If you find yourself in Widow’s Bay, it pays to know what not to do. Don’t travel to the mainland if you were born on the island. Don’t go inside the Boogeyman’s house. Don’t stay in the Captain’s Room at the Inn. Don’t get suffocated by the Sea Hag. Don’t stay out past Mayor Tom Loftis’s 7pm curfew, even if there are fireworks. Don’t attend a party thrown by Patricia. Don’t eat the black mushrooms.

And don’t call Todd O’Connor, the drug dealer played by comedian Chris Fleming, a drug dealer. 

“I’m a shaman,” he insists.

“Is that cocaine?” Patricia asks, pointing to some of his supplies.

“Yes,” he replies. Though many of your favorite musicians and directors tested the shamanic powers of cocaine throughout the 1970s, it’s safe to say those tests were a collective failure. Sorry, Todd.

What brings Tom, Patricia, and their unlikely ally Wyck to this hippie hesher’s house? The death of Reverend Bryce. Tom discovers a cache of  The clergyman called two numbers repeatedly before he died: One was Tom’s (he was busy trying not to be killed by the Sea Hag, if you recall), the other this guy’s. Their initial phone call is both cryptic and creepy, but when it becomes apparent that he’s just a harmless druggie with delusions of grandeur, the brilliance of casting a bone-deep weirdo like Fleming becomes apparent. 

Todd strongly advises the group against taking this trip, but Wyck insists, convinced that the drug will open his third eye and enable him to see the secret truth at the heart of the island. Todd, unfortunately, doesn’t know who “Wyck,” is, thinks it’s Tom’s name, and doses the mayor with the black mushrooms, nicknamed “truesight,” instead of the old coot. 

What follows is one of the most engagingly depicted bad trips/nightmares/fever dream sequences I’ve ever seen on TV. We catch glimpses of how the world looks through Tom’s hallucinating viewpoint using simple camera tricks and sound effects, along with the occasional truly scary visual, like Drew looking inhuman with blacked-out eyes. 

But for the most part, Tom’s trip is depicted through what we don’t see or hear. Smash cuts to black punctuate the action, which repeatedly resumes with Tom suddenly finding himself in some other place with some other character and no recollection of how they got together and then got where they currently are. From Todd’s house, to his office, to the historical society, to a meeting full of townsfolk furious with his curfew, to a meeting suddenly empty of townsfolk furious with his curfew (Tom’s only clues to their absence are dry erase marker in his hand, a message on a whiteboard, and a trashcan full of his vomit), back to the historical society, to Rosemary’s car, to a gas station, and finally to his house — he’s getting booted through time and space by the drug like he’s Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-five.

All the while, in addition to desperately trying to keep the island’s economy afloat and its people alive, Tom’s worried about his delinquent son Evan. His attempt to ground Evan inside his own mayor’s office obviously goes south when he’s too high to know where he is half the time. It’s not like the gaggle of incompetents who work for him can be counted on to care for the kid. 

Evan winds up in a station wagon full of townie boys and off-island girls, smoking weed and spooking themselves outside the abandoned house that once began to the crank caller turned serial killer the Boogeyman lived. Allegedly, he was buried alive in the basement’s concrete foundation, and no one who sets foot inside the house ever comes out again. Eager to impress the girls, Evan goes as far as opening the door before Sheriff Bichir shows up and tells him to knock it off. (“Can I just yell ‘Fuck you, pig’? For the girls?” he asks as he prepares to return to the group with his tail between his legs. “No the fuck you cannot,” says the sheriff.)

It speaks to the strength of the show that despite the staccato psychedelia of Tom’s drug trip, Evan’s section of the story is moody, creepy, and eerily still. Their car is parked in an island of It Follows–style “eternal 9:45pm on a summer night” light; their banter, juxtaposed against the quiet house and the sense of mounting dread, is straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Writer-comedian Colton Dunn and Friendship director Andrew DeYoung have this material down cold, and know how to mine it for laughs while they’re at it. The young actors led by Kingston Rumi Southwick ace the assignment as well.

Evan’s arc builds to the rare Serious Moment in a Comedy that actually works. Shooed home by the sheriff, he’s greeted by the sight of his father, who’s high as balls, and Rosemary, who’s Rosemary, standing in the headlights. Tom begins snuffling around the windows, peering in like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park before finally signaling to Evan to get his butt inside. Evan retorts with a hearty “fuck you” — a callback to a joke, used here for genuine dramatic effect. It’s impressive stuff.

So is what happens when they finally have it out. Evan has never left the island, and he’s tired of his dad’s bullshit explanation that it’s because his mother wanted him raised as part of the place’s culture. He’s also got no time for Tom’s complaint that he has no desire to ride herd on him, believing all this tough love is a display for his constituents. “You’re a shitty mayor — it’s not because of me, okay?” he says.

Stunned, and still tripping, Tom says “I think you’re gonna feel very guilty for saying that to me one day,” the kind of parental statement to which there simply is no effective retort. 

What follows is easy enough to see coming. Puking into the toilet, Tom hallucinates a series of scenes from the day of Evan’s birth. Taking the ferry to the mainland, Tom watches helplessly as Lauren suddenly goes blind, winding up creepily catatonic in the hospital after delivering a healthy Evan. No wonder he won’t let Evan off the island. 

Tom is so stricken that he prays to a God he’s not even sure exists. His response is a monstrous rumbling sound from the darkness of his house. It’s just one of many auditory hallucinations he’s experienced, as Bryce did, but this one sounds like a Balrog is in his bedroom. I wouldn’t want to meet whatever god this is.

There’s one final thing I want to point out in this episode, yet another masterful blend of comedy and horror that skimps on neither. In their ongoing effort to get to the bottom of the island’s mysteries, the un-mushroomed Wyck takes a sheet of ash-covered paper from Bryce’s burned archives to Gerrie, the town’s daffy historian. She manages to unearth the original writing — something about a plague from 320 years ago a town worthy who wore a cylinder around his neck containing the plague’s origin. This ties to the (literally) cold open, in which a man in old-timey garb stumbles in to a cache of the black mushrooms growing in the snow and gobbles them all down.

But in the process of this detective work, it becomes clear that Gerrie and the cantankerous, ill-kempt Wyck aren’t just old townie friends, but were once an item, maybe even married. Back then, Wyck was the kind of guy who kept your daughter out past her bedtime, and Gerrie the kind of girl who stayed out with him. How about that? 

The detail I really love, though, comes later, as Gerrie walks Patricia through her findings. Excited by Gerrie’s success and impressed by her expertise, a smiling Wyck puts his hand between her shoulders. Nothing draws attention to the gesture. There are no camera cuts or closeups that emphasize it. No one visibly reacts to it, since after all it’s not a big deal. I wouldn’t be surprised if actor Stephen Root improvised it in the moment. It’s there, though, and it reveals a depth to this man I wouldn’t have predicted the show even attempting to explore. But I’ve learned by now not to try to predict Widow’s Bay, which I never would have predicted to be one of the best shows of the year.

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.