that while I’ve appreciated every moment that Bechir is on screen, he, like Evan, hasn’t been given much to do. That, coupled with not only the very recent introduction of not only Chelle as a character but also the fact she’s pregnant, means I don’t really have much stake in their late-blooming storyline. Same goes for Evan. Will he go against his promise and get involved in some hijinks? Sure, he probably will. If I had to hazard a guess, though, I’ll make a prediction that the hijinks he finds himself embroiled in will be because Tom has left the town hall. I think it would make storytelling sense that Evan gets to save Tom from himself in the finale. 

But I honestly don’t really care. 

I am excited to see how this all unfolds, though, in the final episode. “Emergency Shelter” gave us a lot of building suspense with the water spouts and the incoming watery disaster and I hope next week’s “We Hope You Enjoyed Your Time” pays that off with some exciting set pieces.

We’ll find out next week when we return to Queer.Horror.Movies one more time this…season?