Review: Widow's Bay, "Your Baggage" | Season 1, Episode 8

I love stories. I mean, who doesn’t, but I have a particular obsession with them that makes me both suited for the reviewing job and worried that my fixations limit my usefulness as a critic. When a narrative is well-structured, when it’s built in an effective way, it makes me feel good; not just as an audience appreciating good art, but in this kind of fundamental “Oh, now the world feels a little saner to me” kind of way. That’s great, but unfortunately it works both ways. When a writer (or writers) miss a beat, when they try and force a twist without building to it, when a story doesn’t flow properly, it feels bad to me in a way that makes it impossible for me to appreciate everything else.

What’s particularly relevant to how I’m approaching Widow’s Bay is that these folks are playing in...well, it would be arrogant and silly to call it “my” wheelhouse, but “horror in a small New England town” has been a fixation of mine since I was a kid and first started reading Stephen King. When a new iteration on that premise comes along, I get all the more excited when it works, and all the more frustrated when it stumbles; and I’ve seen and read enough of them (it’s not all King) that there’s not much inherent novelty to charm me. 

That’s my baggage, if you will, and it made “Your Baggage” an interesting viewing experience. A good viewing experience, to be clear; but even as I appreciated the smart choices the show was making as it nudged the plot forward, I couldn’t help being frustrated at how it fumbled the set-up for all of this. This all works, but it doesn’t work in a way that retroactively fixes the mistakes of the previous episode—it’s more that we’re back on track after fumbling in the dark for a while, and it’s hard to tell if the people behind the scenes recognize the difference.