And what rough voice, her hour come round at last, chain-smokes towards Widow’s Bay to be born? That’s right, folks: It’s Rosemary’s time to shine. When Tom, Wyck, and Patricia are in desperate need of genealogical information to pin down the living descendants of cursed town founder Richard Warren, they turn to the woman who knows everything about everyone in Widow’s Bay, and will tell it all to you at length. She’ll be damned if she’ll let something like a freak storm that sucks people into the sky Nope–style stop her from detailing every root, branch, and twig of the Warren family tree.
There’s a big one coming, alright—a supernatural nor’easter that’s like one big swirl of purple on the doppler radar. For weather like this, the town has a shelter beneath the town hall. Of course, the last thing Tom wants is to send a bunch of tourists into a concrete bunker underground to hide from bad weather. That doesn’t happen in Martha’s Vineyard!
Royally aggrieved by his plight, Tom tries and fails to tear up the calendar from Episode 1, with the wolves and the car wreck. Then he tears down the huge portrait of a town worthy and his wife from the wall, peeling a bunch of wall down with it before finally collapsing under the painting’s weight in what’s got to be Matthew Rhys’s best bit of physical comedy on the show yet. It’s enhanced by Rosemary, who is not strong and knows nothing about injuries, trying to lift the heavy frame off Tom herself. “You’re pushing it down!” he stammers through the pain.
But the damaged portrait contains a clue. In the cold open, we see young Frances Warren fall overboard from the rowboat piloted by Betty Gipin’s character Sarah Warren, whose other rescued children are already falling victim to a disgusting-looking illness of some kind. Watching them float off into the fog never to be seen again, crying to her and then (maybe) screaming as they vanish, is one of the show’s most haunting moments. It contains the same mix of supernatural menace and nature’s vast indifference to humanity that made the original season of The Terror so good.
Anyway, Patricia notices that the woman in the painting, Frances Fisher, only has nine fingers — just like Frances Warren, the little girl, who lost one in an accident some time earlier. She was found floating on the sea by a whaling captain, who adopted her, raised her, and then (of course, and ew) married her. From there, nearly 300 years of descendants followed.
But Rosemary is able to trace every branch of the Frances Warren Fisher family tree till it dies out, which she does at extraordinary length. “Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m talking about and should just stop,” she says passive-aggressively when Tom takes issue with one of the colorful idioms she deploys along the way. (“The family that swims together drowns together.”) Honestly, the episode is mostly a showcase for actor Dale Dickey, who has a whale of a time as a woman in her glory. Whether she’s crossing off name after name while repeating the phrase “dead baby,” or noting notables like “Sophia the Heretic” or “The Ungrateful Hortence,” or being asked by the group not to use slurs, she’s marvelous.
The Warren bloodline, it turns out, has one sole survivor: Ruth (K Callan), the elderly woman who works for the mayor’s office…and the one person unaccounted for in the shelter. Which leaves Tom and Wyck and Patricia with a moral dilemma: Do they kill her themselves to spare god knows how many others?
For Patricia, this is no dilemma at all. It’s simply evil and insane to even contemplate the idea. But Wyck is a salty dog, and Tom just watched Todd the Shaman get sucked into some kind of wind portal in the sky, so he knows this storm has gone well beyond dangerous and into outright malevolence. In the end, he opts to do the job himself.
In other news around town, Sheriff Bechir and his wife Chelle (Sipiwe Moyo) have to turn back when their ferry never shows up. The very pregnant Chelle feels contractions nearly the second they head into town hall to take shelter. Evan’s still on good terms with his dad (and he’s not the final descendant, as I’d have bet money he was), but he doesn’t know that the curse is still in place and there can be no raincheck on his canceled Red Sox game until that changes. Tom does a lengthy bit where he and the lighthouse keeper go back and forth trying to get a necessary part for the shelter’s generator that really is like something that would happen to John Cleese on Fawlty Towers if there were a very special supernatural storm episode of that show.
The funny thing is that this isn’t a super-funny episode of Widow’s Bay, or a super scary one, or one that riffs on one or two very specific stories or subgenres. Sure, there are shades of Nope and The Lighthouse here and there, and a twister straight out of The Wizard of Oz, but there’s no one central horror here — no sea hag, no sunset cocktails death ritual, no machete-wielding Boogeyman. Other than Chris Fleming’s untimely demise and the genuinely chilling cold open, this episode feels mostly like set-up for the finale. It’s funny in places and creepy in others, but in both the horror and comedy categories, I’m hoping it’s just the calm before the storm.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
