Episodes 6 and 7 of Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay land as a phenomenal double-feature, finally blowing open the mystery behind the island’s curse. By weaving together a brutal 18th-century horror story with the show’s signature present-day physical comedy, the series delivers its most ambitious and rewarding block of television yet. Here’s my full recap and review of this stellar twin bill.
Episode 6: “Our History”
Directed by horror maestro Ti West, this standalone hour breaks from the usual format and drags us back to 1702 to show how Widow’s Bay became cursed in the first place.
We open with Sarah Wescott (Betty Gilpin) arriving by boat to become the second wife of the island’s founder and self-appointed Lord Protector, Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater). The townsfolk treat Richard like a weather-controlling god, but Sarah immediately notices the rot underneath: cabins branded with a scarlet X to mark households ravaged by plague.
Sarah soon discovers the real horror. Her new husband is immortal and utterly corrupted. When a pastor sends an assassin to stab him, Richard shrugs off the blade without a scratch. Around his neck, he wears a vial filled with strange underground mushrooms, the physical proof of a bargain with a cosmic entity living beneath the island. In exchange for eternal life, the entity demands a steady stream of human sacrifices. Richard convinces himself that executing his own people is the only way to stop the disease.
Realizing how dangerous he is, Sarah tries to poison Richard’s brandy. He quickly catches on and attacks her, but his eldest son intervenes; he’s known all along that Richard murdered his first wife. After fending off an infected, zombie-like villager, Sarah and the children flee in a rowboat, hoping to reach a ship on the mainland.
Back on the island, the remaining conspirators manage to overpower Richard. Instead of killing him, they rip the fungal vial from his neck and bury him alive in a wooden coffin. As the dirt rains down, Richard screams a chilling promise: the island will never let his children leave, and the terror has only just begun.
We smash back to the present in the episode’s final moments. Under the glare of truck headlights, eccentric sailor Wyck (Stephen Root) stands in a graveyard, digging up Richard Warren’s 300-year-old coffin.
Episode 7: “Seasickness”
Episode 7 snaps us back into the present day, picking up right after Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) recovers from his day-long, drug-induced bathroom ordeal.
Wyck and Patricia manage to exhume the coffin, and to everyone’s horror, Richard Warren is still alive inside. The show leans into its tonal sweet spot here, pairing the terror of an undead colonial tyrant with pure physical comedy. In a particularly great beat, Patricia leaves Tom alone with this historical monster, then casually re-enters the frame because she forgot her purse.
A decayed but still dangerous Richard tells Tom that he’s the last of the Warren bloodline. If they take him out to the ocean’s “dead zone,” he claims, he can finally die for good, breaking the 300-year curse on Widow’s Bay. Desperate, Tom and Wyck load the coffin onto a boat and head out to sea.
Once they’re on the water, Richard’s cooperative act vanishes. He breaks free and launches a vicious attack, trying to seize control of the boat. After a chaotic, delightfully campy struggle, Tom and Wyck manage to wrestle him back into the coffin.
As alarms blare to mark the dead zone’s boundary, Tom shoves Wyck overboard with a life preserver to keep him safe. The boat crosses the invisible line, and Richard instantly crumbles into a pile of ancient bones. Tom doubles back to haul Wyck out of the water, and the two celebrate, convinced they’ve finally lifted the curse.
Back on land, that sense of victory starts to crumble. Evan, Tom’s son, digs through his father’s old belongings and finds a hidden photo of his mother, who we’ve been told died in childbirth. A painting at the local inn quietly connects the dots: one of Richard’s children from 1702 likely survived the escape, which means the Warren bloodline never died out. The entity’s pact is still in play, and the curse is far from over.
By pairing a brutal, atmospheric Ti West period horror film with a high-concept, campy present-day comedy of errors, Widow’s Bay proves it’s one of the most inventive genre-blenders on TV. Episode 6 feels like a prestige horror movie, with Hamish Linklater terrifyingly magnetic as Richard Warren and Betty Gilpin delivering a pitch-perfect gothic heroine. The hard pivot from a 300-year-old burial to Matthew Rhys recovering from a bathroom nightmare shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does; Episode 7’s comedic timing expertly releases the tension built by the flashback.
The final reveal, that the curse persists because a Warren child likely survived in 1702, is a fantastic mythological twist that sets up a juicy endgame for the season. Widow’s Bay earns its scares and its laughs, and this two-parter makes a strong case that it belongs in the conversation as one of television’s most inventive, confident genre mash-ups.
Overall, I give these two episodes an 8.5/10.
What did you think of episodes 6 and 7 of Widow's Bay? Leave a comment.
You can catch new episodes of Widow's Bay on Wednesday on Apple TV.
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