A review of this week's Widow's Bay, "Emergency Shelter" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as that boat comes here on a boat...
Alan Sepinwall
Until now, Widow's Bay has been able to pretty expertly juggle the ongoing story of the island's curse with specific Monster of the Week problems, like the haunted inn or last week's return of the Boogeyman. Each installment keeps Tom, Wyck, and Patricia's quest to find a permanent solution to the curse moving, while also providing a satisfying, relatively self-contained narrative. In other words, it's television. Really, really good television.
But even the very best examples of this kind of blending of serialized and standalone (like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad) tend to go more purely serialized when things get late, whether in an individual season or whenever the end of the show comes around. So "Emergency Shelter" ditches the supernatural procedural elements and basically acts as the first half of a two-parter that will bring the season — but hopefully not Widow's Bay as a whole — to an end.
After passing off directorial duties to others for the middle of the season, Hiro Murai is back in the chair for "Emergency Shelter." All the show's directors have had a strong command of the series' very specific blend of tones. But Murai is one of the very best in television when it comes to that challenge. So it's unsurprising that the episode would so deftly move between absolute absurdity, emotional realism, and the nightmarish feeling of being trapped on this evil rock.