Published May 28, 2026, 1:00 p.m. ET

Betty Gilpin is television’s most valuable player. She has that Catherine O’Hara/Philip Seymour Hoffman factor: She’s good in absolutely everything, no matter how good that thing is. To name two recent examples relevant to her work in the first of this week’s two Widow’s Bay episodes, she played a ferocious survivor in Mark L. Smith and Peter Berg’s brutal ordeal, American Primeval, and a momentary First Lady in Mike Makowsky and Matt Ross’s creepily relevant assassination drama Death by Lightning. The former felt like a project written with her in mind, the latter one like one where her character was an afterthought. Regardless, she’s excellent in both. Unsurprisingly, she’s excellent here. 

So is Hamish Linklater. (Jeez. Is this the most “actors beloved by TV critics” cast ever assembled or what?) His most relevant recent work is Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan’s story of a small island fishing town beset by evil forces, in which Linklater plays a God-fearing religious protector of the village with a sinister secret of his own. Sound familiar? 

Like Flanagan was with Midnight Mass, creator Katie Dippold is riffing on Stephen King and his heirs and imitators in Widow’s Bay, albeit to comedic effect. This episode, which takes us back to the island’s earliest days, is an exception to that rule. There are funny moments to be sure, largely thanks to Gilpin’s lively performance as reluctant town matriarch Sarah Westcott Warren. But working from a script by Alberto Roldán, director Ti West (The House of the Devil, X) crafts a mostly straightforward horror story, about a woman trapped in a brief, unhappy marriage in an even unhappier place.

When Sarah Westcott arrives at Widow’s Bay, she’s feeling smiled upon by the Lord above. Women her age are usually considered long past marriageable, and here she is, plucked from mainland obscurity to become the pre-arranged wife of the mayor — excuse me, Lord Protector — of the island, Richard Warren (Linklater). Needless to say, all is not well with her new home or her new husband. After writing his own bizarre vows, he disappears on their wedding night as church bells ring in the dark. She’s left to tend to his five children, whose existence is a surprise to her, and whose mother is ominously absent. 

With the help of Pastor Collins (David Dean Bottrell) and her own grim observations and explorations, Sarah puts together a terrifying portrait of the man she’s married to. He’s a murderer, whom she watches kill a villager who takes issue with his conduct. She finds the man’s cane in a hidden crawlspace, and follows it down through a warren of caves to a hidden door. Behind it is the torture chair and subterranean doorway we’ve seen before, streaked with blood.

When he’s not busy disappearing townsfolk, including his previous wife, he’s tripping on the black mushrooms he found in the snow in the flashback we saw last episode. He’s got something to do with the plague besetting the town, which turns people into murderous, eye-gouging madmen before they die. And when Sarah unlocks the door so the pastor’s assassin can sneak in and stab Richard to death, he somehow survives and kills the killer instead.

Most of Sarah’s experience is white-knuckle terror — staying wide-eyed all night long, screaming into a pillow. When she finally makes her way out of the caves through a well in the middle of town, she relays everything that’s transpired to the Pastor and his committee of people trying to get rid of this guy. They ask her to help them by slipping Warren a drug that will immobilize him long enough for them to do him in. 

In a scene that makes the allusions to domestic violence explicit, Sarah attempts to seduce Richard, getting him to drink his poisoned brandy as foreplay. When she spits her own sip out, he realizes he’s been had and attacks her. Only the intervention of his eldest son, who knows he killed their mom, saves her. After fending off an infected villager, Sarah and the kids row out to sea to catch up with the ship that was slated to bring them to the mainland. 

Back in town, Richard is buried alive, but not before the all-important vial he wears around his neck is torn free. Warren rants about how the god of the island spoke to him through the mushrooms, and how if they fulfill the pact he made with it, the plague will stop — but if they don’t, “the terrors will not cease, they will only deepen.” 

The conspirators bury Warren alive rather than trying to kill him outright. Once they let him know that his children are headed off the island, he screams “You’ve killed them all!” over and over again. In the darkness that follows, we can hear him breathing.

Then we see Wyck digging up his grave in glare of his truck’s headlights, while his radio plays “Brandy,” one of the episode’s only real concessions to comedy. 

But Gilpin brings a spirit to Sarah that is modern without being anachronistic, emphasizing how women, and by extension all people, are basically the same throughout the ages. It’s funny how she suggests to the Pastor that, you know, maybe it would be alright being 40 and single instead of almost 40 and dead at the hands of a man who made a deal with the Devil. Her reaction to one of the older kids asking if she’d brought something for all of them when she gives Richard’s youngest, his only daughter, her own mother’s brooch wouldn’t be out of place on a family comedy taking place right now. 

Linklater’s work here is harder to relate to — lots of us know how it feels to be an overmatched parent, or a fish out of water, or, sadly, a victim of abuse — but no less interesting. He brings an uncanny quality to Richard Warren, whose affect is impossible to pin down. Is it funny or creepy? Is he high, or has he transcended this mortal coil, or is he simply an asshole? To me, he gives the impression of a body being animated by the most minimal human spirit possible. This guy has given nearly everything to the island, which in the end swallows him whole. 

A couple episodes ago, the show dropped Tom and Wyck to center on Patricia for nearly an entire episode, and I thought that was gutsy. Dropping the entire cast, except for a single scene of Stephen Root shoveling dirt and drinking from a flask while listening to soft rock, and becoming a period piece for an episode — complete with its own old-timey title screen — is gutsier still. (It also likely explains why Apple TV is releasing two episodes this week instead of just this one.) For the result to remain an affecting human drama and an uncomfortable horror show, with a light touch that defies the leaden self-seriousness of many small-screen efforts in the genre…did someone on the crew make a deal with the devil?

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.