At the end of this episode (spoiler, obviously), Reverend Bryce is found dead. His body hangs from the back of his office door. He killed himself rather than face whatever it was he has learned about Widow’s Bay. The final shot of the episode is the horrified face of Mayor Tom Loftis as he stares at the corpse of his friend. 

There’s nothing funny about any of this, and nothing haunted-house spooky about it either. It’s shocking and sad. The stakes of the events transpiring on this island are real, and high. Death is death. See, I thought, this is what makes Widow’s Bay special.

Then, after the action cuts to black, the soundtrack cuts — hard — to the 1990s Eurodance classic “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona. I spent the rest of the credits cackling hysterically.

This, too, is what makes Widow’s Bay special: Its approach to the “comedy” half of “horror comedy.” A big goofy needle drop like that is funny, yeah, but not in such a way as to serve as a release valve for the awfulness of the sight of Rev. Bryce’s body hanging from his door, face ashen, neck askew. If anything, the song’s ironic use draws attention to that awfulness. Many horror comedies — and many dramedies and just-plain comedies on TV right now, including on Apple TV itself — use humor as a way to soften the blow. Widow’s Bay uses it to sharpen the knife.

This episode focuses on the last four days in the life of Patricia, Tom’s…right-hand woman, I guess? Until now her job has mostly entailed passive-aggressively sniping at the mayor for various perceived slights, though compared to the rest of the staff this makes her a model of competency. In her free time, she runs a bookmobile called “The Pattiwagon” that attempts to distribute (no one takes them) and collect (people just leave fast food wrappers) used books for the community. Amusingly, she’s got at least a couple of Stephen King books in there, but honestly that’s just verisimilitude: There isn’t a single collection of used books north of Boston that doesn’t included at least a dozen volumes by Maine’s Master of the Macabre. 

But her life is dominated by her status as an outcast. (Well, that and having Shelly Duvall’s wardrobe from The Shining.) As we learn when she crashes a party to which she was clearly invited only out of obligation, women in the town shun her as a fabulist. Her claims about the serial killer known as the Boogeyman calling her house and then breaking in, only to be thwarted because she hid under a bed? Bullshit, according to Kris (Lauren Bittner), who comes across as a middle-aged mean girl until she digs deep into how horribly her friends died at the killer’s hands when they were kids. Wouldn’t you be mad, too, if someone lied about being targeted just for attention? All of this results in some truly cringey cringe comedy.

(To be clear, even though Kris makes a strong case, we don’t know that Patricia is lying. In Widow’s Bay we never really know anything.)

As a result, the “Sunset Cocktails” she’s been planning for the evening after the Mayor’s Inaugural Swim look destined to be a dud, with everyone in town no-showing in favor of some other guy’s birthday party. (At least until Patricia uses her power to force the Elk’s Club to shut the party down.) But though the only people to actually RSVP are her coworkers Ruth, Rosemary (who has her doubts but keeps them largely to herself), and Dale (who is gang-pressed into being the DJ), the bachelorette party from the previous episode winds up there, as well as the refugees from the birthday party and various other unsuspecting tourists and locals. Pretty soon, it’s actually a pretty swinging party.

A little too swinging, in fact. All of a sudden, Dale’s ad-tier Spotify subscription starts playing the extended album version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” with no commercial interruptions. Kris and the other women who hate Patricia’s guts start you-go-girl’ing her and cutting it up on the floor. Does it have something to do with the punch that a mysterious self-help book that materialized in her bookmobile one day is basically ordering her to serve? The book that Sheriff Bichir caught her on surveillance cameras staring at for hour after hour after hour? The book that has her frantically scribbling drawings and equations all over her notebooks like a crazy person? Surely not, right?

Clearly the rager Patricia thinks she’s throwing isn’t really happening, but the degree to which it isn’t happening, and the way it gets revealed, is both legitimately frightening and absolutely hilarious. Instead of partying, Patricia’s guests are all just standing around with their mouths distended to a disturbing degree. Instead of a mildly weird tiara, she’s wearing an incredibly weird antler headdress. Instead of punch, she was serving them some kind of witch’s brew full of freshly butchered animal blood. By the way, Rosemary witnessed all this — but hey, Patricia told her to be supportive, so what was she supposed to do?

Patricia is able to destroy the self-help book, which is actually a grimoire, in the Wicker Man/Blair Witch bonfire constructed on the beach outside the restaurant where the party’s being held. With the help of Bichir, who’s out after his shift searching for last episode’s Sea Hag, she’s able to do so before any of the guests stride zombie-like into the water toward the bonfire and drown. But when everyone comes too, they come to the (more or less correct) conclusion that Patricia drugged the punch, causing them all to wind up in the ocean fully dressed. That’s a hard reputational blow to recover from.

So Patricia staggers toward home, and Tom and Wyck come across her on their way to the church to investigate Rev. Bryce’s cryptic phone call from last episode, and that’s when the whole suicide/Eurodance thing from the start of this review happens. But leading this review with Mayor Tom is deceptive, in a way. Until its final moments, neither he nor his nemesis Wyck are even in this episode. That, too, is something special about Widow’s Bay: Just four episodes into its run, it can lose its two stars and main characters for half an hour and be none the poorer for it, because everyone else is that good.

It looks and feels amazing, too. With its painterly shot compositions, slow zooms, flat overcast-afternoon lighting, and vaguely retro stylings, this episode is the best pastiche of the A24 house style for horror I’ve ever seen, with the self-help grimoire serving as a Babadook-style haunted book. It’s a marvelous showcase for actor Kate O’Flynn, too, who makes Patricia both incredibly off-putting and enormously endearing; you understand why everyone hates her, and you feel bad for her anyway. Writer Mackenzie Dohr and director Sam Donovan have done dynamite work here, in an episode that makes it clearer than ever that the goings-on in Widow’s Bay really are going on.

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.