Widows Bay Season 1 Episode 6 Brings Our History to Life Through Betty Gilpin & Hamish Linklater! — Review

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Critic’s Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

4.5

Don’t you just love it when a show can surprise us?

It’s rarer and rarer every day that we can enjoy entertainment without spoilers, and Widow’s Bay has been keeping secrets very well.

And I’d venture to guess that nobody expected “Our History” to come to life with Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater at the helm.

That said, this Widow’s Bay Season 1 episode is a little different than the others. We are stepping away from the story we know to help inform it.

It’s great from a different perspective (and a few answers, to boot), and it brings new actors onto a show that sometimes makes it hard to do.

The island itself is pretty self-contained. Those born there are stuck there, and those who come don’t always stick around. Whether they’re visitors (which, until Tom pushed for them, were few) or newcomers hoping to make it their home, leaving often seems like a jolly good idea rather quickly.

And nothing explains that better than getting to know Sarah Wescott in the early days of her marriage to Richard Warren, the founder of Widow’s Bay.

Sarah was a spinster, which wasn’t a great thing to be in those days. Women were to be wed or be insignificant — or chittered about in gossip circles.

While I have leaned happily into spinsterhood because I don’t rely on my father to care for me, Sarah wanted to be wed. But how she came to be wed to a man she never met wasn’t really discussed.

Possibly, her father had had enough of paying for her upkeep. Not that it matters. Her fate was sealed the moment she arrived on Widow’s Bay.

Before she even got over her sealegs, she was married and the stepmother of four children, having wed with some pretty weird vows.

His helpmeet will be bound to him and serve him as the Reeve Prime of the colony, the handmaiden to the Lord Island Protector.

Sarah stumbled over her I-dos. What choice did she have?

It might have been nice to know what she was stepping into, but we can all agree that Richard made a poor choice if he was looking for an obedient woman who wouldn’t ask questions.

Sarah was an intelligent and thoughtful woman of strong will.

When a man is looking for obedience, she wouldn’t be their first choice. But if you don’t really have a choice, she might be the perfect pick, especially since those on Widow’s Bay are often bound there regardless.

Gilpen is such a treasure. While other actors who are seen often across different programming seem like they are the character they play, Gilpen loses herself in her roles. That’s why she’s a welcome face in any production.

But she always brings her signature humor along with her, and Gilpin played Sarah’s awkwardness so well.

Sarah’s joke about whether Richard could control the weather or when she was generally asking the pastor and the others to tarry not because the time to end Richard was running out, she wasn’t giving up without a fight, and doing it with a bit of humor was her signature.

How funny was it when the pastor sent someone to kill Richard only to stand before her, knife raised? I giggled when she pointed to her husband, then rolled over to let the man carry out his deed.

And, really, good on her for even attempting to keep a positive outlook.

She was brought to the island in the midst of a plague of sorts, running rampant on the island. This isn’t an ordinary plague, but one that brings out the darkest parts of humanity.

Sarah’s new husband was keeping secrets, and she had unwittingly become a willing participant in his shenanigans. Not many men would dare beat a man to death with his wife a stone’s throw away.

That speaks both to Richard’s power and Sarah’s helplessness.

What Richard didn’t bank on was that Sarah wasn’t meek or helpless. She was his downfall. And that makes me wonder — if she was his downfall, was Tom his way out?

What did Tom do by bringing people to the island again?

Richard was not easily killed, and in the end, he wasn’t killed at all, but buried alive. When you can’t kill the beast, you do what you can to tame him.

Has he been using his powers with the devil to make the entire island miserable for centuries? What, exactly, will happen when he’s released?

Wyck doesn’t have Richard Warren’s history before him. Sarah’s journal wasn’t a great source of information since she had to temper her reactions by telling her audience her husband was right over her shoulder.

She ran so quickly in the end that she didn’t have time to write a postscript.

Not that it would have mattered. Who in their right mind, even if they had seen everything the current Widow’s Bay residents have experienced, would believe the devil was buried in their own graveyard?

Technology may have progressed over the last few hundred years, but methods of murder sure haven’t. Not much Wyck and Tom can do to Richard Warren hasn’t already been tried — and failed.

Yet, Richard wasn’t as good at what he was doing as he thought he was. His own son beat him over the head to aid in their escape. He’s not the darkest dark lord if he couldn’t even maintain his own household.

So if he’s not the sharpest tool in the devil’s shed, then maybe he doesn’t need the sharpest tools to do him in again.

He’s not out of the ground yet, and it’s entirely possible he’ll be dead or gone when Wyck opens the coffin. Oh, who am I kidding? He’s so in there, and he’s so coming back to life to toy with his island once again.

The biggest surprise? He may not have been the devil at all, but merely its pawn, just like the current residents of Widow’s Bay.

He was ranting about fulfilling the pact to save the island. He took the mushrooms Tom drank on Widow’s Bay Season 1 Episode 5, which revealed to him how to get the people of Widow’s Bay through their first winter on the island.

The island itself may be the curse, not the man who landed there.

He was genuinely freaked out about his children being killed if they tried to leave the island. Maybe trying to tame the beast of the island took its toll on him, too.

Maybe he was once a good man, driven to do things he never would have otherwise because of what he knew about the island itself. Part of the pact he made might have given him immortality.

Honestly, playing with these themes and how they’re presented is so much fun. Widow’s Bay had me from the first look, and it’s paying off handsomely.

This is easily one of the best shows of the year so far, combining horror, humor, and humanity into a tightly wound knot just for our viewing pleasure.