Widow’s Bay
Beach Reads
Season 1
Episode 4
Editor’s Rating
Photo: Apple TV/Copyrighted
“Beach Reads” is the most consistently uncomfortable, squirmy, and scary episode of Widow’s Bay so far. Yes, I absolutely do mean that as a compliment.
This deep dive into the nature of Patricia’s tense relationship with pretty much everyone in town is not quite as hilarious as the season’s first three installments, although there certainly are some funny moments. (Please see literally everything about Dale’s DJ set.) But “Beach Reads,” written by Mackenzie Dohr (WandaVision) and directed by Sam Donovan (Severance, The Crown), is an incredibly rich, compelling text that furthers our understanding of the horrors that haunt this island while also slyly critiquing the cultural mechanisms that pit women against each other.
This episode marks the first time that we’ve seen Patricia (an exceptional Kate O’Flynn) outside of her town-hall role. Notably, when we initially encounter her, she is by herself, minding the book mobile that no one seems particularly interested in visiting. (It is called the PattiWagon, which, A+.) Right away, we feel a little sorry for her. As It’s a Wonderful Life teaches us every Christmas, the two worst things a woman can be are unmarried and a librarian, and Patricia is basically both. Oh, also, everyone hates her. “Beach Reads” explains why, starting with a wine-and-cheese party.
When Patricia shows up at the gathering, it’s obvious she was invited out of politeness and not anyone’s desire for her company. Instantly, her presence makes everything more awkward, and not in a fun, cringe-comedy kind of way, but in a visceral, painful one. Every time Patricia tries to contribute to a conversation, people ignore her, as if she hadn’t spoken some semi-relevant words out loud. Finally, a woman named Shelby, who has only recently moved to Widow’s Bay and hasn’t been taught to avoid Patricia, dares to ask her if she knew any of the victims of the Boogeyman murders that took place when Patricia was in high school. This is the question Patricia lives for, in the same way that Ben Stiller lives to be asked about the New York Knicks. “Did I know them?” she says. “I was almost one of them.”
Patricia eagerly explains how all those years ago, she got weird phone calls from a heavy breather she thought was the Boogeyman. Then the guy actually came to her house, but she was able to avoid getting killed by hiding under her bed. After excusing herself briefly from the conversation, Patricia returns to find the other guests whispering to Shelby about Patricia’s history of dishonesty about almost being a Boogeyman victim. “They even checked the phone records, and it proves she never got the calls,” whispers one of the gossipy ladies. “She’ll tell anyone who will listen,” adds another. “Honestly, it’s so pathetic.” The members of the community believe that Patricia is trying to cast herself as a final girl, the one who survives the horror movie thanks to her resourcefulness and intelligence, when she’s actually just a liar.
One of those women, Kris (Lauren Bittner), whose entire demeanor screams former head cheerleader, finally confronts Patricia at her sunset and cocktails event. “Samantha was stabbed, and she hid in the dryer,” Kris says with barely checked rage. “Then he turned it on, and she baked to death. Jen hid under her covered pool, but he was already waiting there for her. But you. You hid under a bed. That must be his kryptonite.”
“My friends died, and you are just so, so starved for attention that you had to make that about you,” she adds in a blow that knocks Patricia out for the count. Suddenly, Kris’s irritation with Patricia makes much more sense. But is she entirely correct? Or is Patricia unpopular and, sure, maybe a little attention-starved, but still telling the truth about what happened to her?
That is the essence of what this episode is about and, in a lot of ways, this whole series, too. It’s about the stories we’re told about the people around us and the ones we believe about ourselves, and how those become so ingrained in us that it’s hard to see the actual unvarnished truth in all its complexity. To put it in simpler terms, it’s about not judging a book by its cover, a theme that “Beach Reads” cleverly highlights by shifting our sense of perspective repeatedly, and by introducing an actual book that absolutely should not be judged by its cover.
After the wine-and-cheese party, Patricia discovers a copy of Your Turn: Out With the Old and in With the You, a work of self-help randomly left on the floor of the PattiWagon. At first, this appears to be a typical 1950s etiquette book for women, albeit one that seems extremely fixated on destroying the reader’s self-esteem. (“What do you love about yourself?” asks a worksheet inside, followed by two lines to note the positive qualities. “What don’t you love about herself?” asks the next question, then leaves three-quarters of the page blank.)
“All it takes is one great party to change your life,” the book advises, which is an absurd thing to claim unless your name is either Kid or Play. But despite some initial skepticism, Patricia completely buys into that philosophy, takes over planning of the municipal sunset-cocktails event, and decides to make its success a referendum on her worth as a human being.
It isn’t until late in the episode that we realize Your Turn: Out With the Old and in With the You is actually some creepy-ass spell book designed to put all the partygoers in a trance that leads them to attempt to drown themselves. That book is not the only “object” that looks wildly different when examined through another lens.
During the party, when Patricia appears to be making a heartfelt, well-received speech, we can see in the mirror that something else entirely is happening. Rather than reacting warmly, all the attendees are standing still with their mouths agape as if they’re auditioning to replace the guy in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Once Sheriff Bechir shows up at the Salty Whale, everything that Patricia has been doing — making punch, wearing a tiara — is revealed in all its stark horror.
The punch is filled not with strawberries and other fruit, but pieces of dead animals and their blood. Patricia’s tiara — “Seriously, what the fuck is on her head?” Kris says of the fascinator — is actually a crown of sticks and thorns that would fit in beautifully in an episode of Yellowjackets. Bechir, one of the few people in Widow’s Bay with a sharp mind and basic common sense, realizes Patricia must be under a spell as soon as he sees the security-cam footage of her typing furiously in the park, completely oblivious to a major bike accident unfolding behind her. (In another clever POV switcheroo, we hear the sheriff’s call for backup over the police scanner — “All available Fire and Rescue to Patricia’s Cocktails. I don’t know what the fuck is going on!” — in a different context than we heard it in the previous episode. The same goes for the irritated answering-machine message Patricia leaves for Tom, who, per “The Inaugural Swim,” wisely ditched the event to vibe with Marissa.)
The sunset-cocktails twist allows the audience the joy of revisiting moments and comments from earlier in the episode, when we did not yet realize we were watching some weird blood-drinking death ritual. The understated way that Rosemary reacts to literally everything, for example, is an absolute riot. “I didn’t understand one word of that speech,” she says with remarkable calm, considering that everyone at the party has gone full zombie. “I know that you asked me to be supportive, but I have my qualms. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
Patricia realizes that she must destroy the spell book, which she does by throwing it in the bonfire that looks much more like a funeral pyre. It works; suddenly everyone snaps out of Munch mode, wonders how the heck they wound up knee-deep in the sea, and goes back to doing what they always do: blaming Patricia. Even though she just saved them, all they can see is that she nearly got them killed, which, I mean, is technically fair? But there’s more to Patricia than just one mistake or the (possible) error she made by exaggerating her own experience with the Boogeyman. But that’s all they will ever see in her, and it leaves Patricia bereft and lonely. At its core, this episode is a portrait of the pain a woman endures when she says she was victimized and no one will believe her.
While Patricia is not able to throw a party that transforms her life, she does ultimately get what she wants by the end of the night: the feeling that she matters. Tom and Wyck pick her up so they can investigate what’s going on with Reverend Bryce. “Why don’t you get in with us?” Tom says. “We might need your help.” You can see on Patricia’s face how much she likes to hear him say that they need her.
Sadly, they find Bryce dead, having hanged himself from the back of the door to his office. Patricia may have broken one spell and saved a number of souls. But apparently, the island can’t be defeated that easily.
• Clues to Consider: Let’s think about what happened during the 24-hour period that unfolded during the past two episodes. Tom was attacked and nearly murdered by a Sea Hag. Reverend Bryce discovered a possibly haunted well, declared that “There is evil here,” then killed himself. Patricia threw a cocktail party in which she inadvertently cast a weird spell that almost made everyone there kill themselves. Is it possible that the island needs to periodically “feed” itself by having people die? Is there a quota it must meet? If that’s true, it would add credence to Patricia’s story about surviving the attempt on her life by the Boogeyman. Maybe she lived because the island didn’t need her to die, not because she was smart enough to scoot under the bed.
• So Many Horror Allusions: “Beach Reads” packs in more references to horror movies and stories than any episode of Widow’s Bay so far. First of all, the wine-and-cheese part is hosted by a woman named Lenore, a name that figures prominently in Edgar Allen Poe’s work, most famously the poem “The Raven,” which is about the narrator’s grief for a woman who died far too young. You know, like the victims of the Boogeyman.
The Boogeyman is an obvious reference to the nickname for Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s original Halloween. But even Patricia’s house and the way it’s filmed when she walks up to its front door function as an homage to that film. The fact that Patricia says she also got heavy-breathing phone calls from the killer adds a whiff of Scream to the mix, as does the Ghostface-style expressions on the faces of the hypnotized sunset and cocktails crowd.
When Patricia keeps refreshing her evite to see if she’s received new RSVPs, the way she keeps tapping the same key echoes Jack Nicholson’s psychotic typing in The Shining. (“All e-vite and no work make Patricia go berserk.” Or something.) And the transformation of the party guests not only evokes Scream and The Scream, but also Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Footloose is also name-checked, which is technically not a horror movie but is about a small town that stubbornly refuses to change. Although living in a place without dancing sounds pretty scary to me, so maybe Footloose is a horror movie after all.
• Give It Up for Kate O’Flynn: The more I watch O’Flynn’s work in this series, the more I admire what a deep performance she’s giving. In this episode, her physicality as Patricia is on full display. The way she hunches her shoulders and ambles awkwardly from point A to point B is so believably graceless, as are Patricia’s dance moves, which make Elaine Benes look like Misty Copeland. O’Flynn has to thread a very tight needle that allows us to find Patricia pathetic in ways that are sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, and sometimes both simultaneously. She does that beautifully in the scene where she sobs, then yawns, then sobs again after Kris yells at her in front of the whole crowd. If she wasn’t as good as she is, this episode wouldn’t work at all. Thankfully, she is.
• Funniest Line of the Week: This is really hard because, again, everything about Dale’s gig as a DJ is pretty freaking funny, from his objections to Patricia’s playlist suggestions — “It’s like she wrote down every song she’s ever heard in her life” — to the ad for baldness medication that interrupts Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It.” (“I don’t have premium,” he says weakly.) But I have to give it to one line from the book from hell, a.k.a. the work of literature formerly known as Your Turn: Out With the Old and in With the You: “It’s going to be a success because it’s your turn,” the devil (I mean, the book) tells Patricia about her party. “Unless the turnout is low — that’s a verdict on your social value.” Friends, I guffawed.
