In the seventh episode of Widow’s Bay, Mayor Tom Loftis is pulled from a mushroom-fueled nap only to be told Richard Warren’s body has been found—and he’s still alive. What follows is a desperate sea escape meant to break the island’s curse, but Richard’s fina
The seventh episode of Widow’s Bay starts with a nap that feels like it shouldn’t exist.
Mayor Tom Loftis wakes up from a heavy dose of island mushrooms—only to learn from Patricia that he hasn’t simply slept. His cheek has been on a toilet seat, and he’s been fully asleep for a full day. Patricia doesn’t waste time softening the blow. She invites Tom to the historical society building—formerly the home of Richard and Sarah Warren—where she informs him that they have dug up the body of Richard Warren.
Richard is not only out of the ground. He’s still alive.
And he’s waiting upstairs to talk to Tom. because Tom is technically in charge of the island that Richard first began to protect more than 400 years ago. For anyone watching, it’s immediately clear the episode is built to overwhelm. It takes its horror seriously, but it also keeps pivoting—toward moving drama and absurdist comedy—without missing the beat.
The conversation in the historical society is where that pressure turns physical. Tom meets Richard for the first time in the space where the Warrens once lived. and the silence primes the room for jump scares. But the scares don’t arrive the way you expect. Patricia keeps re-entering at the worst possible moments—returning to the same space after she’s previously been out of it—turning dread into something closer to slapstick timing.
It’s also where the show pushes the curse plot forward with a jarring clarity. Richard explains how the curse began “from his perspective. ” with a voice that sounds like it’s coming from a speaker located in the deepest bowels of hell. on a sound system where the mix is all bass and no treble. When Tom asks how Richard is still alive. Richard says: “I was tricked by a devil and betrayed by my lessers. But an evil power sustains me.”.
Richard’s survival is tied to a deal made out of desperation. When there was nothing for the first Widow’s Bay settlers to eat. Richard came upon those very special mushrooms. ate one. and then “something else” came to him. When Tom asks what that “something else” was, Richard offers a maddeningly open answer: “A demon?. The island itself?”.
The next piece is even darker in its implications. Richard says the entity presented him with a covenant meant to save members of the settlement—people who had resorted to eating dirt and other corpses. When Tom asks what Richard offered in return. Richard deflects again with the line: “If I had refused. none of you would be here.”.
Richard adds that, when Tom confesses he also saw what may have been the entity, “It knows frightened men will do desperate things.”
What the show won’t give viewers is the document itself.
Richard keeps a tiny piece of paper in his locket, and the episode makes a point of the covenant never being shown. Richard tells Tom he signed it with “my own blood, feces, and semen.” Tom swiftly puts it down without looking at it.
Tom’s instinctive refusal becomes its own moment of character—comedic, yes, but also telling. The episode frames a central problem in the only way it can: viewers are asked to take Richard at his word while knowing the terms remain hidden.
Richard also gives a solution—one that would, in theory, break the curse. Since he’s the last of his bloodline, he says all they have to do is take him out to sea—“past the point where sailors fear”—where the hex on him will be broken. Then he’ll finally age normally and die.
Wyck, a Widow’s Bay native, puts Tom and Richard on his boat and heads toward a specific distance marked by buoys. If they go farther, Wyck warns, Wyck may not make it back alive.
That’s when the episode tilts fully into Jaws territory, not as a parody but as a structure for dread. On the boat, Wyck delivers a lengthy monologue about a haunting, dangerous encounter he had at sea as a teenager. He tells Tom and Richard about a trip with Mark Doyle—Mark’s brother Gerrie’s brother—where they came into contact with an underwater beast.
The attack wasn’t shark-related, Wyck insists, because one of the boys saw a tentacle. Wyck says he tried to swim away, then felt something grabbing his foot. He kicked it off and realized it was Mark, grasping onto his friend for help in what would turn out to be Mark’s final moments alive.
The details matter because the episode ties fear to motive. Wyck’s story gives viewers a reason for his obsession with removing the curse. He didn’t save Mark, but he can still save others on the island from meeting a similar fate.
It also makes Gerrie’s fixation on the island’s history feel less like an aesthetic and more like grief with a route. The episode shows Gerrie surrounding herself with artifacts tied to the island’s past. and the narrative suggests the simplest explanation: Mark Doyle’s story gives a plausible emotional source for the idea that the haunted place caused her brother’s death.
From there. the episode heightens the tension with another reference-heavy sequence: Richard and Tom share some spiced rum in a small cabin. It’s staged around a table in the same way as the Quint U.S.S. Indianapolis sequence. Richard sings a sea shanty called “Last Man,” written specifically for Widow’s Bay. Neil Casey handled the lyrics, and the music was written by Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire.
Then the danger breaks through the ritual. As Wyck predicted, Richard’s change of heart arrives right when it’s least convenient. He wants to live after all—something the episode frames as natural, considering Richard has been stuck in a coffin for more than 300 years.
The boat gets jostled, a skirmish erupts, and Richard shouts: “I’m gonna make you eat my dick,” at Wyck.
After a struggle that includes a harpoon, Wyck and Tom manage to get Richard back into his coffin. Wyck briefly gets lost at sea with a life preserver but returns unscathed.
Tom checks the coffin.
Richard has been reduced to bone and ash.
Richard’s last words were exactly what he predicted: “Let me live.”
It’s a clean end for a man the episode has treated like a puzzle box—funny in motion, terrifying in stillness, and finally extinguished. But the episode doesn’t let that win feel like a cure.
The show returns to land and makes the consequences harder to ignore. The idea that Richard’s “timely death” has lifted the curse seems unlikely for multiple reasons. It’s only the seventh episode, and there are three more to go. Back at the inn, Kelly prompts Evan to start searching for answers about his dad.
Evan finds photos of his father as a baby with his mother—who is described as clearly very much alive and survived childbirth. The episode pairs that with the depiction of the physical weakness Wyck experiences when the boat gets too close to the so-called danger zone. reinforcing that the business about not being able to leave the island is real.
Richard’s death may not be enough.
And then comes the closing shot—the one that turns the episode’s questions into a threat.
The scene returns to the inn. where a satisfied customer leaves while saying Kurt smells “like a cabbage took a shit in a baby’s diaper.” The camera pulls into the lobby. focusing on a painting that appears to show Sarah Warren and Richard’s children departing the island in the boat. as seen in episode six. In this version, though, one child is paddling helplessly in the water.
The implication lands quietly but powerfully: why show that right now, if it isn’t hinting at more surviving Warrens than Richard believed?
The episode also drops small reminders that the island keeps rewriting rules. Before Evan and Kelly start digging into the story. they’re watching an old movie called Horror Hotel. set in an odd Massachusetts town where two witches who were burned at the stake make a deal with the devil to grant them eternal life and continue inflicting pain on the place.
There are other details threaded through the episode too: when Tom first arrives at the historical society. the camera scans past a partially destroyed letter. The readable words say: “I wish my words alone would convey the gravity. but this is the only way you will understand.” The letter is signed by Rev. Theodore Roberts. suggesting that Bryce isn’t the only holy man who may have ended his life thanks to the island.
Then there’s the museum humor, sharp enough to cut the dread without blunting it. Richard walks around the museum looking at items his children once owned that are now on display. He stands in front of Richard Warren merch, including a T-shirt that reads: “Don’t Say I Didn’t Warren You.”
Patricia’s comedy remains its own form of chaos—her timing, her interruptions, and her notebook attempts to communicate with Richard. The notebook begins with: “Hello, I am Patricia.” A second page follows, scrawled after Richard fails to respond: “Are you mad at something I said?”
For someone trapped for hundreds of years with no way to speak to other humans, it’s an odd, heartbreaking kind of innocence.
Richard’s coffin ends in ash. His curse explanation lands like a locked door. And still. the episode leaves the audience staring at the same unanswered question. sharpened by new images and new arrivals upstairs: who. if anyone. will be the last man standing when Widow’s Bay decides it’s time to feed again?.
Widow’s Bay Seasickness Tom Loftis Richard Warren Patricia Wyck Gerrie Evan Kelly island curse Horror Hotel Jaws-inspired episode