Lovecraft, The Lighthouse, and Patricia: Hopes for Widow’s Bay Season 2

Widow’s Bay is the show of the summer. I can’t decide whether I should brag that I was anticipating the show for months running up to its release, an early fan championing the series since I first heard about it, or lamenting that I’m not one of the many viewers who heard about its greatness through word-of-mouth during its run and were able to consume it in a huge, delicious binge. Either way it’s a fantastic new show, a horror comedy that manages to complete the high wire act and works as both genres. And it’s been renewed! With a second season in the works, I thought I’d detail some hopes I have for the show’s future.

Firstly, I don’t want the show to change its format too drastically. I love Widow’s Bay as essentially an anthology show: a different ‘haunt’ each episode. They can be connected by some loose storytelling but I don’t want any serialisation to become aggressive, the threads pulled too taut. My least favourite episodes of the show are probably the premiere and the final two because there is less of that ‘monster-of-the week’ feel.

Now that the mythology of the island is being expanded, connections made, I don’t want it to be too expansive, too connected. This show isn’t Severance, it’s not a massive puzzle, and I’m not interested in filling in all the gaps. The overall storytelling aids character insight and is an excuse to string together different horror tropes. I don’t need it to be more than that. The past incidents on the island are fun jokes more than anything; they don’t need to be part of an intricate narrative web.

I’m very curious how the show handles its core cast of characters moving forward. The first season is about Tom accepting that the island’s curse is real. Wyck started the show as the wizened, seasoned veteran of the island’s horrors but now Tom is near his level. It’s great development but it’s also a possible problem for a horror show: it’s not as scary when the characters are more confident and capable and less scared themselves. They may need to bring in some flesh blood, ready for spilling.

Dale and Rosemary are great side characters, and while I’d be up for episodes focusing on them, maybe that is their best use in a comedy show: a scene or two an episode for a reliable laugh. Now that the island has made a name for itself through tourism (although it remains to be seen if the events in the storm shelter has hindered this), a way to expand the show would be for people to want to move there. A whole new bunch of residents who have no idea of the terrors that await. Rich investors or people wanting to buy a summer house getting more than they bargained for.

At the least I could see Sheriff Bechir being brought into the show’s ‘Scooby Gang’. I love actor Kevin Carroll, who plays baffled incredibly well. His delivery of “I don’t… understand… what’s happening” in the second season finale of The Leftovers is one of my favourite line readings of all time. And Evan can now take on a more active role, given he’s the one who knows about the sacrificial chamber. I do hope there isn’t a twist about the mother secretly being alive, either with or without Tom’s knowledge, because there’s enough drama now in the family without that.

But while one character enters the fray, another exits. Wyck’s importance waned as the season progressed. Stephen Root is fantastic, I’d love if the writers found new things for him to do, but ‘The Herald’ character archetype isn’t all that important once action actually gets underway. The show’s seventh episode, Seasickness, references Jaws and Wyck has his own version of Quint’s speech, discussing the tentacled sea monster that attacked him as a teenager. The natural place for the story to go is to commit to the bit, go full Jaws or Moby Dick, have Wyck face off against this beast again and meet a watery grave. Or maybe he can survive and go full crusty seaman, take on a Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse type role. I’d love to see an episode inspired by that film after Our History brought to mind Eggers’ The Witch.

But while Wyck can die, Patricia lives forever. More Patricia please! At first she seems like a fun side character but the two episodes she helms are the best of the season. Beach Reads in particular is brilliant. She can support a full episode, hell, a full show. Don’t get me wrong, Matthew Rhys as Tom is also great but Kate O’Flynn as Patricia is a revelation. Her mannerisms, even the way she walks, is fantastic and I’m sure the showrunners know they’ve struck gold. They’d be foolish not to have her be co-lead moving forward. I’m less sure what her conflict will be but I wouldn’t be opposed to the Boogeyman coming back. I’ve seen enough slasher movies to know you can never keep a good killer down and this is a comedy show: having the Boogeyman return and not explain the impossible resurrection at all would be a fun meta joke.

The show certainly knows its horror references, more than just the Stephen King vibes on the surface. I’d love to see it embrace Lovecraft next season. The trapdoor in the sacrificial chamber reminds me of Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace, which while taking its title from Edgar Allen Poe is actually the first H.P. Lovecraft adaptation. Whatever the horror beneath the island is, I hope it isn’t a standard devil or demon. Have it be a weird unknowable ancient cosmic horror we can barely fathom. I can’t help but want to see it but just a glimpse: we should never see the whole thing and what we do see should make little sense.

Finally, I hope the second season immediately confirms the new status quo in Widow’s Bay. This is my only substantial critique of the finale: what does everybody now know and what are they doing about it? I have to imagine Evan told his dad what happened, the main cast watched the tapes Dale watched, and they understand how the sacrifices stop the horrors on the island. But it never makes that clear. It’s such a big idea, that Tom’s trolley problem has now exploded outwards and he needs to find 8 souls to feed to the island, but I never totally got the sense he knows that’s what he has to do now when the bell tolls. Hopefully the second season can jump straight into this, lay the cards on the table, and deliver more laughs and scares in equal measure rather than getting snagged on its own expanding mythology.