Tom’s function in Widow’s Bay is partly to stand in for the viewer, being gradually (but, crucially, not too gradually) convinced that the island is a locus of supernatural activity. This requires him to be the victim scary entities attack, as in the season’s third episode, “The Inaugural Swim.” When Tom sees an old woman on the road, not answering his offers of help before shuffling toward him at alarming speed and scratching his arm with her ragged nails, Tom’s town hall colleague Rosemary (Dale Dickey) is confident that he’s had an encounter with a sea hag: she scratches you to get your scent under her fingernails, then tracks you and waits to strike until you’re alone and weak. Tom is sufficiently convinced by Rosemary’s story to seek further lore from Wyck, who confirms Rosemary’s assessment, adding that the sea hag’s scratch paralyzes her victims such that Tom’s in imminent danger of death by hag: “She crawls into your bed and sits on your face.” Of course, once such a scenario has been mentioned, you know it has to pay off, and a few hours later Tom is at home, drooping in a recliner with a bat to fend off a hag assault. In a single scene, he moves from broken-down doll to paralyzed target concentrating his whole body’s terror into his eyes to employing a well-timed recliner adjustment to displace his assailant. You might never have realized how much you craved seeing Rhys doing slapstick until he’s belly-crawling along a floor, frantically swimming for his life, or waking up with his face pressed to a toilet seat.
The aforementioned Bashir Salahuddin, Stephen Root, and Dale Dickey are but three beloved character actors in the Widow’s Bay cast. You will also see Tim Baltz, K Callan, Christian Clemenson, Veanne Cox, Jeff Hiller, Toby Huss, Nancy Lenehan, and Kate O’Flynn. For a production about a cursed island to draw so many national treasures to the same place seems almost irresponsible—why tempt fate, or an asteroid strike that could wipe them all out at once???—but maybe Apple splurged on a special reinforced bunker to keep them safe between scenes.
4. Its teen characters are actually worth watching.
I guess I won’t speak for all TV viewers who aren’t parents when I say that programming about children can be tiresome: not only have their problems failed to interest me since I grew out of sharing them, but the kinds of young people who are drawn to be screen performers (or pushed there by their parents) often have a polished precocity that can make them tough to watch. So when I got to the point in the Widow’s Bay pilot where we learn Tom has a teen son named Evan (Kingston Rumi Southwick), I worried about how many of the season’s imminent life-and-death crises would require Evan to be in peril. Even worse, they might do what practically every other group of TV teens do these days: commit a murder together and poorly try to cover it up.
