The Genius Way 'Widow's Bay' Set Up the Obvious Finale Twist

Major spoilers for Widow’s Bay through episode 9

Widow’s Bay finale arrives next week, and I know that the responsible thing to do is sit back, let Katie Dippold cook, and find out how it ends along with everybody else. Every outlet covering this show is already deep into prediction mode, and the right take this week seems to be: stop guessing, you’re all wrong, and if you’re right, that’s probably worse.

I don’t care. I haven’t had this much speculating since my Mad Men and True Detective days, and there’s one thought about this finale that is so much fun to think about, and the only way I know how to get rid of a thought like that is to exorcise it through you good people. So here we are.

You know where episode 9 left us: Rosemary cracks the genealogy, and it turns out Richard Warren’s bloodline didn’t die with him. One descendant remains on the island, and as long as she’s breathing, the curse holds, the storm comes, and everyone in Widow’s Bay dies. Her name is Ruth. She’s old. She never married. She has, as far as anyone can tell, no one. And so Tom, Wyck, and Patricia do the math: one woman, near the end of her life anyway, weighed against every soul on the island.

The math is easy. Suspiciously easy. Ruth isn’t just the last descendant — she’s the ideal last descendant: Elderly. Alone. Conveniently close to death. She is exactly the sacrifice a town would pick if it got to choose its own, which is exactly why I don’t believe her for a second.

Because if there’s one thing nine episodes of this show have taught us, it’s that the island doesn’t deal in convenience. It deals in cruelty with a sense of humor (bless). And the cruelest possible version of this story — the one that’s been obvious since Tom promised Evan that trip to Boston, since the truth about Evan’s mother came out, since this entire season revealed itself to be about a father who lies to his son for the boy’s “own good” — is that Ruth isn’t the last descendant at all.

Evan is. Obviously.

I’m not the only one who suspects this — it’s the prevailing theory heading into Tuesday — but here’s the part I love. The Evan twist isn’t what makes this devastating. It’s what the twist does to Tom retroactively. Because if Tom kills Ruth — if he convinces himself that one life weighed against the whole town is not just permissible but necessary, that a good man does the terrible thing when the numbers demand it — he hasn’t just made a decision. He’s signed a contract. And contracts do not care whose name comes up next.

“The needs of the many” is either a principle or it’s not, you know? If sacrificing Ruth is the right move, then sacrificing Evan is equally the right move — more so, even, with the storm closing in. The moment Ruth dies and the curse doesn’t lift, Tom will be standing in the wreckage of his own logic, holding an argument with his son’s name as the only answer. When Wyck demands that Evan be next, Tom can’t claim the math was wrong; he already used it. He can’t claim one life is too precious to trade; he already traded one. The only thing separating Ruth from Evan at that point is that Tom loves one of them, and “I love him” is a bad counterargument. It a tacit admission that this was never about the greater good; it was about finding a victim he could live with.

In other words, the finale doesn’t have to kill Evan to wreck us. It just has to make Tom understand that, by his own reasoning, it should.

‘Widow’s Bay’ finale streams Tuesday, June 16 on Apple TV.