Widow’s Bay Just Put Every Final Girl to Shame

This article contains full spoilers for Widow’s Bay episode eight “Your Baggage.”

Midway through the eighth episode of the Apple TV series Widow’s Bay, “Your Baggage,” the masked killer (Airon Armstrong) who has been chasing local sad lady Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) seems to have been defeated. He has fallen through a top window to land hard onto the floor. For a moment, Patricia thinks that the chase has ended. But after a beat, the slasher bolts upright and begins his pursuit anew.

Anyone who has ever seen a slasher movie knew that the killer wasn’t dead, but it’s especially obvious to those who have watched Halloween. “Your Baggage” director Andrew DeYoung and writer Emma Ketchum fill the story with nods to the John Carpenter film, from the killer being dubbed “the Boogeyman” to a sequence of Patricia pounding on her neighbor’s doors and being denied help. But the homage goes only so far, and “Your Baggage” ends with Patricia doing something that never occurred to Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott, or any of the other final girls.

Patricia’s showdown with the Boogeyman occurs at a gas station, where a teenage employee (David Armstrong) talks with Sheriff Bechir (Kevin Carroll). Bechir and the employee watch as Patricia sprays gas on the ground and waits for the Boogieman to arrive, holding a taser to the puddle. When Patricia sets the ground and the Boogieman ablaze, the teen runs outside while, in perhaps the most realistic part of the show, the policeman Bechir just stands there. After the Boogeyman tosses the teen aside, Bechir finally takes action, grabbing a shotgun but getting slashed before he can shoot. However, Patricia takes the shotgun and blasts the Boogeyman before he can kill Bechir.

But Patricia doesn’t stop there. Having learned her lesson, she walks up to the Boogeyman and keeps the shotgun trained at his head. Next, we’re treated to a montage of the Boogeyman being loaded into an ambulance, being pronounced dead by a medical examiner, and then loaded into a cremation oven, all with Patricia holding the shotgun to his head. Only when the oven opens to reveal the killer’s ashes does she finally lower her weapon.

It’s an incredible joke, a perfect example of the knowing, character-based humor that has made Widow’s Bay such a delight. Further, the scene challenges the conventional wisdom around horror movies, that too often assume people need to make dumb decisions for scary scenes to happen.

The paradigmatic example is, of course, Halloween, where Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) repeatedly drops her guard and turns her back to Michael Meyers, even after he’s recovered from a seemingly-fatal injury. But Laurie has had just as many imitators: the Camp Crystal Lake counselors in Friday the 13th, the Woodsboro teens in Scream, the citizens of Elm Street. Time and again, even the final girl survives not by their wits or ingenuity, but by luck and determination to finally beat the killer in the end.

Of course, Widow’s Bay is both an homage and a comedy, and thus doesn’t have the same demands as a straightforward horror movie. While the show can sometimes be scary (remember the possessed people in the last Patricia episode?), viewers come to it primarily to laugh and to identify the way it plays with horror tropes. Laurie and Sidney don’t have that luxury.

Still, the joke at the end of “Your Baggage” shows that horror writers have too often relied on stupidity as an excuse to put their characters in danger, and it’s just as tiresome as tropes about losing cellphone service. Widow’s Bay issues a challenge for horror writers: let your characters be smart. Or else Patricia will come for them.

Widow’s Bay streams new episodes every Wednesday on Apple TV.