Review: Widow's Bay, "Beach Reads" | Season 1, Episode 4
Patricia goes all in to make a big impression, and it goes as well as you'd expect
There’s this term I made up that I keep trying to make happen: “geek tragedy.” I got the idea after watching Carrie for the umpteenth time–while Stephen King didn’t invent the concept, he did offer maybe the prototypical example of it. In a geek tragedy, a social outcast stumbles on some kind of power, internal or external, and is, for a moment or two, allowed into the circle of their peers, finally achieving the acceptance they’ve fought so hard for all these years. But then, because it’s a tragedy, something backfires. In Carrie, it’s pig’s blood. In Widow’s Bay, Patricia looks into a mirror.
Admittedly things had been going wrong well before then, but seeing herself in the mirror and realizing the horrors she’d inadvertently unleashed is the turning point for Patricia, and for “Beach Reads” as a whole. This week, we shift our focus away from Tom for a while and get to know another major figure on the island. The result is another strong episode that uses horror as a way to express character, finding the sadness in Patricia’s prickly facade and then nearly unmaking her (and several others) with it.
It’s been clear for a while that Patricia was an important character–it would be weird to have a show like this without a female lead, and Kate O’Flynn is too charismatic a presence to be sidelined forever. Before “Beach,” we knew she was uptight and prickly, arguably the only person in Tom’s employ willing to stand up to him. We knew that her relationship with Tom was a complicated one, but that both seemed to depend on each other to a certain extent. She didn’t seem like the most social butterfly, but with a town like Widow’s Bay, it’s hard to tell the difference between “eccentric who is comfortable with their eccentricity” and “eccentric desperate to be normal.”
